TIME! What Are Ye?
Despite conjectures among mathematicians that “Time” may not actually be a thing… it continues to taunt me.
Albert Einstein, the discoverer of the Theory of Relativity, and Kurt Gödel, the father of the Theory of Incompleteness, were buddies. They are purported to have had fascinating conversations, according to some writers, “beautiful,” “aesthetic” journeys to the “edge of thought.” I can’t vouch for that. I don’t know exactly how those conversations would have gone, based largely, or entirely, on mathematical symbols. If you can understand Einstein and Gödel, you are way ahead of me. Math and I have never had a good relationship… and we are totally estranged these days.
“Spacetime” is central to Einstein’s theories. From what I can glean, Gödel wasn’t so sure about the time part of the equation. He produced a mathematical equation that suggested that one could travel in a big circle through the Universe and arrive back at your starting point before you left! This seemed to suggest that time doesn’t exist at all.
These mathematical “truths” are an unintelligible language to me. But, unless the universe is an illusion (which some religions and philosophies claim it is), then there is an observable — over vast spans of “time” — process ongoing. Here on Earth, we have not only the direct personal experience of our own lives from hour to hour, day to day, year to year, lifetime to lifetime as measurable scale of “time” — but also the geological “time” clock that we can clearly read in the rocks, trees, ice caps, etc. If we need further markers and measures, we have astronomical observations that specify how long the Sun has existed, as well as galaxies and stars far beyond our solar system.
If all of the “reality” that we perceive actually is an illusion, it is one heck of a complex and intricate conspiracy amongst the myriad forces and materials of the observable universe. And for what reason — except to mess with the human mind, which is one of the most recent inventions of “time” — I cannot fathom. A cosmic mind trick which took billions of years to set up, just to stump some stupid and selfish life form on a tiny planet drifting somewhere in the limitless Universe? Now that takes a leap of “faith” as nutty as most religions.
“Time” may be weird, but it seems to possess dependable characteristics. Despite the possibility asserted by Gödel’s theory, this strange thing called “time” only seems to run in one direction: ever, incessantly, unstoppably forward. It never flows backwards. It’s rather like a waterfall in a way… despite the many amazing properties of water, it never manages to flow back up the waterfall. Until someone is proven to arrive somewhere before they left, I’m sticking with that practical observation.
In our daily lives, time seems ever knowable and predictable in its ticking. Until it doesn’t. As a kid, a single, whole year was an imposing duration; the gaping void between Christmases seemed interminable. Stories my dad would tell about his childhood thirty-something years prior seemed as if out of the Middle Ages. I used to think of the Civil War as sooooo long ago… when, back in the 1960s it was just ONE lifetime previous. Today, I’m keenly aware of the utter dash of YEARS arriving and disappearing, each drawing me closer to that final hour. I used to think of 70 years old as ancient… now I’m nearly there. A second, minute, hour, day still define the passage, yet time itself has morphed from sloth-like to gazelle running for its life. My old perceptions of time have melted into mush, especially when pondering larger stretches of the time. Indeed, the longer the time-frame, the weirder things become.
Time now seems like a phantasma intentionally playing with and provoking our sanity.
So, that one lifetime back to the Civil War when I was 10 years old has now stretched to almost two full lives. That is still stunning to me. Three lifetimes gets you back to the Revolutionary War, 240 years ago. Whew, a long, long time ago, right? Wrong.
It’s bizarre to consider time in terms of dollars… and things go askew quickly. Two hundred and forty dollars is a trifle in this day of inflation. How about 1500 dollars? That might not even pay the rent or mortgage for a month… but in years it will get you back to KING ARTHUR, or if you prefer, MUHAMMAD! Two thousand, which in dollars will barely buy a 10-year old car, will get you back to JESUS! Fifty-four hundred in dollars might get you a 5-year old car, but will time-travel you back to the invention of WRITING! Forty thousand dollars won’t buy you much of a house, but in annual time units it will get you back to the days of CAVEMEN! To buy the average home in Seattle you will commit to coughing up 900,000 dollars (plus interest); that same number in years will take you back well before Homo sapiens existed.
Then we might consider much larger piles of money and deeper swaths of time. Government expenditures often soar into the billions. A single billion won’t buy much in the way of disaster relief these days, but in years it takes us back to before there were higher animals and plants on the planet. It has been 4.5 BILLION years since the formation of the Earth and our Solar System; in dollars that will buy you half of an aircraft carrier. Astronomers tell us it has been roughly fourteen BILLION years since the formation of the Universe. Really? In dollars, that’s a cheap American foreign war! What was the Universe doing during that ETERNITY before 14 billion years ago? A TRILLION dollars, like Donald Trump gave away in tax cuts to the rich in 2017, well, that number flies off the charts in terms of universal time or distance.
Once we start thinking of time in terms of dollars where bigger numbers are routine, the disconnect is illuminated between our own experience, especially as time accelerates through our lifetime, and the great voids of perceived distance in historical events. How can our lifetime seem so brief, flashing by in a veritable instant, yet events just a few lifetimes back so ancient? How to square the brevity of our being with the scant scope of the entirety of human history and even the evolution of the entire universe? So, too, the actual titanic voids of distance that the universe contains seem to mock the tiny time-frame available for its creation and expansion. Shouldn’t the universe be WAAAAY older than it is? Shouldn’t human life seem to be way longer than it is? I’m not asking for a longer life, just one that seems longer, proceeding at the pace established at our conscious awakening, around five years old. Shouldn’t life, and all of history, be like light, traveling at a steady speed, even as it seems to dawdle crossing dark, empty canyons of space?
Sometimes my childhood seems a appropriately distant, but my college days in the 1970s seem like maybe a couple of decades ago, the 80s maybe a decade ago, the 90s a few years ago. Didn’t I just get deliriously happy with the election of Obama in 2008? And aren’t the wounds still fresh from Donald Trump’s election in 2016? Going from 20 to 70 in “real time” seems as if it was achieved in miles per hour in a Ferrari. And I’m still accelerating. It’s not the most pleasant realization when you know that a brick wall is at the end of this track.
Something very strange is going on here.
No other measure is so ephemeral and slippery as time. Space, for instance, that other component of “spacetime,” which we measure in scales of distance, is more dependable. We can get our minds around an inch, a foot, a mile, 100 miles, 500 miles, 1,000 miles, 8,000 miles across the planet, 240,000 miles to the Moon. With a little more effort, we can quasi-envision 93 million miles to the Sun. Light years require even more imagination, but, OK, it takes 4.2 years traveling at the speed of light to reach the nearest other star. Once we’ve envisioned these vast distances, and accepted them as “really large,” they don’t change much. The foot, the mile or the light year do not grow shorter as we grow older.
I guess the philosophical-spiritual way to coexist with this crazy “time” thing — whatever it is mathematically — is to accept it as a process, each moment begetting the next, which is what allows other processes to unfold: like star and planet formation, the emergence of life, evolution of species, survival against all odds for what would become a spindly, naked ape, and then the trials and tribulations of this wondrous/terrible life form called humans.
Somehow, someway, “time” along with “space” is the framework upon which the Universe creates and destroys, bequeaths and takes away existence. All things must pass.
Except, apparently, electrons and photons and neutrinos and quarks and the four fundamental forces and dark matter and dark energy.
And how to explain them? Oh no… more mathematics!
