“Time Does Not Exist” December 31, 2023 Dr. Roger Ray
I would like to begin with one of my favorite quotes from the Buddhist philosopher, Alan Watts, who said that “No carpenter ever claimed to not be able to finish a construction job because he had run out of inches.” Inches, meters, cubits, acres, hectors, miles are simply units of measure. These words have meaning because they are useful in our daily lives, like knowing the difference between a recipe calling for a cup of sugar or a ton of sugar. I can say that “feet” or “meters” don’t exist, but we know what it means when we say that we need six feet of lumber or that people who live up north might get a whole meter of snow. Snow exists, thankfully it doesn’t where I live, but I have seen it and I know that it does.
I’m sure that you don’t need any further argument to prove this point. We can all quickly agree that units of measure are merely useful albeit entirely contrived things. What may take more evidence is the claim I hope to convince you of today which is that time, like inches, is just a unit of measure and does not, itself, exist.
Many of us will be engaging in a number of different rituals this evening to mark the ending of one year and the beginning of a new year. Most of us know that even though most of the world agrees on a twelve month calendar year that begins on January 1, and even those who prefer to mark time differently still typically have to at least be aware of this popular agreement. For Buddhists in Thailand, the current year is 2566 and many Muslims would tell you that the year is 1445, both based on the presumed time of their founding prophets but the whole thing is still based on nothing more than general agreement.
Our calendar is the end result of centuries of political and religious beliefs and traditions that have us starting our year, not at some logical point like the winter solstice or the spring equinox but rather a nearly arbitrary point in early winter. Our seven-day week is similarly arbitrary and our division of 12 months in a year is terribly odd with one month having 28 days while four months have 30 days, and seven months have 31 days. Few things would make more sense than to give February a couple more days every year so that we would have seven months with 30 days and five with 31 but such a change would be so confusing that it will simply never happen.
We have sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a day, which is some 12 based way of counting rather than something that would have made more sense like 10 seconds in a minute, ten minutes in an hour, and ten hours in a day, but, again, tradition dictates these imaginary measurements and we are not likely to ever see them brought into some logical conformity.
These fixtures of measurements are so pervasive in our language and our technology that the concepts take on a life of their own, as if they were describing something that was real, which, I insist, they are not.
Boiled down to the most simple concept, what our units of time actually measure is movement. The earth revolves on its axis once and that is a day. The earth revolves, or so it seems, around the sun once and that is a year (the sun is also in motion so we rotate around our star while we chase it through space). But what if the earth stopped spinning? What if our solar system was not in motion? What if the people and plants, the very atoms that make up our planet, were not moving at all? What then, would be the passage of time? Wouldn’t we say about such a state of affairs that “time was frozen?” Because the only meaningful dimension of time is movement. Time does not exist. Time is just a way of measuring movement.
To quote Stephen Hawking, “Einstein’s general theory of relativity, on its own, predicted that space-time began at the big bang singularity and would come to an end … at the big crunch singularity.” (p. 115, Hawking, A Brief History of Time) That is, without matter in motion, there is no time.
Einstein and Hawking both talk about the fabric of time bending under certain circumstances but, if I may be allowed to punch way over my head, what they are really saying is that the faster any material thing travels the more the atoms in that material thing, whether it is a clock or a person, slow down their movement and they therefore appear to be in a slower time universe.
If you have identical clocks and put one on the surface of the earth and put the other in a rocket circling the earth, the one on the surface will move forward faster than the one in space. But, men and women, clocks are not time, clocks measure time based on certain assumptions of their mechanics, but motion changes the nature of the mechanics.
But the concept of time is rooted so deeply in our minds that we have come to think of it as being something like a river that flows continually in one direction. We mortals are like little paper boats that are, at our births placed on that river with all of the other little paper boats and we all journey at the same speed until our little boats get waterlogged and sink. In modern times, this has inspired some to wonder if it might be possible to somehow speed our boat up and move forward farther into the future or even to turn around and motor back up stream, into the past.
