“Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne
As yet another year breaks upon the shore and that you realize you really are a certain age one can only marvel about the concept of time. When you turned 10 you felt pride at being in double digits, at 18, moving out from home, at 22 graduating from college (now what?). Then marriage, often kids, a career, retirement. Zip, zip.
I won’t touch on physical (even some mental) loss, the people who have passed away. Once you sailed along with a small armada of family and friends. Some disappeared into a squall and never came back, some vanished into a fog-bank and yet you remain at the helm of your creaking boat. Through a telescope you see a small speck on the horizon. It is your parents waving as they disappear over the horizon. You take in a few sails to try to slow down. The sea seems calm for now.
What is this concept we have created? Time and its passing seems like an undeniable fact of life.
Time seems universal, has order, duration and a seemingly smooth unity. Trees grow, bodies age, dogs die, and the mirror does not lie. We are finite. Our synapses file memories away, to spring them back (sometimes slightly altered) to project some kind of understanding of our experience and what may occur in the future. Without memories there are not futures we can envision.
The problem becomes when one digs into the realm of relativity and especially quantum physics, which I don’t pretend to understand. Most theoretical physicists believe our concept of time is a complex human construct and has no basis in subatomic reality. Rather it is part of a space/time continuum. We seem to inhabit a place in space and view its cohort (time) as inherently logical.
But in a different space, i.e. traveling much faster, our concept of time changes.
Philosopher Huw Price (Cambridge, Bonn, etc.) puts it this way: “the basic properties of time come not from the physical world, but from our mental states.” Thus “time” is something our brains construct to make sense of change. Change is real but “time” is not. From change our brains have constructed a concept of time.
Time is a prime conflict between relativity and quantum mechanics, measured and malleable in relativity while assumed as background (and not an observable) in quantum mechanics. To many physicists, while we experience time as psychologically real, time is not fundamentally real. At the deepest foundations of nature, time is not a primitive, irreducible element or concept required to construct reality.
But if what we experience as “time” is not fundamentally real it sure is one hell of an illusion.
How can you gaze back into history and not feel that time (and change) is not real? That seems ludicrous.
My mother saw Civil War soldiers marching (or strolling) in Armistice Day parades. When I was about 9 my great uncle Frank, vibrant in his late 90’s, told me he saw Abraham Lincoln drive by in a carriage. As of 10 years ago two of John Tyler’s (10th U.S. President, born in 1790) grandsons were still living.
The not-so-distant past is all around us.
As we flip through the last days of the year consider calendars, certainly a human construct to organize “time. Mankind recognized the rhythmic dance of the sun and moon, including solstices, in the Neolithic age—as far back as 5000 B.C.
The Roman’s basically invented the 12 month calendar, Julius Caesar playing a large part. January got moved around and became the first month rather than the 11th.
In 557 the Council of Tours declared January 1 a “pagan holiday” and instituted March 25 as the official New Year. This caused great confusion over the next 1000 years. Finally in 1582 Pope Gregory used a Papal Bull to declare once again January 1st as the official beginning of the New Year.
Still many outlying, non-Catholic countries refused to recognize that date.
It took England until 1752 to finally change over (from March 25). The English colonies, including India, soon followed suit. Slowly other countries adopted January 1st: Japan in 1873; China in 1912; and finally Greece in 1923.
However while the official “economic calendar” might reflect the Gregorian decree, many cultures still rely on a lunar calendar for their historical New Year. Hindus will celebrate March 22 in 2024; China February 10-17th. Of course Judaism and Islam also use the lunar calendar for their “cultural” New Year.
If calendars seem malleable then what about our sense of Time? Physicists know that the faster we move the slower time will seem to move. Maybe that’s why aging seems precarious. We move slower and time seems to increase in velocity.
That our brains try to organize events into a time frame is well known medically. Time distortion (a damaged or mis-firing cerebellum) can occur in Parkinson’s patients, those with ADHD, and schizophrenia. The most common distortion is called “tachpsychia.”
It seems our brains build the calendar and clock for which we need to optimally function. Here’s to our intrepid and amazing brains.
In any respect it’s time for a cup of tea. May we live long and prosper.
Happy New Year!
Ah, where we came from and what are we made up of.
The older I get, the more important DNA appears to be over free well in decisions made.
Are we just a infinitesimal small chemical reaction to experienced events, predetermined by our makeup at the time of the Big Bang? It appears so.
While suddenly ancestor study has become greatly enhanced by the internet, we are still limited to gathering names and at best recording major events like marriage, birth, and death with a steamship passage tossed in. (Back then I ran around the office proclaiming put nothing in an email that you would not cc to the FBI, something that turned out fortunate when I was later sued for 6 million dollars, a lawsuit dismissed with prejudice.)
The future will be vastly different. During the Enron trial it was revealed emails have half lives of at least a thousand years and when you erase an email it is just erased on your computer but Big Brother Google has saved it for all eternity.
In 3 more generations Google and other internet providers will be mature companies of little growth potential.
Then an accountant will come up with a big money cash cow to enhance profit and stock price, selling individual data stored on their vast files of long dead users to their descendants.
For only a million dollars, (equivalent to $100 today dollars) you will be able to follow in almost real time the life history of grand parents and great grand parents by viewing their emails and internet search histories.
Hopefully by then, everyone will have been exposed already so "reality" of what people really are like that none will be disturbed that a grand parent voted for by then disgraced Biden or Trump or sent emails to a hidden love.
So, to my great grandchildren, this reply is to let you know, great grand pa has nothing to hide as he never emailed the real me.
Impressive round up…