Slices of Regret

I sometimes tune in to a radio show called Ideas, a regular weekday evenings show on Canada’s CBC Radio One and a damned good one at that.  The other night it was a documentary on time, the concept of time, the wrongness or fakeness of the human concept of time.  Pretty thick stuff and nothing that’ll get you to your next meeting on time but, if you got the time, let me tell you what I thought I heard.

 

Time is not what you think it is.  The species, which includes me, thinks that time exists as a standalone entity of some sort, something not bolted securely on to physical reality, something not physical at all but nevertheless real and almost a form of currency that we can use or lose or waste.  Time marches on, we say.  It flows, we think.

 

The big thinkers say not.  They say time is not an entity that is separate from space and what it is definitely not is marching, nor passing, nor flowing.  It is static and timeless (an odd choice of words and mine, not that of the big time thinkers) and everything that ever happened anywhere is still happening, wherever it is happening.

 

“One chunk at a time,” you’re thinking and I hear you.  Let’s look first at the case against time being something that flows.  The concept doesn’t work because flow implies measurement and measurement implies a reference standard and what is the reference standard against which time is measured?

 

Here’s a way to make yourself crazy.  You know that you can measure the flow of a river as a volume of water through a unit of space over time.  Let’s keep it simple, one chunk at a time, and say that you can measure a volume of water with a bucket.  How much water does that bucket hold?  Let’s say it holds a gallon.  How much is a gallon?  No fair to say that it is the amount that the bucket holds (my blog, my rules) but one dumb and marvellously illustrative answer might be that one gallon is the amount of water you can drink in a sitting.  Right… so how long is a sitting?    If you don’t know how long a sitting is, you can’t measure a gallon of water.  If you can’t measure a gallon of water, you can’t measure flow.  If I’ve made the point, we can skip the chunk about measuring a unit of space and move on to asking this: if time flows, and flow is a measurement of volume through space of over time, you have to use time to measure itself and that’s like… stupid.

 

How long is a second?  Try to answer that without talking about fractions of seconds or fractions of minutes or whatever.  Go ahead.  Try. 

 

I’ve got a million of ‘em but they’ll get us nowhere closer to understanding what the big time thinkers think about time.  When you get to the point where your only defence is mass hysteria, i.e., something is because we all agree to say it is, then you’ve come to the end of the argument and it is time to move on.

 

That’s what Einstein did.  He moved on to relativity.  With relativity you get the theory that says time doesn’t flow.  Rather, you (and me, too) flow through time.  To get a handle on that idea you have to let go of the handle that says time is separate from space.  That’s what Einstein did.  He attached time to space and presto: space-time.

I’m all the way out on a layman’s limb in suggesting that space-time means that now exists now and forever.  And so does now.  And now, and now, and now and it’s like driving a car through a landscape.  You flow past the mountains on your left and the desert on your right and all of it continues to exist after you have flowed through it.  Each now continues to exist after you have passed through it into the next now and the next and the next.  To say it another way, driving through that landscape is a bit liking driving into an infinite number of still images of the landscape each of which continues to be a still image after you’ve blasted through.

 

Here’s your assignment.  When you go for that long drive, you are to capture an infinite number of infinitely large two-dimensional still images of the landscape as you’re driving.  Capture each at an infinitesimally small increment of distance starting here and ending at the horizon.  (That horizon bit is a mindscrew I couldn’t resist.)  Now, put those images in a stack on its side, the way the recipe cards sit in the box in the kitchen.  Now tell me what you’ve got.  Wouldn’t this horizontal array of two-dimensional images, each one depicting a moment – a now in space – wouldn’t it amount to four-dimensional space-time?  Somebody is going to straighten me out on this.  I can feel it.

 

Until they do, riddle me this: If you could somehow occupy this stack and flow through it, what would that be like?  What would you call it?  Well, these physicists and philosophers and deep, deep thinkers say that would be called existence in space-time.  Pretty much where we’re at.  They’re saying each image is a now, a three-dimensional slice of time and time is the fourth dimension.  For clarity, assuming you need it, to say that each now is an image is equally valid (which still may not be saying much.)

 

This may be the weakest distillation of the concept of space-time ever posted, but it works for me, to the extent that stuff like this needs to work at all.

