The Illusion Of Time

Time is but the shadow of the world upon the background of Eternity.

JEROME K. JEROME (1889). Clocks, in The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow.

Time and space are fragments of the infinite for the use of finite creatures.

HENRI FREDERIC AMIEL (1864). Journal.

Of all concepts related to our existence, the most fascinating one is the concept of time or perhaps the timelessness of our existence. Time may mean different things to different philosophies but it does not mean forever. Time itself was created with the universe. Since time did not exist prior to Creation, we can not talk about what happened before the big bang on the time scale.

To plot our place in the history of the universe, the vertical axis is space and the horizontal axis is time; events on this plot are space-time events such as the light cone, whose angle is defined by the speed of light given a source such as sun. We are in the future light cone of sun by about 8 minutes, for moon about one second; the light we receive from sun left the surface of sun 8 minutes ago. According to the scientific paradigm, time can move in both directions: future and past. Why then, paraphrasing Stephen Hawking, "We do not remember the future?" It is because transition from past to present results in greater chaos, the passing of which is psychologically acceptable to mind-in a unidirectional manner, the feel of passing of time. Predicting future will cause more structuring, a phenomenon against the theory of physics and the nature of mind accepting the movement of time in only one direction.

If sun were to switch off now, we will not know about it for about 8 minutes because that's how long it takes for the light beam to reach us from the sun; this is what is meant by being in the future light cone. What we see is the past not the present.

What we see in the skies is the past; the Hercules constellation is 27,000 light years away; that means we see it as it appeared 27,000 years ago, back in the days when there was no human city on the face of the earth and bow and arrow had not yet been discovered. The light coming from the distant stars often may take millions of years to reach us; it tells us how the starts may have looked in the past; we can not tell their present status. Our crystal ball is running the events of the past

The stars we are looking at in the skies may well have vanished millions of years ago but they will continue to shine for millions of years. Also, the location of stars we mark on the sky is fallacious because the light coming to us may have changed its course several times as it passed through strong gravitational fields of stars. It is quite possible that a star we are gazing may well be on the exact opposite end of the sky. For this reason, the concept of direction can not be applied to the universe; the universe is direction-less. It is only our relative position in terms of light years that is important. So, while we sit here and think about the time that passes us by, we are actually contemplating our movement in space-time, the axis created by combining time and space.

Another illusion of time appears in the relationship between motion and time. All material bodies are continuously in motion; their relative motion however, makes them appear stationary. A bouncing ball on a moving train may appear to an observer on the platform to have traveled hundreds of feet between each bounce but to the traveler on the train the ball only moved up and down and not sideways. It is therefore our relative position to other bodies which tells us their position and speed in space. There is no absolute position in space and time.

Our measure of time is also dependent on who is measuring it and where he is located. It is all relative. The classical theory of relativity proposed by Einstein states that as the speed of an object increases, its mass increases also. When the speed reaches the speed of light (about 186,000 miles per second) change in mass becomes noticeable. At 90% of the speed of light, at about 170,000 miles per second, the mass is about 10% higher but at the speed of light, the mass becomes infinity, the object stops moving and time slows down coming to standstill.

Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light because it is composed of nonmaterial waves. The PBS television serial to celebrate Einstein's hundredths birth anniversary shows Peter Ustinov zipping out to speed of light returning in a fraction of a second unchanged, while his identical twin on the earth ages several years.

Another perspective of time related to its passage as we feel it. We can tell the passing of hours and days but on a larger scale our perceptions blur out. For example, the time span for the creation of the universe and Armageddon is so large that it is not possible for us to comprehend. For magnitudes of this type, time is a measure of distance: distance of expansion of the universe. We can only tell how many light years away we are from other stars. Distance as we commonly perceive does not apply here because there is no straight line path in the universe. With collapse of the universe, time collapses also and starts all over again with perhaps another Creation.

Finally, the time, the hour we pass today, may indeed be a fiction of our imagination. We are proving where time and distance merge, space warps and leads us to nth dimensions. Our mind is programmed to visualize passing of events, from past to present but not from present to future. The sequence is seemingly planned and we always assume a priori that past precedes present.

The grand unified theory makes the startling prediction that not just energy of time but matter is also temporary; protons that form the heart of every matter in the universe are not permanent as had been believed; they are destined to decay. Nothing lasts forever. There is change everywhere; not even quarks last forever; the sun, the stars and atoms they are made up of are destined to vanish one day along with time.