"You are the Universe" --A Human-Centric Look at Time (WATCH Weekend "Galaxy" Stream)
A human-centric look at time has been offered by quantum physicist Menas Kafatos and bestselling
author, Deepak Chopra, a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, Clinical Professor
UCSD Medical School, researcher, Neurology and Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital
(MGH).
In their new book, You Are the Universe, Chopra and Kafatos cover time in great detail, but
here's a thumbnail sketch of their more philosophical argument: If you ask a simple question like
"What came before the big bang?" you are posing a paradox.
(Warning: As the great Danish physicist Neils Bohr said to one of his colleagues: "Your
theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.)
"Before" and "after" have a meaning only in time, and linear time at that.
There is no evidence of any kind that time existed before the big bang.
Moreover, what we typically think of as time--the tick tock on a clock face--depends on having
a human nervous system.
Einstein broke free of this model, where we think we intuitively know what time is, when
he introduced the concepts in his theories of relativity.
In those theories, the speeding up or slowing down of time depends on the frames of references
of observers.
Time is not universal.
For example, a moving observer�s time slows down as seen by a stationary observer.
Slowing down of time also occurs when an observer is falling towards a black hole, as seen by
a distant observer.
The effect is still there, but tiny, in all gravitational fields, including the Earth's
gravity.
The relativity of time depended upon a new theory, and if we stand back, we discover
that all views of time are human constructs.
If time seems linear, that's because we humans have modeled it that way in accord with our
nervous system.
It is just as viable to construct other models of time.
For example, your body obeys natural rhythms in accord with the planetary, lunar, and solar
cycles.
The very notion of "time passing" fits with the firing of neurons in the brain, which
have a beginning, middle, and end.
If you drop every model, something surprising happens.
They are not needed.
For example, you can view your daily life as occurring entirely in the present moment.
The present moment is not a clock phenomenon.
Clocks measure intervals--seconds, minutes, hours--while the present moment has no interval.
It's always here, endlessly renewing itself, unmeasurable, and fleeting.
Because the instant you try to capture it, it's gone.
This implies that the "now" is actually outside time.
It can be defined either as instantaneous or eternal.
Both are valid as verbal descriptions but in the end invalid, since the vocabulary of
time doesn't apply to the timeless.
The same is true of the big bang or the potential end of the universe.
Time doesn't begin or end in an absolute way.
It is a convenient way of using words.
Time is simply a concept that fits various physical models.
But its origin is as much in metaphysics as in physics.
In the video above, Caltech cosmologist Sean Carroll attacks � in an entertaining and
thought-provoking tour through the nature of time and the universe � a deceptively
simple question: Why does time exist at all?
The potential answers point to a surprising view of the nature of the universe, and our
place in it.
When someone believes he will die and go to Heaven for eternity, the typical, casual definition
of "eternity" is a long, long time.
But that's not true, because whatever is eternal must be outside time.
Ultimately, the only participation we can have in time, outside time, or with a dimension
of inconceivable time, occurs in our consciousness.
Whatever we can experience determines the nature of time.
It is just as true to say that the big bang is occurring right now as to date it back
to 13.8 billion years, because only when we think about the event do we draw the big bang
into the world of human experience, and thinking happens in the now.
None of these conclusions are speculative--quantum physics and cosmology deal with them--and
cosmologists and quantum physicists argue over them--every day.
Without settling the vexing questions of "What came before the big bang?"
"Where did time originate?" and "What is the timeless like?" we only want to point out
that time has no meaning outside a specific frame of reference.
There is no "real" time, only models of time constructed in human awareness.
Once we realize this simple fact, the capacity to move beyond all models, to truly lose our
fear of death, come alive.
The spiritual concept that we were never born and will never die then becomes viable, too.
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