Time is the most mysterious concept that you are likely to think about. You know exactly what time is, unless you actually have to explain it and then things bog down. If you admit that time is pure puzzlement, well you’re not alone as the nature of time has been endlessly debated by thinkers, good, bad and average, ever since humans had the ability to think. Okay, I’m a thinker, so here are my thoughts in Q & A form about time.
Are you confused about time? If so, join the crowd. I’m part of that crowd, and I’m confused, but I’ll try to work through my befuddlement via this hypothetical question and answer session which hopefully will enlighten me and you too.
Q. What is time?
A. Time is a concept, like Wednesday is a concept.
Q. A concept of what?
A. Change. Without change the concept of time is meaningless.
Q. What properties does time have?
A. Time has no properties, just like Wednesday has no properties. Time has no structure or substance; no mass or energy, no colour or spin or charge, it has no associated field, and it exerts no force and has no fundamental particles associated with it.
Q. Does time have a beginning? Will time ever end?
A. No. Time is eternal. An eternal time removes those nasty philosophical questions of what came before; what comes after?
Q. Can time be created?
A. The concept of time can be created, but only by the mind blessed with some degree of sophistication, but that does not give substance and structure to time itself, any more than the JFK concept of ‘landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth before the end of the decade’ in and of itself made it so. The concept of a lunar landing is not a real lunar landing. Time itself cannot be created like a soufflé since there are no ingredients that collectively comprise time.
Q. Can time be destroyed?
A. Since time cannot be created, time cannot be destroyed. While that is similar to existing conservation laws, there is no conservation law in existence for time like there is for matter and energy since, unlike matter and energy, time cannot be altered from one form to another, since time is not a thing.
Q. Was the Big Bang event 13.7 billion years ago the start of time?
A. No. Since time cannot be created, the Big Bang banged in existing time which means there was a before the Big Bang. Something had to cause the Big Bang (a change) and that something could only have been an earlier event which happened in already existing time, since an event, a change, defines what time is.
Q. Where does time exist?
A. The concept of time exists only where change exists, and change only exists within that ongoing, yet ever paper-thin slice that we can the “now”. Change neither exists anymore in the past nor does it exist yet in the future.
Q. Are time’s related terms also concepts?
A. Absolutely. None of the following can be placed on the lab’s slab; none of the following are ‘things’, just mental concepts and conventions: past, present, and future; when, now and then; before and after; second, minute, hour, day, week, month, seasons, year, decade, century, millennia, and eon; any of the named days of the week; any of the names of the seasons; any digit that represents a year (i.e. – 2013); any date; yesterday, today and tomorrow; birthday, anniversary and holiday; weekend and weekday; noon and midnight. A clock or calendar or metronome can be put on the lab’s slab, but a clock, etc. isn’t time, just like a thermometer isn’t temperature, and a Geiger counter isn’t radioactivity.
Q. Is time travel to the past possible?
A. Yes and no.
Einstein’s concepts of General and Special Relativity allow for time travel to the past (and the future), the usual scenario is via a rapidly rotating massive object that can twist space-time around in a loop where the starting point that joins up with itself to form the loop, like a snake swallowing its tail, isn’t any longer at the same point in time. However, the flaw I find with all of that is that this requires space and time, or space-time, to be a thing, which IMHO it is not. Space-time is a concept without substance and structure because both space and time are concepts without substance and structure. Be that as it may.
The basic argument against going back in time is the creation of a paradox, something along the lines of killing your mother when she was a young girl thus preventing your very existence which means you couldn’t have gone back in time and murdered your mother, etc. Hells, bells, why not just do the suicide properly and go back in time a few months and kill your own self! But any trip back in time will create conditions back then that did not originally exist, and however minor, not only will they become an established part of history, but have that butterfly or ripple effect on down the line – chaos theory. If those new conditions, thanks to your time travelling presence, did not originally exist and now they do, that’s also a paradox as something cannot be and yet be at the same time, and that contradiction extends on down the line as history unfolds differently.