The notion of time travel began to appear in fiction literature in the 18th century, but by the 19thcentury, the idea had caught on so that we get things like the story of Rip Van Winkle, The Christmas Carol, and famously, H. G. Wells’ novel, the Time Machine. Even Mark Twain tried his hand at a time travel piece called, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
I would like to make a distinction in literature between fiction and fantasy. This distinction may only be useful for the present topic, but it seems important to me to point out that there are fictions which describe events that may have happened or which may happen, and there are fictions which are pure fantasy.
Star Trek, for example, is famous for having predicted a number of things that were actually later invented, such as tablet computers, voice interactive computer software, instantaneous translators, transparent aluminum, flip phones, and pin communicators. On one level, science fiction can look at developing research and engineering and make predictions that seem to be possible or even probable.
They often suffer from excesses of enthusiasm, such as Marty McFly’s hoverboard in a Back to the Future movie that was set in 2015. The Jetsons with their flying cars and domestic robots was set in 2062 and I fear that they will fail on most of those predictions as well. . . still, hover boards, flying cars, and domestic robots are possible and can be realistically discussed with existing science in mind. Such things are science fiction.
On the other hand, in order to make many fiction stories work, they also have to inject a number of things that are pure fantasy. . . necessary to the plot, but not at all possible, like, for example, the warp drive in Star Trek or Hyper-Space in Star Wars. This is the crux of why I am taking on this topic today. Our language seduces us and makes it difficult for us to tell the difference between what is possible and what is pure fantasy. What I find to be the most frustrating is when people confuse the mere fact that they find a certain aspect of fantasy to be thrilling or exciting and they therefore insist that it is more than possible, but that it is even probable. And that, I submit, is not a matter of personal belief, it is a matter of embracing delusion. . . which is bad for science, literature, politics, and especially religion! A key element of critical thinking is the ability to divide the possible from the impossible. Holding onto delusions is choosing to be unintelligent.
Once you abandon a devotion to reality then all manner of insanity is put on the same level of credibility with actual rational thought. Believing that there is intelligent life on other planets in the universe doesn’t require too much of a stretch. The universe is very big and there are a lot of planetary systems which seem to have the right parameters to support the evolution of life as we understand it. However, the distance between these planets is so great that there is no way to get together for brunch. The closest of these planetary systems is about 25 trillion miles away. It takes light over 4 years to get from here to there.
The popular Astro physicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, seems to take great delight in teasing TV interviewers on this topic, wondering aloud why alien spacecraft only seem to appear to military pilots. And he has asked why the images are all so fuzzy, maybe aliens are fuzzy? And why with six billion cell phones on the planet has no one ever shot a decent picture of an alien or a UFO? Tyson accepts that intelligent life probably exists all over the universe, but he also insists that the distances between planets is such that we will never meet them.
The speed of light is a constant. So far as we know, it is impossible for anything to go faster, and yes, I know that there are theoretical aspects of physics in which it is discussed but, here on Earth 1, we are aware that we can’t even approach lightspeed because the closer you get to lightspeed, the more energy is required to accelerate and it quickly gets to what physicists call, simply, infinite energy, which means plainly that you cannot get there from here.
The faster you move, the more atomic movement slows down, so, should an astronaut be able to travel at nearly the speed of light towards Proxima Centauri, even though it took said astronaut 4 years to get there, it would have felt like just a few minutes. However, because mass condenses more the faster you go, the astronaut would also have been crushed to the point of being smaller than a pea. You wouldn’t have so many wrinkles, but you would have gained an infinite amount of weight.
So, giving up on traveling at light speed, what about just trying to go really fast? Odd things happen at very high rates of speed. Like, at 20% of light speed, the movement of hydrogen atoms would feel like you were being shot with a thousand machine guns.
Because of these very real limitations of human space travel, science fiction becomes fantasy with talk about worm holes, hyper drives, warp engines, or even multidimensional universes. Worm holes may theoretically exist, for very brief moments. But if they did exist and you tried to go through them, you would immediately be crushed and in the next moment be torn apart. Traveling through a worm hole is about as scientific as Harry Potter’s magic wand. These are matters of fantasy, conjecture, and Hollywood, not rational thought.
