23/10/13       BLOG 15/  IS ‘NOW’ AN ILLUSION ? 

Summary: Recent comments from physicists highlight the tripartite rift – between Relativity, Quantum Theory, and common perception – in what each implies for the ‘real nature’ of time. 

And since common time perception is the region least scrutinised by science so far, it must seem most likely to hold the answer to better time understanding overall......, 

Two New Scientist Articles

The latest review of time’s current crisis – i.e. scientists’ lack of understanding  about what it all really means – appears in New Scientist - Nov. 2 2013.  This follows fast on an earlier feature (August 5, 2013), which examined the seeming confliction between relativity, quantum theory, causality and free will. It concluded that our understanding of at least one of this quartet must be wrong.  But which one is erroneous remains unresolved so far...

In similar vein the later New Scientist describes recent efforts by physicists and cosmologists to resolve a very old question long known to philosophers.  Is the moment of ‘now’ real in any sense outside of our personal experience? Or alternately is it just an illusion of human consciousness?

This latest feature is by Australian Michael Slezak, who has tutored philosophy at the University of Sydney.  Since this institution  is also associated with the pioneering Centre for Time (founded by Philosopher Huw Price in 2002),  it’s no surprise to find he has special expertise on time affairs.

The Block Universe

First therefore Slezak summarises how most physicists now probably consider reality as essentially timeless, a concept also known as The Block Universe.  This is a very old philosophical idea given new life over the last century, largely through the great pragmatic success of Einstein’s Relativity Theories.

Relativity has always proven to work with total precision wherever it’s been tried.  But it also implies that our labelling of events as Past-Present-Future, is a purely local description, ultimately of no more significance than ‘Here’.  It holds that events of all sorts really lie timeless or coexistent against the background of space-time – and that we merely “‘dis-cover or come across them” as our lives proceed.  

Obviously such an implication must seem in strong conflict with our everyday experience of memory and reality.  Further it conflicts with one of the main tenets of Quantum Theory – the Copenhagen Interpretation which regards the future as essentially indeterminate....  

Time Reversal Common?

Some physicists therefore now concentrate on “the arrow of memory”, perceiving it as the main criterion through which we derive a direction for time.  They seek to explain why it should always seem to work from present to past – and never from present to future - quite exclusively.

In an earlier feature (The Guardian – 27/08/2009) Slezak has written on one such attempt. He summarised an article in Physical Review Letters (Aug 2009) wherein M.I.T. physicist Lorenzo Maccone proposed that the psychological time arrow of one-way memory could be explained through  quantum entanglement.

Maccone invoked symmetry, to suggest that time-reversed effects may occur in reality - and just as often as those others we normally observe.  For example a cup lying smashed on the floor might rise up to reassemble itself from its scattered fragments – and indeed might be doing so in reality just as often as we see it falling down to shatter in the normal way.

Maccone’s hypothesis also can be seen as the latest restatement of much older ones, 
for example those once summarised by Martin Gardner in Scientific American  -  Jan 1967.  Back then early theorists considered time in relation to  whole extraterrestial regions composed of anti-matter, and with all their inhabitants likewise.  If so, their extraterrestial memories might only reflect what we would see as their future, a process they would regard as entirely natural!

This could even be extended to an entire mirror-Universe where events run in the opposite direction to our own, as indeed Sean Carroll has suggested in a more historical context lately (Blog 14).  And more invocation of symmetry might even suggest it’s continuously interacting  with our own like two giant meshed cog wheels.  If so, some natural constraint of biology might keep us forever unaware of this other anti-Universe.

But of course in practice we never see such examples of time reversal, except in backward-running films.  To explain why not, Maccone postulates a very extravagant and ad hoc addition to quantum entanglement. He suggests that all our memories of such time reversal, may be naturally “erased by (quantum) necessity”.

There is of course no hint of evidence for any such ‘quantum necessity’, nor indeed that extensive time-reversal could ever actually transpire.  So Maccone’s argument dpeends on a wholly theoretical extension of entanglement, a notion itself ontologically dubious.   Wherefore It all seems like another metaphysical example of ‘fairy-tale physics’, which author Jim Baggott so deplores on the modern physics scene. (Cf: Blog 13).

