Instead of spending the weekend in my usual code warrior mode, I spent it discussing various obscurities with visitors. Among these was the subject of time. I had made an offhanded comment that time does not move, in fact, does not exist, to which my visitors proclaimed, “But of course it does!”
I beg to differ
Time is nothing more than the measurement of movement, a somewhat arbitrary one at that. And yes, I am aware of the atomic clock. But why use the frequency of Cesium, Hydrogen, or Rubidium to compute time anyway? Oh, that’s right. They oscillate at 9.2 billion intervals per atomic second, which, for measurement purposes, means their frequency is predictably accurate. And the atomic seconds are meaningful only in that a minute is 60 seconds, an hour 60 minutes, a day 24 hours, and a year 365 days (except for leap year).
So why is a year 365 days? Well, a year is based upon a single revolution of the earth about the sun. Makes perfect sense to me. Yet what if our planet were closer to or further from the sun? After all, movement is nothing more than the change in relative displacement between objects. That we chose the earth in relationship to the sun, moon, and itself, was due to a the predictable change of the earth’s displacement. In fact, the atomic clock is nothing more than a predictable change in the displacement of the electrons about the nucleus.
Nonetheless, still arbitrary, and only meaningful in that this measurement is used to synchronize our activities, one with another. And even so, time has not moved. Sure, a lot of other things have (the electrons spining around the nucleus of the atom, the spin of the earth, you and I, etc. and etc.), but time itself had not moved. Yet time is the universal god by which we live. And because of this, we ponder the future and the past, even though they are nothing more than some specified the number of atomic oscillations from an agreed upon point in space… either paradoxically backward or forward.
Which brings me to the crux of this particular discussion. If time does not exist (other than as an arbitrary unit of measure), how is time travel possible? Further more, what about the more obscure? Precog, for example? Is it nothing more than the Gestalt effect involving an unconscious calcuation, and thereby prediction, of future movement? While the logic appears to break down when considering precogs may involve unfamiliar people and places, there is the old Jungian collective conscious hypothesis.
He may have been on to something…
We do, each and every one of us, have our own little electromagnetic field (some call them auras). And given the right set of conditions, it is possible to unconsciously pick up signals (some call them vibes) from each other. Assuming one has taken the time to hone this capability and in light of our nature to consider our environment in a situational context, the idea of unconscious calculations and predictions seem plausible.
And I wonder… is it the freedom from the physical ties and expectations that bind during our waking hours which allow us to travel somewhere in time when we sleep?
