Ahoy Fellow Time Traveler!
What is your attitude toward time? Do you feel like there's never enough? It might be time to take a closer look at - time. Join me and we'll do that together!
---
Listen to the podcast here
Ahoy Fellow Time Traveler!
The concept of time seems simple that marches ever on one increment than the next. It's steady and predictable. Hence the saying you can set your watch by that. Depending upon the appropriate referential framework to which we turn our attention, the increments we use range from microseconds to eons. For most of our daily decision-making, we think in terms of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, seasons, and years.
These frameworks are integral to our experience. They strike us as reality itself. For the most part, it might as well be the case but the truth is it's not. I will explain. As does so much of the world, time turns out to be more than meets our eyes. Time does not march along and neat precise segments as it seems to according to our limited physical senses.
Time is more than meets the eye. It does not march in neat, precise segments. Like space itself, where there is no such thing as a perfectly straight line, it morphs and twists depending upon the referential framework from which it is observed.
Like space itself where there is no such thing as a perfectly straight line, it morphs and twists, depending upon the referential framework from which it is observed. It isn't something separate from the dimensions of space. It's part of it. That's why physicists refer to the framework of the universe as space-time.
This was a monumental discovery often credited to Albert Einstein. Einstein’s special theory of relativity first published in 1905 paved the way for the concept. One of his math professors at Zurich Polytechnic, Hermann Minkowski, applied four-dimensional math to his former student's theories and introduced the concept as he coined the term space-time in a publication in 1907.
These important insights swam against our human intuition. Maybe that's why they alluded to prior detection. Over a century later, we are still working to integrate the implications of this greater understanding of reality into our worldviews. There are two areas where the obsolete Euclidean and Newtonian paradigms may limit the power of our mental models. The first is how we think of time. The second is how we think of existence itself.
Let me first say that I know this discussion is on the wonky side, to say the least. If I knew how to make the deeper points in another way, I do it. I paraphrase the sudden onset protagonist Miris Wallace, yet it turns out the world is inconveniently complicated. I hope you will bear with me because we don't tend to talk about the connections between theoretical physics and our decision-making too often in our daily lives.
As a result, what I shared a day may strike you as strange. It is. I also believe it's useful at least I find it. It's worth our consideration because it helps navigate some of the biggest questions we have such as, “If God is good, why do bad things happen? How did the universe begin and how will it end?” The topic also helps me think about more immediate concerns like, “How do I lessen my fear of death? What is the best way to think about the concepts of heaven and hell?” The implications of time affect our ideas of morality leading us in the direction of better understanding, the precepts of axiology, the science of value.
Don't worry. We are not going to delve into all of that at least not in one fell swoop. We will stick with the nature of time and look at what its deeper nature implies. Einstein, Minkowski, and a few other mathematicians and physicists working around the dawn of the twentieth century expanded our model of the universe by explaining the relationships between energy, matter, and the medium in which they are materialized space-time.
For example, prior to their work, the force of gravity was quite a mystery. Now, we know what it is. It is the phenomenon that emerges from the relationship between matter and space-time. The heavier and denser something is, in other words, the more quanta of creation, subatomic and atomic particles are bunched together, the more space-time is affected.
The universe bends around concentrations of energy or as we think of it, mass. Speaking about the relationship between mass and energy, Einstein shed light on that too. They are convertible according to his famous formula, E=MC squared. That's why nuclear power is so energetic. The little bit of mass we use up in an explosion is converted to energy by a factor of the speed of light times the speed of light.
As might as the fastest thing we know about, the conversion is roughly a factor of 9 with 16 zeros behind it. Let’s say you had $1 billion. You kept on acquiring billion after billion faster than Bezos or Gates. Let's say you did it so much you became a billionaire a million times in a row. You'd be 190th of the way there. $90 million or billion is a big number but it is a number. It's knowable predictable observable. Since we can at least mathematically convert mass into energy, we could theoretically calculate the total energy in the universe.
Some posit that because of the symmetry of the universe negative energy equals positive energy, which makes the answer zero. Whatever may be the case there, we do observe gravitational effects so it is true that the universe is shaped by that energy. This brings us to consider time and energy. They are wrapped together because energy is expressed in terms of movement, which implies being in one place at one moment and another moment, and so on.
Time: Time and energy are wrapped together because energy is expressed in terms of movement, which implies being in one place at one moment and another, and so on.
There seems to be no way to express the reality and nature of the universe independently of a frame of reference, in other words, an observer. Scientists of the twentieth century were not the first to notice the centrality of the observer. This is a fundamental concept in much of the creation mythology dating back thousands of years to ancient Mesopotamia and elsewhere in the earliest records of history.
At its core, creation mythology includes three parts, order, chaos, and that which can distinguish between the two. Another way of thinking about this is objectivity needs subjectivity. According to ancient and current wisdom, the two are inseparable. That's one way I try to understand God as the big subjectivity without which there is no objectivity.