In any case Huw Price – former head of the Sydney Centre for Time and now Cambridge Professor of Philosophy – regards Maccone’s argument as circular: his novel extension to quantum entanglement is “assuming the conclusion he wants to derive”.  Nor does it “explain why all observers have the same orientation in time – why don’t some observers remember what we call the future.....?”

Still the fact that Maccone  was published in Physical Review Letters  is just another testament to time’s growing importance on the modern physics scene.  Likewise his particular focus on memory is a very important matter to which I’ll return in Blog 16....

A Growing Block Universe?

In similar vein Mikchael Slezak’s article reports on how South African cosmologist George Ellis again proposes to use Quantum Theory to explain our experience of Now and its resultant memories.   Ellis invokes the quantum Copenhagen Interpretation which regards the future as indeterminate – until one of its various potentialities becomes suddenly transformed into a definite present through observation at the point of Now.

So the present is defined as that  observation instant which divides a real Past from an unreal Future, and which only comes into existence once such an observation is made!

The Ellis approach would also restore a common moment of Now across the Universe:  if it’s twelve noon now here on Earth, is must also be noon out in the furthest galaxy.   This would also seem to imply a sort of growing Block Universe, but one wherein just the past sector is fixed and determinate.  

But otherwise Ellis discards the full Block Universe implied by Relativity.  He quotes Quantum Theory to conclude that  “You can’t predict what will be tomorrow,  so the future can’t be real because its not even fixed yet”

To which Huw Price retorts that even though the future is unknowable to us, it may still exist, like whatever lies on the other side of an intervening hill! 

In addition the Copenhagen dictum invoked by Ellis results in the well known fable of Schrodinger’s Cat, an example of quantum illogic which British astronomer Fred Hoyle long ago reduced to absurdity.  For if you replace Schrodinger’s mythical cat (which is both-dead-and-alive until inspected!),  by a quantum detonator for an atom-bomb placed in London, then the capital is both there-and-not-there until some outside observer decides to look!

Directional Geometry?

In contrast New York mathematician Time Maudlin accepts common notions  of perception without further consideration, contending that “The notion that time passes is absolutely commonplace.”  Though on this one may observe that whether “time passes” by us – or alternatively instead whether it’s we who “pass through time” as implied by Relativity -  is not at all so clear!

In any case Maudlin proposes that all lines of all sorts drawn in space should always be given an arrowhead of direction as a fundamental property.  (Normally they lack this directional quality.)   From which he hopes to develop a whole new kind of geometry in which time direction is always integral.

Relativity Modified?

Ontario cosmologist Lee Smolin accepts common perceptions of time as valid much like Maudlin does, and seeks to integrate them with what physics apparently implies.   But in doing so he discards Relativity’s  Block Universe, reformulating Einstein through the mathematical medium of shape dynamics.  

So where Relativity Theory renders both space and time elastic for observers travelling at different speeds, these new mathematics would just stretch or compress space alone.  Those various observers would then only differ in their estimates of size or distance, while sharing a common or universal moment of Now.

Smolin’s idea would therefore agree with Quantum Theory to this extent of a universal Now.  But it does seem difficult to reconcile  with all those numerous effects of altered clocks and time dilation now readily observable.  And proven to agree with Relativity mathematics over the past 40 years.  

Still Smolin holds that “all that exists is this moment”, which makes the present the most important, indeed singular, aspect of time . So the past can only be real in terms of present records or traces which former events have left behind. And the future likewise in terms of present indicators sugggesting what may possibly occur.

Why time seems to ‘flow’ ?

In contrast to Smolin, California cosmologist Sean Carroll emphasises the marvellous successes of Relativity in so many fields.  So “we shouldn’t attempt to change the Block Universe to explain our experience of time flowing, ...but should concentrate on explaining human experience in light  of what our very successful physics tells”. 

