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Joe Mahmood

Joe Mahmood

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ROGER WATERS - TIME



GRASPING THE MYSTERY

The most accurate atomic clocks are so precise that every few years a "leap second" must be thrown in - the newspapers insert a little story when this happens, the last occasion being June 30, 2015. The need to add an extra second arises because Earth's rotation is gradually slowing down, and adding the extra second brings Coordinated Universal Time (clock time) back in sync with solar time (sunrise and sunset).

When clocks based on the vibration of atoms can slice time into millionths of a second, it would appear that time doesn't have many mysteries left. Clocks are very useful for telling time. But they also conspire to keep us from knowing the truth about time. When asked to explain relativity, Einstein famously said, "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity." He was slyly referring to the personal aspect of time, and that is where the hidden mysteries begin. When someone is feeling blissfully contented, they often sigh, "I wish this moment could last forever." Are they wishing for something that could already be real?

Because time has two faces, one relating to personal experience and one relating to the objective world described by scientific equations, the issue is a tangled one. No matter how time seems to drag in the dentist's chair or in a traffic jam, the time registered by a clock isn't affected. You can slice this fact two ways. You can claim that clock time is real, while personal time isn't. Or you can point out that subtracting the personal aspect of time is possible only in theory. In the world of experience, all time is personal. We take the second position, even though it sounds radical and even peculiar at this point.

When time gets intensely personal, we notice the human element that typically hides out of sight, because we take it for granted. Shakespeare's Macbeth is at his most despondent, having killed a king and setting his own tragic fate in motion, when he wearily declares, "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, / To last syllable of recorded time."

This is a classic expression about the personal aspect of time. One day inexorably follows after another, bringing us closer and closer to the moment of death. But time's "petty pace" is actually an illusion. Time doesn't "flow" in the quantum field, where all of reality exists as pure potential. The quantum field is outside our commonsense notion of time, when a particle emerges from the field, it has no history. Particles are tied to an on/off switch, not to the past.

In a quantum reality, Macbeth would say, "Now and now and now. Nothing else exists but the present." If the flow of time is no longer credible, the only time that can possibly exist is the present moment. The present moment is the measure of "real" time, while the "flow" of time, which produces the birth of babies and the death of old people, is an illusion. There's the rub. We see babies being born and old people dying, among many other things that happen in the flow of time. No one can tell us that these things are illusory.

Naturally, this illusion is very convincing if you happen to be alive on Earth. But to a physicist, the timeless quantum field is being filtered through a human nervous system, which cuts eternity into neat, practical slices for our own benefit. "Out there," time is a dimension of reality totally detached from human concerns. Macbeth may be afraid to die, but a magnet isn't. It exists in the electromagnetic field, which for all practical purposes never ages. For as long as the present universe endures, the electromagnetic field remain intact, never growing old. A lightbulb burns out after a certain number of hours, but light itself doesn't burn out. Even if the cosmos should reach an endpoint billions of years from now, and every source of light goes dark, it would be wrong to say that light got old. It would simply shut off.

Excerpts extracted from YOU ARE THE UNIVERSE - Discovering Your Cosmic Self And Why It Matters by Deepak Chopra, M.D. and Menas C. Kafatos, PH.D.

https://www.deepakchopra.com/
https://www.menaskafatos.com/
 
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