1. THE FUTURE OF TIME

THE FUTURE OF TIME

by Sean O'Donnell, Ph.D.

Few people doubt that our knowledge of time in the centuries to come, will be very different from what passes for temporal understanding nowadays.
To know where you may be going however, it helps to realise where you have been coming from!
In these articles I will therefore strive for systematic and simplified exploration, of all major sectors of time knowledge as currently known to science. I will not address relatively trivial matters such as more efficient time management. Instead I will seek greater comprehension, and hopefully consolidation, of time's larger mystery overall.
This project derives from “The Mystery of Time”, an AdultEd course conducted by me at the National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG) – 1988 to 2,000 AD.

1/ A New Approach

SUMMARY
There is as yet no real or proper Science of Time. But its striking current absence from the scientific scene, will probably be seen by future historians, as the single greatest omission of our age.
Here I make the novel proposal that time's current status in science is similar to the disordered “jigsaw of the elements” which was prevalent in chemistry around 1850. That was before D.Mendeleef succeeded in piecing them all together into the unifying pattern of the Periodic Table in 1869.
However scholars have adduced at least 6 good reasons why no proper Science of Time has yet emerged, and these I will consider in my next two articles.

Time is the great single universal, or one common factor behind all nature and also personal experience. And yet curiously it's also that single major aspect of nature about which science knows least. For, even at this late date in progress, time obstinately remains a mystery which scientists can't comprehend properly, if indeed at all.
Which, when you come to think about it, is also a further mystery on its own.
This further problem is then why we still know so little about time's real nature at this late date in science history. It emerges more clearly when you consider the nature of reality, which science regards as matter displayed in space and time.
About the nature of matter we are now very knowledgeable from chemistry (the science of substances) and physics (the science of events). About space we are likewise increasingly knowledgeable through a long line of development stretched over two millenia – i.e. from Euclid's geometry (ca. 300 BC) to NASA's Hubble Telescope.
But about time's real nature – and indeed whether it really exists at all (or should that be occurs?) outside of our merely human illusions – science is still very much ignorant, challenged and confused.
This secondary problem - i.e. our ignorance of time's real nature at this late date in progress - is therefore one for which I will seek explanations suggested by others, over these first few articles.

TIME STUDIES NOW

Though the nature of time has been the subject of numerous conjectures ever since western philosophy and science began in Ancient Greece around 600 BC, modern or more scientific time speculation only really commenced just over 100 years ago. It began around 1885 when speculations (still relevant) on 'Time as the Fourth Dimension' were published by English cleric E.Abbott in Flatland (1884). He was soon followed by author HG Wells with The Time Machine (1895). This was another theme which continues to excite wide interest today.
In a curious case of art preceding reality, both fantasies then attained scientific immediacy when Einstein really did incorporate time as the fourth dimension or axis, in his first or Special Theory of Relativity (1906).
However time studies only really began to take off half-a-century later when scholars G.J.Whitrow (London) and J.T. Fraser (Connecticut) wrote two works which are still definitive. These were The Natural Philosophy of Time (1961) and The Voices of Time (1966). Thereafter both authors co-founded the International Society for the Study of Time (ISST).
Since then the ISST has held 13 multidisciplinary conferences with published proceedings, and maintains a bibliographic database ennumerating 25 sectors of differing time content. Through such we can further estimate that about 1,000 time-related books have been published in the past half-century, along with perhaps half-a-million time-related papers.
Otherwise there are just 2 formal centres devoted to time study, anywhere in the world today:-
1/ The Institure for Time Nature Exploration (otherwise termed Temporology), established under the Dept. Of Biology at Moscow State University in 1984.
2/ The Centre for Time, established under philosopher Huw Price at Sydney University in 2002.
The current status of time studies therefore consists of just three central bodies attempting to abstract temporal essence from studies conducted under many other disciplines. Often the temporal content in these other disciplines seems peripheral, disparate or even conflicting in what is apparently implied. For example there seem to be vast differences in what time implies when treated by relativity, quantum theory, psychology.
Such scattered subsectors or 'islets of temporality' are therefore still largely disunited or separate: they have no clear position or relation to each other in what I will term the great allegorical 'Archipelago of Time'. Which is of course another way of saying there's still no organising framework or schema for these differing manifestations of temporality overall.
That no proper Science of Time as yet exists is therefore obvious or self-evident. Which further suggests another obvious question - “Why Not?”

LIKE THE OLD 'JIGSAW OF THE ELEMENTS' ?

To some extent also this currently scattered disposition - of separate temporalities or disconnected sectors of time knowledge - resembles that very limited understanding of chemical elements, which was the best available to science around 1850. Of the 50 or so elements then known, each was considered largely in isolation or on its own. This was because of the huge variation in chemical properties between say sodium, iron, chlorine: there seemed little or no similarity or connectivity between them all.
Wherefore few scientists back then (with the notable exceptions of J. Dobereiner (1819), and J.Newlands (1863)) likely ever suspected that all those widely different 50 known elements, might resemble the scattered pieces of a jigsaw just requiring to be joined up conceptually. And so it was not until 1869 that D.Mendeleef, expanding on his two predecessors, was able to fit those pieces together and solve this 'jigsaw of the elements'.
Mendeleef's newly formed jigsaw was of course the familiar Periodic Table of Chemistry. But his newly coherent overall picture was still very much incomplete: it had various gaps or missing pieces where new elements would eventually fit in. Still his novel Table now constituted an organised schema with optimised order and strong predictive power.
After which chemical studies were finally able to mature into a proper science - as distinct from that scattered and disconnected collection of facts which it had largely been before.....

TIME AS A CONCEPTUAL JIGSAW

Likewise the current status of temporal knowledge also resembles a conceptual and much scattered 'jigsaw of time'. It's one where the various islets of temporal knowledge are still very much isolated, or scattered in large disarray. For example there seem to be abrupt changes, in what is meant by time, as one turns from quantum theory to relativity and then on to human memory. This is much like the great differences between those 50 known chemical elements as observed 150 years ago,
With time the great scientific challenge now may therefore resemble that which confronted Mendeleef before 1869. So how best might one “solve the jigsaw of time”? - by uniting all those scattered islets of temporality into a more coherent and productive pattern.
Some scholars like J.T.Fraser rather pessimistically think any such single pattern must be impossible. Imagine however if conceptual unification ever could be achieved by assembling the great time jigsaw! In that case we would then have one overall schema or umbrella, under which a true and mature new Science of Time could develop naturally
In succeeding articles and to such ends, I will therefore address and attempt to correlate, those many sectors of current scholarship where time is especially dominant. Most such studies are of course a product of deep and laborious investigation by scholars over decades. But I will try to summarise them in a simple manner accessible to all.
In this my intention is to make the entire topic of the temporal - that great alllegorical 'Archipelago of Time' with all its scattered islets of knowledge - much easier to grasp and understand. So that hopefully people may then find it easier “to see the whole wood despite the trees”.
I further believe, and with good reasons I will present later, that the still unformed “jigsaw of time” may well be put together within the present century, with results therafter constituting a revolution to rival Mendeleef or even Copernicus in scope.
For humanity's understanding of time in the 22^nd century will almost certainly be very diffferent, from that which passes for temporal knowledge nowadays.