But then to explain Relativity’s related implication of a fixed future, Carroll invokes Quantum Theory’s supposed extensibility into the Multiverse.  This would hold that an infinity of fixed futures already lie waiting before us – but that we can only encounter one of them.

Philosopher Craig Callender agrees with Carroll that physics should hold on to what is already proven to work so well.  So that “(to explain) our apparently aberrant perception of T, does not mean we have to overturn physics or invent a whole new way of geometry”.  And this is a viewpoint commendably parsimonious in contrast to much of what I’ve described above.

As opposed to the modern notion that the future ‘lies ahead’ of us, Callender seems to favour one  Ancient Greek viewpoint which held that the past lies in front of us and the future behind.  A picture perhaps more realistic and appealing than the modern convention in several ways. 

So that while we may seem to be moving “backward into the Future with no clear idea of where we’re heading”, Callender holds that such is merely due to our egocentric need for a continuous identity.   Instead one might regard all the observations of a lifetime as a series of about 3 billion second-long slices, each one “existing motionless” at its respective moment in space-time.  And from them we generate the illusion of time flowing, by combining all these moments into one egocentric and enduring sense of personal identity. 

Or  “because I think I’m identical over time, that’s why time seems to flow, even though it doesn’t”, as Callender concludes.....

In sum, a trichotomy......

Surveying all the foregoing therefore, and at the risk of undue repetition, it’s clear that a trichotomy, or tripartite rift, exists between current time understandings on three disparate frontiers.  The implications from Relativity don’t agree with those from Quantum Theory, and neither agree with what common experience or perception seems to say!

Of these three great conflicting regions in time understanding, it’s clear that Relativity is most soundly based.  Conversely perception must be the weakest,  in fact never really examined so far with rigour remotely comparable to physics experiments.

It’s therefore through a much deeper re-examination (literally a re-search!) of common ordinary temporal perceptions and preconceptions, that the answer to time’s overall enigma is most likely to be found. 

And that is an exercise to which I’ll devote the next few features here......

NEXT BLOG  “Why can’t people ‘Remember the Future’ – Really?”

14. TIME AND THE CURRENT CRISIS IN PHYSICS

Summary

Three books published within the past year reveal how the question of “time’s real nature” is now coming to the fore with increasing urgency, while further showing how its essential mystery eludes physics still.

Of these 3 recent books the most comprehensive is “A QUESTION OF TIME – THE ULTIMATE PARADOX”.  This is a new ebook from the editors of Scientific American, one which collects together recent time writings from the same source. 

It expands on Scientific American’s special issue on “A MATTER OF TIME” (Spring 2012) – a compendium I’ve already reviewed in a recent blog.  There I noted a great lack of overall order - or connectivity between the various topics it considered.  Though still with a  fairly comprehensive treatment overall.

And it’s fair to say that the same holds true for this new ebook likewise. ...

“A QUESTION OF TIME” then republishes 17 time-related articles, from recent issues of the parent magazine and its several subdivisions, over the last five years.   Of these articles some two-thirds consider the role of time as apparent from physics, while one-sixth (3 articles) deal with “The human side” . 

Which also leaves one-sixth of the total (3 articles) concerned with philosophy, the “most original and general of all the sciences”.  Philosophy has been trying  to bridge the great rift between the inner and outer realities of time ever since it first took hold in Ancient Greece around 600 BC. 

Nowadays this rift is expressed more formally as the great temporal gulf which separates  psychology and physics, two disciplines with  very different views on time.   

So that “the gap between the scientific understanding of time and our everyday understanding of time has troubled thinkers throughout history” as contributor Craig Callender states in his article.  He considers the very common question of whether time might be just be an illusion, despite what our all common experience seems to say.

Elsehwere George Musser describes our current lack of temporal understand-ing as “a hole at the start of physics”.  While physicist Paul Davies argues from relativity that “the most straightforward conclusion is that both past and future are fixed”.  This expressed a viewpoint first expressed by Zeno and Parmenides ca. 450Bc, and long known to later philosophers as The Block Universe or block time.  

