Time, Infinity and a Jelly donut (Part 2)

When time begins . . . and ends ((part 2)

"If we assume that all matter were to disappear
from the world . . . there would no longer be any
space or time."
Albert Einstein
(1979—1955)

"Here you must put time out of your mind and
know that in that world there is neither time nor a
measure of time, but everything is an eternal moment".
Martin Luther
(1483—1546)

"Creation was with time, not in time."
Augustine of Hippo
(354—420)

"Time shall be no more." (Revelation10:6)
John the Apostle
(0—100? A.D.)

"Time began with the world — or after it."
Philo Judaeus
(B.C. 20—40 A.D.)

 

Gentle Readers,

We can “kill time”, we can waste time, we can try to make up time, or slow time down, have a good time, tea time, make time, we can work full time, or play time or find extra time, time to sleep or wake up! As the wisest man who ever lived summed it up To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace (Ecc 3:1-8 )

If time is of no interest to you them consider eternity. Time someone said is like a river and eternity is like standing on the river bank.

;Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away So go the opening lines of one stanza of Isaac Watt's well-known hymn.
It expresses the common sense view of the flow of time, a steady stream of something in which we live, carrying us along in its current, flowing always at the same speed and in the same direction, and passing across the stage of our experience like a tape upon which events are being indelibly impressed. It comes out of eternity and passes on into eternity, allowing us an opportunity to act out our little part in the allotted span.
Nothing happens outside of it because it is inconceivable that it could. There has always been time, and all events are embedded in it, even creation itself. Before the universe existed, time must have been passing even in eternity, while God was making his plans. When the world comes to an end, we have to ask how there can possibly be "no more time" (as Revelation10:6 (1) seems to say) since God and the angels surely continue, and so will we as God's children. At any rate, such is the common sense view of things.
"And [the angel] sware by him who lives for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that are therein, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer " (Revelation 10:6).

The common sense view tells us that time is constant in its flow, unvarying and unending. But experience challenges this, now and then.(2) Let us explore the circumstances under which such challenges may arise. They seem to depend on some factors that are external to ourselves and some factors that are within ourselves.

Some of the external factors are such things as the time of day, environmental temperature, darkness, extended periods of absolute silence, total deprivation of sense stimulation, and involvement in a threatening situation or an actual accident.

Some of the external factors are such things as the time of day, environmental temperature, darkness, extended periods of absolute silence, total deprivation of sense stimulation, and involvement in a threatening situation or an actual accident.

Some of the internal factors are age (childhood, maturity, or senility), body temperature (whether due to fever or to environmental conditions), hypnosis, the action of drugs or poisons, potential starvation, and sex (whether male or female).

Other internal factors are extremes of pain or fear, pleasure or excitement. These, too, effectively distort our awareness of the passage of time, the former enormously slowing it up and the latter substantially accelerating it. It has been observed that, in retrospect, we retain only vague memories of what was happening when time was dragging, but vivid memories when time was flying. It is as though our estimate of time is somehow adjusted to the intensity of our awareness.

We measure time by change. But change has to be perceived and perceiving involves some kind of activity of the mind that is almost certainly linked to the electrochemical processes of the brain. So we now suspect that altered temperatures upset the normal operating speed of these processes. The higher the temperature, the more rapidly the "frames" are recorded and the greater the number of them per time unit: the lower the temperature, the more slowly they are recorded and the fewer of them per unit of time.

The hibernating animal whose temperature steadily falls until he finally goes to sleep, probably skips straight from the picture of the last day of autumn to the first day of spring. There is no experienced interval in this "skip." The eye of its mind therefore takes only two photographs in that interval -- the first falling snowflake and the last melting icicle. The intervening winter is by-passed entirely (and so is our “step out of time” via “death into what we call timelessness or eternity ). As a sun dial counts only the sunny hours, so the animal's consciousness perceives only the warm days. On its last wakeful day in the fall, the sun declines more and more slowly as its own temperature falls and it loses consciousness even before the sun has actually set. It is months later that one day in the spring as the warming sun rises higher in the morning and the environmental temperature allows the animal to return to a waking state, it opens its eyes to see the sun already risen. In the interval it has not known that the sun was daily continuing its circuit across the sky. Kaleidoscoping its last moments of wakefulness in the fall with its first day of wakefulness in the spring, it had not actually seen the sun go down at all. The winter months have simply been eclipsed. There have, in fact, been no intervening winter sunsets.

What if the only creatures alive were creatures like this? Their picture of the world would be the only reality they could know and they might very well assume that it was the reality. We are in much the same position, except that we depend on mechanical clocks rather than biological ones, and these mechanical clocks continue to run even when we are unconscious. Nevertheless, it is we who have set the speed at which they go, according to the speed at which we have sensed the sun in its journeyings

It is true that this is all subjective. Yet the question arises whether the flow rate of time that is normal to human experience may not actually be determined by the mean temperature at which our bodies operate. This temperature is remarkably constant for all men all over the world -- at the equator, in the tropics, in temperate zones, and even in the Arctic. Thus if body temperature does regulate time sense in any way, we all agree pretty well on the speed at which time is passing, i.e., at what speed the sun is making its daily round. . . . and therefore at what speed to set our mechanical clocks.

But what if we lived on a planet where the normal body temperature happened to be 104 F. (as it is in birds) instead of 98 F.? Of course, the sun would go across the sky at its own fixed rate, whatever that happens to be, but if we with our new time sense perceived it to be going more slowly than it now is and accordingly set our clocks to match its slower time, how could we ever discover it? How then can we know what the objective flow rate of time really is? We naturally assume that there is some such objective flow rate for the Universe but we cannot tell what it is for sure because it is locked into our stream of consciousness, and this is determined by our temperature.

We ourselves as part of the system cannot know whether our time sense reflects the actual passage of time. Perhaps God observes the movements of the Universe at twice the speed we do, or only at half the speed we do. To Him who stands outside of it, uninfluenced by temperature or any other such factor, time may pass at an entirely different rate, the "actual" rate one might say. Thus there could be a general conspiracy to which all objective time markers within the system are party, and we assess the flow rate of all these markers in the context of our own consciousness. We set our clocks to keep our time as determined by the speed at which we observe the passage of the sun across the sky of our experience. We filter these signals through our minds and every kind of marker is forced through the same filtering process, both the clocks we make and the length of the day by which we set them. Of this filtering process we are unaware.

To be continued....

 

Love, Denis

 

2. On some research done in this area, see Alton J. DeLong, "Phenomenological Space-Time: Towards an Experiential Relativity", Science, vol. 217, 7 August, 1981, p. 681.