Objectivity poses quite a challenge. When we look at the world around us, we don't see things as they are. We see them as they were. Light is fast but it does travel. It takes time to arrive at the receptors of our eyes, more time to be processed into images in our brains, more time to be converted into distinguishable objects, and even more time to be assigned significance. When things are close to us, it might as well be instantaneous.
The further away we gaze, the further back in time we see. We are now receiving images from the James Webb telescope that reveal galaxies that are only a few hundred million years younger than the nearly fourteen-billion-year-old universe itself. This is causing quite a stir among the physics community because prior to these images, their models would not have predicted such complexity emerging so quickly. To understand the universe, we still have a lot of work to do.
That's enough of the big stuff, except for two observations that also resonate at the level we operate in our lives. The first is that no matter where you are in the universe when you gaze out, you perceive yourself at its center. The second is that the speed of light is constant and that there is nothing that can travel faster.
Quantum phenomena seem to supplant that notion but we will save that discussion for another time. While all of that macro-scale pondering is esoteric, it does point to analogous elements relative to our human-scale realities. In other words, some of this pertains to how we might build more powerful models for the decisions we make in our lives.
The main thing I take away from these scientific observations is this. All is not as it seems. For instance, consider the way we perceive the passage of time. Think about the past year. Has it gone faster or slower? If you are like me, on the one hand, it seems forever ago that the year began. Many have happened and so much of my life is different now than it was a year ago.
All is not as it seems. Consider the way we perceive the passage of time. Think about the past year. Has it gone faster or slower?
On the other hand, it flew by. I can barely believe that another year is already gone. This is a function of our perceptions and how we frame our thoughts. This was analogous to have time slows as speed increases. I invite you to consider the question, is life long or short? Once you do that, you may also consider this, does the question have any real meaning?
In our linear time experience, we think in terms of cause and effect. This perception topology shapes our emotional landscape. Tragedy and triumph, ambition and aspiration, blame and regret. Even good and bad. From our perspective, the past is gone. It's in the rearview. Nothing we can ever do can have any effect whatsoever on a timeline once we have experienced it.
Our memories are like footprints. They bear resemblance to what happened but they are not what happened. Likewise, the future is placed forever out of our reach. We anticipate a future. The time that looms ahead in our journey is our experience and thoughts as realities. Take place in the present moment. The present moment is where our consciousness is located. It's where our power resides. It's a function of the cumulative decisions we have made in the past. Some are weighted more than others. Our present thoughts and actions determine the conditions of our future.
In the context of all that we have looked at, the present moment is where reality resides. It's all we ever have. If we are to maximize our power and increase our agency, we must learn to respect the present moment. What does that respect look like? In our present moments, we face three choices about how we direct our energy with respect to time. We can waste it, spend it, or invest it. The people with the highest achievement, however, are measured wasted. They spend it but not as much as they invest it.
People at the lowest levels of the human experience, however we want to measure that, do the opposite. They rarely invest it. Sometimes spend it but mostly waste it. I want to emphasize that our attitude toward time determines our future reality. It makes sense then as the number one priority and claiming our power and manifesting our full agency in this world for us to resolve to optimize our attitude toward time. Hold it precious and it will serve us. Disrespect it and we pay a price, sometimes a heartbreaking agonizing price.
Our attitude towards time determines our future reality.
The second consideration raised by the nature of time is centered around existence itself. We have a strong proclivity to fear death. We look at lives cut short as a tragedy. We get mad at God for the injustice and heartache that is all too prevalent in the world around us. These feelings are based upon a myopic view of time and existence.
One of the most vivid illustrations of this concept for me is Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles milieu. In her creation, vampirism grants immortality. It's a curse not because her vampires must feed on blood and avoid the sun. Immortality itself is the curse. Why? If death is so bad, why wouldn't immortality be good? The answer is the same reason as what sets value in a marketplace, the law of supply and demand.
If we had an infinite amount of time, no moments would be worth very much. Life would lose its value and meaning. If so, death is the very thing that gives life its value and meaning. We may not welcome death, at least while we still feel that we have life to live. When we lose someone, it's appropriate to grieve. Our understanding grows by placing things in their appropriate context.
Time: If we had an infinite amount of time, no moment would be worth very much. Life would lose its value and meaning.
We might do better when we remember that our lost loved one’s life was their life. It had the impact it had. We honor those. We lose by taking what we can from their example, learning and growing from it. Also, remembering the ways they contributed to our lives. In that way, their life expands in value. This doesn't sound like a tragedy to me. My hope is these ponderings fuel your thoughts.
If you are feeling down about a loss, regret an action or inaction, or feel like you could benefit by increasing your respect for the present moment as I can, then consider the deeper nature of reality and how we might leverage it to increase our agency. Nobody else has your unique journey through this world. You are solely positioned to contribute in the way you cultivate for yourself. It's your business to maximize how the people who know and love you will continue to be enriched when your time in this world is run out. Let's go.