It’s about time!
kevin doole, staff
Over time, as we humans have evolved beyond the basic needs of life, we have constructed a host of abstractions atop the age-old foundations for survival. These may all seem concrete on some level, but, as you will see, describing the fallacy of one illustrates the emptiness of all the others.
The fallacy that I have chosen to ruin this week is time. It is not real. The fourth dimension, some call it, twisting and bending its shadowy way out into the universe and beyond, is nothing but a crafty illusion. It is not a part of the Cosmos. It is merely an abstraction created to help our curious species understand the world. That we observe time as linear is because we lack the aptitude to truly comprehend reality.
The physicist Julian Barbour has been deconstructing time now for about 45 years. As the story goes, in 1963 Barbour was mulling over an article about the theoretical physicist Paul Dirac while mountain-climbing in the Bavarian Alps. Halfway to the summit he was finally stalled by the weight of a stowaway question he’d been carrying up with him. “What is time?” He turned around, went home and got cracking on a solution.
The question was half of a scientific ascent whose summit we find in our midst today. As a hundred years ago we realized that the Earth was not stationary in the solar system and several hundred years prior to that we learned that the Earth was a sphere, today we find ourselves with time on the scientific chopping block. The laughable misconceptions of scientific yore were not held so long ago that we should feel above them. They must help us understand that we misunderstand the universe in equally laughable ways today. We struggle to mentally grasp simple truths of the cosmos but still somehow take them for granted
Anyway, Barbour decided after a while that time does not exist at all. It would be impossible to describe his well-proofed theories here, but as an illustration you can imagine the universe as a massive collection of snapshots. Whereas Newton presupposes that there is a flowing “river of time” that was there before anything was put into it, Barbour says that everything is already there and that time is nothing more than an arbitrary measurement of the difference between two snapshots, or “nows,” as Barbour calls them. These “nows” are everything in the entire universe at one instant. All together they make up the entire universe (picture each “now” as a card, and the entire universe as the deck). He believes that they are just there and do not necessarily flow from one to the next. It is only because of our kooky methods of confusion that we see the past as the past and the future as the future. In essence, we are ultimately incapable of seeing the external world how it really is.
Depressing? Perhaps. You must see how poorly equipped we are for our existence. The idea shows that there is very little separating us intellectually from the woodland creatures. We’ve got language and opposable thumbs, but that’s all.
But then, in the same way that the meaning of life for a rabbit seems simple to behold, so does the meaning of our human lives. Philosophy, you may try to describe why we are here as much as you like but you just function on twisting language into new ways of understanding weightless abstractions. I write you off; same goes for you, theology. Same goes for anyone else who may attempt describing anything to me. You are all without consequence. Those abstractions just confuse the issue and the fallacy of time reveals their hollowness. Just look at a photograph of some people. It can be understood as an extremely narrow “now” as it exists in the real universe. As you look upon it, try to figure what every person in the world would easily understand from looking at the people. Would it be their religion? Their financial situation? Their philosophical opinions? Their job? Their breadth of knowledge? No. Out of context, those details would rarely show up in one of Barbour’s “nows.” The things that do show up are what unambiguously give meaning to our human lives. It’s the happy smiles and possibly also the sad frowns! Perhaps even indifferent glances and oblivious yawns. Feelings and stuff! Emotions and whatnot! That kind of stuff!
