On Time

The suggestion of neutrinos breaking the light barrier finally raises the possibility of time paradoxes. A clock strapped to one of these neutrinos will have moved backwards the next time it is checked, while the neutrino—from the frame of reference of the observer—will have travelled forward in time to a new place. A future cyclotron—using perhaps the gravity of planets—could bend the path of neutrinos so that they return suitable close to the starting point. If a detector position here could signal rapidly enough for the neutrino source to be moved then a very bizarre situation would arise. A clock strapped to the arriving neutrinos would see the change of position of the journey happen before they had set out! So that in fact their arrival would be moving the position back so that they could set out on the original path… has some difficulty saying that!

Anyway got me thinking about the great unsolved question of time.

There is an obvious problem with time. The standard model sees it as having a direction—Past, Present and Future—and somehow the Future becomes the Present which becomes the Past. This change from one to the other is imagined like a river, or an arrow or in someway a movement. Once so established we then use time along with space to relate positions of moving things so that like static frames of a film they may be strung together into a flowing phenomenon of change. But if we wish to explain the movement of an arrow or a river by using static events linked by time, we can’t then use the river or the arrow to describe the flow of time. At root we still (in the 21st century despite millennia) have no way to think about the time apart from the observation that things change. This idea that movement was ineffable was first posed to me by a friend, Andrew Rennie, at college. And being ineffable I have been reluctant to take up the gauntlet for what is 21 yrs now!

It would appear that the standard view of time serves to separate events into film like frames that are static and frozen. These are describable pictures and numbers may enumerate the points in these pictures and the frames themselves. But how they fit together—how the points in space are differentiated from one another, and the frames in time are differentiated from one another is beyond such insight. How they comes to be joined together into a changing phenomenon remains utterly unexplored in this frozen world. Perhaps essentially so since the very process here is to encode and produce in language the phenomenon of change, which is essential to differentiate the sequence of symbols and thoughts of the process.

Returning to the start, phenomenologically, what we begin with is the observation of change. That nothing remains as it is. We may sit and stare at a leaf and, if stationary, we will start to notice that it has movement in the wind, and as the days go by its shape will change as it grows or is eaten or decays. We like sudden changes, but most change is a very morphing from one shape into another and from one state into another. This morphing, refusal to remain what it is, is the essence of Being. We must I assume begin with this idea. It is the flux of Heraclitus, the Power of Nietzsche, that is forever in turmoil undoing what is, and becoming what is yet to be. “Becoming” is what came first, the Become only steps along the journey. Language being entity biased prefers the Become, the established things that have happened, but it forgets that they are only here because they Became, and like the Little Mermaid the cost of having Become is to one day Begone. Unenlightened life, as Buddha taught us, is dominated by fixation on the Become, the Becoming, and the Begone. Enlightened life is the realisation that true reality is built upon the shifting sands the both build and destroy the sand dunes of our minds.

Time travel is a mine field of paradox. As I read once paradox is a sign that something has gone wrong in our language and thoughts since in reality there are no paradoxes. If I was to return to 1859 what assurance have I that it is the ‘same’ 1859 as recorded in History? A paradox requires that it is the same 1859 so that in a century and a halves time I will be building my time machine. But how do I know this? More importantly how could I know this! What even does the ‘same’ time mean? Its normal usage would be concurrent events in different places, but the idea of same place but different time moves the question of same ‘time’ to same ‘place’. The question in 1859 is then is this the same place as in 2011. If I was in Downe House in Kent in 1859 I would be witnessing Darwin putting the finishing touches to ‘On the Origin of Species’. Downe House lies on certain identifiable roads and in relation to certain other places. In 1859 these would remain the same so I could give a normal definition of same place. Likewise I would recognise Darwin, and the house and grounds having seen paintings of him and visited the house, so could give a normal definition of same house and man. But this is deceptive. What if I was visiting an exact copy of the Earth? Crazy but what if I was the visit the area 100,000 years before: how would I find the ‘place’ where the house now stands. I need a point of reference. I could use GPS and make that a point on the Earth’s surface. But what is my 0 position. The rotation of the earth, precession around the sun etc all mean that there is no fixed point 100,000 years ago that I can find to map to the present. I would need to map the current 0 longitude and latitude back through time to find it 100,000 yrs ago. Likewise the whole issue of the English plate moving from the South Atlantic over time to crash into the Scottish plate. 100,000 yrs ago the GPS reading for Downe House would have been in the sea and wouldn’t even refer to the same rocks as today. So same ‘place’ is entirely relative, the problem I have when trying to reference the next sentence clause: it must be relative to a mysterious thing called Here and Now which is always assumed a priori and cannot be defined.

It is that mysterious Here and Now which is the true Place and Time and this remains the same even when we travel back to 1850. It is just another day. True that people carrying future knowledge don’t show up very often. If I was to tell Darwin the impact of his book in my world it would be a very odd occasion for him; and the fact it doesn’t happen suggests that there is something else wrong here. But assuming that it does happen the point is that I would be retelling Darwin of a world that is not in his future as though I was from further down the river than him, nor now is it in my future. The point is that we are both in a new place and time, as ever and the future remains as open to us as it did. If I went and killed one of my ancestors there would be no paradox as my own history doesn’t change, there are simply two ‘pasts’ one before in my memory and one after in my memory.