Time is a funny thing. All minutes are 60 seconds long. But some last longer than others. And there may be no minute that lasts as long or causes as much distress as a minute spent on an unmoving New York City subway train, somewhere in a dark tunnel, bereft of explanation or knowledge when motion will resume.

Scientists who study time and our perception of it have multiple explanations for this phenomenon.

Behavioral economists speak of “loss aversion.” “If I give you $10 and take it away from you, that feels a lot worse than me not giving it to you in the first place,” said Mark Dean, an economics professor at Columbia University. “When there’s a stalled subway train, you’ve thought you had this time, and you have that time being taken away from you.”

Systems-management scholars talk about the difference between “filled time” and “empty time,” and the paradoxical finding that how long people expect to wait for something determines how they experience the wait.

“In the service industries, one of the axioms is to manage people’s expectations and always provide service at a level higher than expectation,” even if that means overstating expected wait times, said Richard Larson, a professor at M.I.T.’s Institute for Data, Systems and Society. “The thing about the subway is that if the train stops in the middle of the tunnel, if you’re not told that the maximum wait time will be, say, one minute, it could be infinity.”