Again, you can find any number of theorists who can very intelligently discuss many of the “what if’s” of physics. If a kind of anti-matter which does not appear to exist did exist, we might be able to stabilize a worm hole in space, not that you could go through it, but, well, my point is: pieces of theoretical physics do not always add up to an intelligent whole. Good for fantasy movies, bad for rational conversation.
If you are still not convinced, if you believe that the evidence exists but it is being kept classified by the government, then please consider this: When, in 2017, when Donald Trump became president and had access to all of our nation’s secrets, do you believe that he went out to Area 51 and saw the crashed alien spaceship and the dead alien astronauts and didn’t tell anyone about it? That would require believing in magic.
But a bit more back on topic, theoretically, even though we cannot literally travel forward in time, because speed slows down our atomic motion, if we could travel fast enough, it would feel like we had traveled forward in time. But to travel backwards in time would require every atom in the universe to retrace its movement simultaneously. That is, you would have to make all of the material matter in the world to suddenly and very accurately, move backwards. . . which, presumably, would include the atoms that make up my body which means that I would age backwards until I didn’t exist anymore. Obviously, this is impossible.
Both Einstein and Hawking jokingly reference the grandfather paradox that speculates that you can’t go back in time and kill your own grandfather so that you never came into existence but while time travel does not exist, both Einstein and Hawking had a sense of humor, even though many of their readers apparently don’t. When the comedian, Denis Miller, talks about performing in a comedy club in Birmingham, AL called “I Don’t Get It,” that doesn’t mean that there is actually a comedy club in Birmingham by that name, but it does mean that Miller has some general opinions about the sophistication of people in Alabama. If you are looking up the address of a comedy club named, “I Don’t Get it” well, you might be from Alabama.
For anyone who has had difficulty following me up to this point, please accept this short hand observation: we know that you can’t travel back in time because no one from the future has traveled back to our time. Or, don’t believe anything you see on the History Channel.
As one of my physics professors said, “The only people who talk knowingly about visits from aliens appear to cite government sources and the government only talks about aliens when things here on Earth 1 are not going well.” She may have been promoting a conspiracy theory of her own, saying that the government distracts us with silly rumors about space aliens so that we don’t think about the ecology, the economy, or government corruption but, I have to admit, her conspiracy theory seems more probable than having visitors from other planets.
The more that Christianity, Islam, and Judaism cling to myths that clearly are not true, the more religion alienates intelligent modern people. There is a great deal about spirituality that can make the world more just, more peaceful, and more healthy, but the pretending to believe in ghosts, souls, eternal life, angels, demons, and magic books is getting in our way.
Our nation is falling behind in basic science skills and even math. This is true, in part, because we think that believing in delusional things is our right. Yes, you may have a right to believe that the Holy Spirit talks to you, that you have ridden on the Millennium Falcon in hyperspace, and Scooby Do sometimes drives your minivan, but if you insist on these delusions, you are choosing to be the opposite of smart.
Somehow, the ability to suspend reality in favor of imagination has corrupted our politics to such a degree that it has taken our Judicial system three years after the January 6, 2021 insurrection to decide if it was really an insurrection when millions of us watched it happening line on TV and, sadly, a lot of us from certain states actually know people who were there and involved in the attempted overthrow of American democracy…. And they posted videos of themselves in the Capitol on FaceBook.
I love science fiction movies, or science fantasy movies. I never miss a Marvel or DC superhero movie or anything in the Harry Potter franchise, no matter what issues exist with actors and authors. But I understand such things to be escapism because reality can be exhausting and sometimes, I need to take a break. But folks, let’s sharpen our critical thinking skills. Let’s be honest with ourselves when we indulge in a reading our horoscope or watching Fox News, we know it isn’t real and we are not going to factor anything from the History Channel into our understanding of history. There are important matters at hand and you are needed back on Earth 1.
