Time

I’ve been thinking about time a lot lately – something that I have a great need for, but a very limited supply of. It seems to be a pretty slippery customer to deal with, expanding and contracting in the most absurd fashion imaginable. Time does not seem to be fixed or static, rather it seems to be dynamic, malleable and fluid. In fact, I have been wondering about its nature and trying to decide whether time is real or just some artificial construct that I have created in order to understand my universe. Did you ever become aware of how time seems speed up during moments of joy or excitement and slow down during periods of tedium? We need action now! We need the DHS to stand up, do its job and protect us. As Stark-Raving Chandler said, time should be ordered to arrive on time!

Have you ever noticed how age seems to compress time? Consider the summer vacations from school when you were very young. My own experience of this was that these periods of time lasted a lifetime – from the point when we came bolting down the three cement steps of Markham Elementary School, breaking our number 2’s and chanting “no more pencils, no more books, no more teacher’s…” as we dashed across the heavily clovered field, past the tennis courts, racing towards the parking lot and freedom beyond - to the point when, clad in a new pair of Sears Toughskins (preferably with a cool iron-on patch on the knee, like a wolf or something) we would troop bravely back into the maw of that monument of lower education - could be measured in years. Great deeds were done in those three months. Lifetimes were lived, adventures were had, eternal friendships were formed, passive verb tenses were used...

Simple mathematics may offer some explanation: a year for a five-year-old child is 20% of his entire life up to that point; however, for a 50 year old adult, a year is only 2% of his entire life. Thus with increasing age, each segment of time is a decreasing percentage of the person's total experience. I suspect that this is the reason why the elderly are always asking what time it is – time is moving so quickly for them, as to be a blur. Perhaps this is the real cause of Alzheimer’s or dementia?

Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems incredible.
~ Salman Rushdie

Time has historically been closely related with space, together comprising space-time. Newton believed time and space form a container for events, which is as real as the objects it contains. Modern physics views the curvature of space-time around an object, to be as much an accepted feature of that object as are its mass and volume, except when the extreme mass and curvature of that object takes up more than one seat on the subway. Einstein showed that if time and space are measured using electromagnetic phenomena (like light bouncing between mirrors) then due to the constancy of the speed of light, time and space become mathematically entangled together in a certain way (called Minkowski time-space) which in turn results in Lorentz transformation (see below) and in the entanglement of all other important derivative physical quantities (like energy, momentum, mass, force, remaining hit-points, etc) in a certain 4-vectorial way as described by special relativity.

According to these theories, the concept of time depends on the spatial frame of reference of the observer(s), human perception, as well as the measurement by instruments such as clocks, and that it is different for observers in relative motion. Even the temporal order of events can change, but the past and future that are defined by the backward and forward light cones described by Einstein never change. The past is the set of events that can send light signals to the observer, the future is that set of events to which the observer can send light signals. All else is the present and within that set of events the time-order differs for different observers. Confused yet? Einstein commented on this in his typical understated fashion, saying that the only reason for time is so that everything does not happen at once.

Newton and Einstein’s perspectives, and indeed that of most modern physicists, are consistent with the realist's view of time. A contrasting view is that time is part of the fundamental intellectual structure (together with space and number) within which we sequence events, quantify the duration of events and the intervals between them, and compare the motions of objects. In this view, time does not refer to any kind of entity that "flows", that objects "move through", or that is a "container" for events. This view is in the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz and Immanuel Kant, in which time, rather than being an objective thing to be measured, is part of the mental measuring system, and is therefore a human construct.

Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason, described time as an a priori intuition that allows us (together with other a priori intuitions, such as space) to comprehend sensory experience. For Kant, neither space nor time is conceived as substances, but rather both are elements of a systematic mental framework, necessarily structuring the experiences of any rational agent, or observing subject – typical Kant, huh?

Ralph Waldo Emerson considered time as presentness, where past and future are but our present projections (of our memory, hope, fear, etc.). For Emerson, time needs a qualitative measurement rather than a quantitative one. Leave it to old Ralph to change the rules – the quality of time…hmmmn. Physicist David Bohm stated that worldview is the lens through which our thoughts are formed “the general tacit assumption in thought is that it's just telling you the way things are and that it's not doing anything - that 'you' are inside there, deciding what to do with the information. But you don't decide what to do with the information. Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives false info that you are running it, that you are the one who controls thought. Whereas actually thought is the one which controls each one of us." Perhaps this is why Persig was institutionalized.

