The gift of time

One of the most important characteristics distinguishing man from all other forms of nature is his knowledge of transitoriness, of beginning and end, and therefore of the gift of time. In man, transitory life attains its peak of animation, of soul power, so to speak. This does not mean man alone would have a soul. Soul quality pervades all beings. But man’s soul is most awake in his knowledge of the inter-changeability of the terms “existence” and “transitoriness.”

Thomas Mann

Image: In the Orchard by James Guthrie

1 googol AD

Today, the average density of matter in the visible Universe is a few hydrogen atoms per cubic metre; by 1 googol AD, that figure will have fallen to one electron or positron in a volume far, far bigger than today’s visible Universe.

via Michael Hanlon


Image: Abel 39 by Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona via wikimedia

Icebergs

Photograph fail to convey the grandeur of icebergs. They also fail to convey how mutable they are. An iceberg that looks like a mesa in the distance as you approach transforms into something architectural, with melt-carved towers and wind-sculpted outcroppings suggestive of angels — as European explorers noted — or birds. Explorers, in their journals, grasping for comparisons with which to familiarise the strange, likens icebergs to cathedrals as well as angels. But icebergs lack the symmetries and patterns of a church. They exhibit form, but organic form, form sculpted by the subtle force of the coincident, form very on the chaotic. Every change in angle is a revelation. The light drapes differently. The shapes shift. The colours turn from white to turquoise to blue. In some there were grottos or canyons or isthmuses terminating in a peak that seemed about to great off. From the big one, cataracts of meltwater rushed into the sea. It occurred to me, admiring those waterfalls, that the before my eyes past was dissolving into the present.

— from Moby Duck by Donovan Hohn (2011)

Slow light

Not the kind explored here by Radiolab but the 'normal' kind:



Remember, however, that from the point of view of a photon, whether from the Sun or the Andromeda galaxy, what we perceive as the distance to any object is traversed instantaneously. As Jim Al Khalili puts it:

For a particle of light, time stands still, such that the past, the present and future all collapse into one eternal moment.

The dimension of the present moment

Apparently, the present moment — our sense of "now" — lasts about three seconds. [1]  It is part of an illusion created by the brain and sits in a hierarchy of processes between the functional moment, which is the brain's response time to stimuli (typically in thousandths of a second [2]) and a sense of mental presence, which operates over a timespan of about thirty seconds and gives us a sense of continuity. [3]

In a collection of essays published in 1990, Mirsolav Holub noted that the dimension of the present moment, at about three seconds, is roughly the same amount of time as it takes to speak a line of poetry. And language, of course, plays an important role in our ability to place ourselves in much longer stretches of time. [4]


Notes:

[1] see Laura Spinney The time illusion: how your brain creates now, drawing on Moments in Time by Marc Wittman.

[2] The auditory system can distinguish sounds that are two milliseconds apart. The visual system requires tens of milliseconds. Two events must be at least 50 milliseconds apart before you can tell which came first. But the computation in the brain involved in understanding sounds is much slower (see this). 

[3] Thirty seconds being the amount of time that experienced moments are held together in short-term, or working memory.

[4] Brief overviews of the science of time: this by Sean Carroll and this by Jim Holt.


Image:  Étienne-Jules Marey

The light backward

When we see images of distant stars and galaxies we look far back in time.  It is an extraordinary and rather wonderful fact, but also alien from normal experience.

Looking at this image of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is different.  Because light reflected off the comet takes only about half an hour to reach the Earth we are seeing it almost as it is in real time – that is, in the time of actual lived experience.

We see a degree of detail so far unrealised for such a distant object – albeit one that is of course vastly closer than any star.

We see a strange mini-world with terrain imaginable for human feet.



Image: ESA

The echo of strange noises

The past has flown away,
the coming month and year do not exist;
Ours only is the present’s tiny point. 

Time is but a fancied dot ever moving on
which you have called a flowing river stream.  

I am alone in a wide desert,
listening to the echo of strange noises. 

– Mahmud Shabistari (1317)

Image: Abandoned Mining Town, Namibia by Marsel van Oosten

"Consciousness takes place in time"

The problem of consciousness is an aspect of the question of what the world really is. We don’t know what a rock is, or an atom, or an electron. We can only observe how they interact with other things and thereby describe their relational properties... 

While [the future of science] is unpredictable…the only certainty is that we will know more in future. For on every scale, from an atom’s quantum state to the cosmos, and at every level of complexity, from a photon made in the early universe and winging its way towards us to human personalities and societies, the key is time and the future is open.

from Time Reborn by Lee Smolin (2013)

Image: The White Fence by Paul Strand (c1917) via wikipedia

The clock at Brekkukot

   ...if there were anything happening in the room you never heard the clock at all, no more than if it did not exist; but when all was quiet and the visitors had gone and the table had been cleared up and the door shut, then it would start up again, as steady as ever; and if you listened hard enough you could sometimes make out a singing note in its workings, or something very like an echo.

   How did it ever come about, I wonder, that I got the notion that in this clock there lived a strange creature, which was Eternity? Somehow it just occurred to me one day the that the word it said when it ticked, a four syllable word with the emphasis on alternate syllables, was et-ERN-it-Y, et-ERN-it-Y. Did I know the word, then?

   It was odd that I should discover eternity in this way, long before I knew what eternity was, and even before I had learned the proposition that all men are mortal – yes, while I was actually living in eternity myself. It was as if a fish were suddenly to discover the water it swam in. I mentioned this once to my grandfather one day when we happened to be alone in the living-room.

   “Do you understand the clock, grandfather?” I asked.

   “Here in Brekkukot we know this clock only very slightly,” he replied.

   “We only know that it tells the days and the hours right down to second. But your grandmother's great-uncle, who owned this clock for sixty-five years, told me that the previous owner had said that it once told the phases of the moon – before some watchmaker got at it. Old folk farther back in your grandmother's family used to maintain that this clock could foretell marriages and deaths; but I don't take that too seriously, my boy.”

– from The Fish Can Sing by Halldór Laxness (1957)

 Image via Reddit

No mornings and no evenings

“Paradise may be beautiful but it is not interesting.”

-- The Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky (2009)


Image: wikimedia commons via The King of the Islands of Refreshment by Benjamin Breen.

See also A Pacific Odyssey (illustrated version via here)

A space of possibility

Parmenides argued that, contrary to outward appearances (and to Heraclitus), existence is uniform and timeless, and change impossible. The objective world, Hermann Weyl added, simply is; it does not happen:

Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the world-line of my body, does a section of the world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time.

Compare/contrast Nan Shepard on Coire an Lochan:

[The] changing of focus in the eye, moving the eye itself when looking at things that do not move, deepens one's sense of outer reality. Then static things may be caught in the very act of becoming.

Parmenides, writes Raymond Tallis [1], “overlooks the space of possibility that is the world we collectively create and in which we live lives steeped in the presence of the past and anticipation of the future”:

...[But] notwithstanding the invalidity of his conclusion, there is, at the heart of his vision, a fundamental truth: namely, that the object of knowledge (captured in a name, a thought, a proposition) is static compared with our experiences.

Note [1] In Defence of Wonder and Other Philosophical Reflections (2012)

Image: Melencolia (1514) by Albrecht Dürer (Wikipedia). Carl Galle argues the picture may be about overcoming melancholy, an optimistic parable on the struggle for knowledge.