 

But if its not yet working for you, try remembering.  At least one theoretical physicist who’s name I can’t remember used the example of memory to support the concept of space-time.  It seems that the human brain appreciates many nows but we call them thens.  We call them memories.  Interesting.  And convenient, too.  But I’m not convinced that this is a good support and here’s why.  If each memory which we call a then is actually an image, a now, a slice of timeless (Permanent?  Immutable?  What?) time that we don’t happen to occupy (but could, some theoreticians would argue) but which simply continues to exist in the same way that the landscape continues to exist after you’ve checked into the Bide-a-Wee Motel, well then that means that every asinine, mean, embarrassing or shameful thing I’ve ever done is still out there, still happening, forever (whatever forever means in space-time.)  The trouble with this lies not in anything having to do with physics or philosophy.  The trouble is that it sucks.  I regret them all and I’d rather just forget about them.

 

One more for the crazy-making file.  We agree, hysterically or otherwise, that a novel has something called a timeline.  At this point, I would like to ask you for something.  In as much as we all think we know what space is, we must also think we know what a line is, right?  Will you give me that one?  If so, isn’t it curious that we can then rush to the altar and marry the idea of time, which we think to be something separate from space and the idea of a line, which by definition is freakin’ space?  Net-net, a space-line I can picture but a timeline I can’t, except as represented in space, e.g., on paper.  And another thing, if time flows like, say, a river – something the big thinkers say is mass hysterical hogwash – how can the rest of us sleep at night knowing that lines don’t flow in the way that a river flows, that is, they are static, but we’re still content with the idea of a timeline.  I’ll tell you how.  Who cares, is how.  Or, maybe worse.  Maybe we think that a line flows something like a river but if that’s the case, we have to accept that it flows in either direction and at the same time, to boot.  Rivers don’t do that (other than tidal rivers which don’t count.)  Actually, let me modify that one for the sake of my argument.  I don’t think that a line flows like a river.  I think that I can flow along a line in either direction but I can only flow in one direction at a time.  I presume you agree and in that case, we’re getting somewhere and the big thinkers are waiting for us to catch up.

 

Back to that novel. Each page, paragraph, sentence and word describes a never-changing albeit fictitious now.  You can drive through the space-time/landscape of the novel again and again.  You can skip through it willy-nilly, forward and backward.  Maybe Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow (which title he lifted from Arthur Eddington, I guess) got me close to this thinking and I now realize why I struggled with the idea of driving through that novel’s space-time both forward, along the timeline of a single sentence and, simultaneously, backward along the timeline described by paragraphs and chapters.  Tough sledding for such a slim space-time and it must have driven Amis nuts to write it.

 

So what have I wrought?  I am pleased enough with the novel analogy.  It is helpful in understanding big time thinking, but it is not a proof and if my horizontal array of images has any validity it may be the disproof.  Yes, you can move in any direction of the space-time of a novel but the novel’s space-time does not include you!  The horizontal array of images does include you.  If you were able to move in any direction through my horizontal array of images, you would run into yourself and c’mon, anyone who has ever been to the Cineplex knows that simply cannot be allowed to happen.  But hey, maybe it wouldn’t be a problem at all, space-time-wise.  It might bugger up an election or your foursome, but who would ever remember?

 

That brings us (whoever is left, anyway) back to memory and the role it plays in understanding time, if any.  I’ve got a problem here beyond my whiny slices of regret.  If I back the car up through my horizontal array of images and meet myself and together I step on a butterfly and the Leafs end up winning the Stanley cup, do I remember that they didn’t even make the playoffs?  Or did that ever happen?  Or is it still happening and are there an infinite number of space-times, all of them real and static and infinite in their variety?  And if so, why can’t I remember the futures?

 

In my wallet, I carry a little piece of paper with my children’s birthdays written on it.  It’s the only memory trick I ever learned.  Not surprising that I don’t remember an infinite number of futures.  And notwithstanding, it does seem that an infinite number of concurrent space-times is a possibility but each had better be contiguous or I’ll never learn to shoot skeets.

Later,
–B–

Two and a half things in this ramble are my ideas.  The example of the drive through a landscape I stole off the radio but the bit about the stack of images amounting to model of a space-time is my invention.  Of course, it may be that countless others have described something similar and I haven’t yet driven through their landscapes.  The bit about a novel also being workable model for space-time might be mine, though that seems unlikely.  It’s too obvious.  I’ll take a half-credit until the straighteners-out get to me.  The idea that my bad behaviour is better forgotten is entirely original, because I did those things and nobody else.  And of course, you’ll have to go to http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/living-on-oxford-time/index.html to see just how badly I have misrepresented the big time thinkers.