“Time is the justice that examines all offenders.”
~ William Shakespeare

Time can be thought of as linear, cyclical, discrete, continuous and any combination thereof. In general, the Judeo-Christian concept, based on the Bible, is that time is linear, with a defined beginning: the act of creation by God. But does time have a beginning and if so, what happened before that beginning? Did God get up that morning, toast a Pop-Tart, check his “to do” list, give Mrs. God a kiss on the cheek, roll up his sleeves and set about the business of creating time, some time shortly after breakfast? Stephen Hawking has commented that statements about what happened "before" time began are self-contradictory, and thus without meaning, but he doesn’t like Pop-Tarts. The Christian view also assumes an end, the eschaton, expected to happen when Christ returns to earth in the Second Coming to judge the living and the dead – a good day to be wearing your helmet.

This view of space-time, one of space-time as discrete phenomena, while seemingly more intuitive and in tune with our human lifestyle, carries with it the burden of several paradoxes, most notably those credited to the sophist Zeno. Several of Zeno's eight surviving paradoxes have been preserved in Aristotle's Physics, such as Achilles and the tortoise. In this paradox the fleet-footed Achilles nobly gives the tortoise a head start before commencing the race. Achilles starts running and reaches the starting point of the tortoise, but by that time the tortoise has moved forward a short distance, thus Achilles arrives at the point where the tortoise was. Again, Achilles runs to the point where the tortoise was, but the tortoise has again moved forward a short (albeit shorter) distance. In this way, Achilles will never catch the tortoise, as he will always be running to where the tortoise was, covering an infinite number of ever-decreasing distances.

"In a race, the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead." (Aristotle Physics VI:9, 239b15)

In the arrow paradox (this paradox is also known as the fletcher's paradox, where a fletcher is a maker of arrows), we imagine an arrow in flight. At every moment in time, the arrow is located at a specific position. If the moment is just a single instant, then the arrow does not have time to move and is at rest at that instant. Now, in following instants, it then must also be at rest for the same reason. Thus, the arrow is always at rest and cannot move: motion is impossible. Whereas the first paradox presented divides space into discrete segments, this paradox divides time into discrete points. Eternalism addresses these various difficulties by considering all points in time to be equally valid frames of reference - or equally "real", if one prefers. It does not do away with the concept of past and future, but instead considers them as directions, rather than as a state of being. Whether some point in time is in the future or past is entirely dependent on which frame of reference you are using as a basis for observing it, and whether or not you have a fresh set of AA batteries in you global positioning unit.

Planck time (~ 5.4 × 10^−44 seconds) is the unit of time in the system of natural units known as Planck units. Current established physical theories are believed to fail at this time scale, and many physicists expect that the Planck time might be the smallest discrete unit of time that could ever be measured, even in principle. This is a quantum view of time. Scientists have come to some agreement on descriptions of events that happened 10^−35 seconds after the Big Bang, but generally agree that descriptions about what happened before one Planck time after the Big Bang will likely remain pure speculations.

The practice of meditation, central to all Buddhist traditions, takes as its goal the reflection of the mind back upon itself, thus altering the subjective experience of time; the so called, 'entering the now', or 'the moment' or “walking the rice-paper”. The practitioner seeks to stop time, or render it irrelevant. Hinduism, like Buddhism, has a concept of a wheel of time, that regards time as cyclical and quantic, consisting of repeating ages that happen to every being of the universe between birth and death. In recent years this cyclical vision of time has been embraced by theorists of quantic space-time and systems theory.

So where does that leave our hero? It leaves him still stranded in Harlem, still with too much to do and not enough time to do it in. An extension that follows directly from special relativity, one that has been empirically proven, is time dilation, and on the surface, would seem to provide an “out”. Simply stated, this is the observation that time slows as acceleration (or gravity) increases. It then follows that if I want to “create” more time for myself, all I really have to do is find a way to accelerate myself to a significant fraction of the speed of light (the greater the fraction the better). As I accelerated, time would increasingly slow for me, relative to the rest of you who are comparatively motionless. I’d do it (set phasers to “kill” and give me warp speed Mr. Sulu), but it just seems like an awful lot of effort to go through, only to have to get up tomorrow and face yet another day with too little time for the tasks at hand and no Pop-Tarts anyway. So here I am 2,035 words later and what have I learned? I’ve learned that you can't change the past, but you can ruin the present by worrying about the future – so, fuck it!