Further, you MUST go back in time (no free will in the matter) to ever create and ensure the conditions that came to pass back when, new conditions that you initially caused – only you never initially caused them since there’s an infinitely recycling causality loop here. You went back in time which caused a certain set of conditions which become a part of established history which means at some point in your life you are required to go back in time to create that certain set of conditions which become a part of established history, all to be endlessly repeated for all eternity. Presumably you couldn’t even commit suicide before you travelled back in time and thus break the cycle.
Of course if the past were somehow changed, then presumably you’d never know it since all records, including those of your memory, would be altered accordingly. But things would be messy if millions of people each travelled back in time and altered this, that and the next thing. History textbooks and other records would be rewritten and altered to conform to all those alterations every second. Then too, what if someone went back in time and altered history to the extent that mankind went extinct as a result – that’s the ultimate going back in time and killing your mother as a young girl!
Here’s a novel concept. Say it is the 10th of the month. Go back in time to the 1st of the month and meet and greet yourself. The both of you now wait until the 10th of the month and then go back in time to the 2nd of the month where you both can now meet and greet and join up with the other two of you that existed then. Then the four of you wait until the 10th of the month and the four of you travel back in time to say the 3rd of the month where the four of you link up with the four of you that existed on the 3rd. The eight of you now wait until the 10th of the month and then travel back in time to the 4th of the month where you group together as a crowd of sixteen. Wait until the 10th of the month and the sixteen of you travel back to the 5th and join up with the other sixteen to form a mob of thirty-two, and so on and so on. Starting with just you, you could create an entire army of you!
Q. Where’s the paradox in creating an army just out of you?
A. The paradox here is that you are getting something for nothing, in this case extra copies of you. Where in fact does the extra matter and energy come from that creates that you army?
Q. Anything else?
A. Another reason time travel to the past is suss is that we don’t see any time travellers from our future paying us a visit. Though Einstein’s Special and General Relativity allows time travel to the past, and although the laws of physics are time invariant (they are valid from past to future and future to past), no visitors. Either our descendents don’t have any interest in us, or perhaps there aren’t any – descendents that is – if we go extinct or go back to the Dark Ages sooner rather than later. Or, perhaps time travel just isn’t possible after all or is in the too hard basket.
Q. You lie! What about the Second Law of Thermodynamics?
A. Ah yes, what about the Second Law of Thermodynamics which is held responsible for time’s arrow or the arrow of time (i.e. – things proceed from past (which you remember) to future (which you don’t remember). But the Second Law of Thermodynamics is misnamed since the second ‘law’ isn’t really a ‘law’, just a statement of probability, albeit extremely high probability. When things happen in a statistically probable way (eggs break or scramble; eggs don’t un-break or unscramble) that’s the arrow of time that we perceive. Put in a more thermodynamic context, a boiled egg cools off and heats up the kitchen until both are at the same temperature; the kitchen doesn’t cool down and transfer that energy to the raw egg and cook it.
Q. Anything else?
A. Yes, another postulate has it that one cannot travel further back in time than the time the time machine was constructed. So if our descendents come up with a first ever time machine in the year 2113, they couldn’t come visit us in 2013, though those living in the year 2213 could go back to 2113 (but no farther back).
The way out of that is what about an advanced extraterrestrial civilization’s time machine, say built in 2013 BCE, or over 4000 years ago. Say, what about those pesky UFOs? Instead of ET coming here from out there in their and our present, they come here from there in our present but from their future! The only problem with that is that UFO events and flaps are not clustered around what we would call historically important events, like say the Trinity A-Bomb test in 1945 or the launch of Apollo 11 in 1969 or the sinking of RMS Titanic in 1912. Of course, that they are conspicuous by their absence, well that just maybe our parochialism coming to the fore. Time travelling aliens may have a differing agenda.
Aliens aside, you could easily imagine a time travelling Travel Agency existing several hundred years from now conducting guided tours to important historical events of their (and our) past, say tours in groups of one hundred per. After several thousand such tours, say to the battle of the Alamo or to Custer’s last stand at the Little Big Horn, things would be getting a mite crowded since each tour has to show up at the same place and date!
Q. And what do you conclude about the viability of time travel to the past from the above?
A. Ultimately, to my way of thinking, time travel, at least to the past, is impossible since time is a concept and not a thing, like a road or a river you can travel up and down on. You can travel in a car, but not in the concept of an automobile.
To be continued…
No comments:
Post a Comment