Such implications from physics are of course in direct conflict with what we seem to encounter in everyday experience.   But on this Gary Stix further notes that  “Science has barely begun to consider how we perceive passage.”   Presumably the science he’s talking about here is psychology which deals with perception.  Though one may reasonably question whether psychology is as yet fit to tackle such  questions at its present early stage of development.....

In sum therefore the ultimate time paradox seems to be the total confliction, between the implications of physics and our everyday experience.  But the sophisticated laws of physics – and in particular relativity – have been tested to exhaustion and never found to fail.   Whereas those tests on our time experience seem rudimentary in comparison.

It therefore seems likely that common experience is somehow misinterpreting, or missing something crucial, about the “real nature” of time.  This is a very important question which deserves more critical consideration, and to which I’ll be returning in my next few blogs....   

FROM ETERNITY TO HERE 

...is another recent time book (2010) written by cosmologist Sean Carroll,  well known for his popularisation of science as derived from his theoretical cosmology. 

In this ‘new history of time’ Carroll ventures far beyond Stephen Hawking’s original BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME.   Fot the latter only dealt with time from the Big Bang event, which most people think started off our current Universe some 14 billion years ago. 

But Carroll now theorises that reality may be much older than this.  In fact it may be infinitely old – i.e. eternal - with the Big Bang just the latest in an ongoing and never-ending series of creation events.  Of these the last one has meant that we’re now living in a “time forward” phase, one which entails increasing entropy as the source of our past-to-future arrow of time.  

But Carroll theorises that there may have been a previous or ‘pre-Big Bang’  Universe (i.e. before 14 billion years ago) in which time’s arrow may have been reversed. And with others before that again in an infinite series stretching back through all eternity.

So that the real history of this supposed greater and eternal Universe goes far beyond our current episode of just 14 billion years, being also “statistically time-symmetrical”.  Or with an equal number of “time backward” and “time forward” episodes, the latter being the kind we live in now.  

Of all those many far-flung speculations in cosmology, this surely must be the most cosmic idea of them all.  And it must seem near impossible for non-specialists to follow through on whatever mathematical reasoning lies behind.  Though the prime factor may have been the desire to preserve time symmetry for things  overall....

TIME REBORN

...is another recent time book (2013), written by cosmologist and former advocate of string theory Lee Smolin.  And as compared with Sean Carroll’s book,  it seems almost cosmologically restrained.  For Smolin’s time-span just deals with the history and future of our current Universe.   

He holds that the current crisis in physics just comes down to our lack of understanding about the real nature of time – a problem at the root of ‘all of the mysteries which physicists and cosmologists face’.   

In contrast to others who claim time is unreal in the natural world, Smolin contends it’s a basic factor in all those physics laws we apply to our own particular Universe.  But thence he proceeds to a more arguable contention: if these laws are to be explained they must have evolved in time. 

And furthermore if so, they should be subject to the same principles as Darwin’s Natural Selection in biology.  So that Smolin’s proposed principle of cosmological natural selection may have sorted things out in aeons past, to leave us with those physical laws and constants we now have!

Elsewhere Smolin refers to the current battle between Relativity and Quantum Theory ,with their two very different conceptions of time.  He believes that Relativity needs to be rethought away from its implications of a block universe - in which all events both past and future lie ‘timeless and already written’, as numerous authorities have believed.  

Here his position is in contrast to most commentators who suspect that there’s something amiss with quantum ontology, i.e. the picture it seems to afford us for reality.

 Though if one follows Smolin, a new understanding of reality can result.  It affords a new world-view  in which ‘time is reborn’ and again becomes a dominant factor for the Universe.  As it was in the era of Newton or before Einstein.

Overall however the more grounded and down-to-earth among us may feel that such heady speculations of cosmology  come dangerously close to metaphysics – a traditional preoccupation of philosophy which was always lacking in much evidence.  Likewise there seems little or no factual evidence of any sort to back up such far-flung cosmological ideas.  This too was the argument in John Barrow’s FAREWELL TO REALITY which I reviewed in my previous Blog 13. 

It may therefore be wiser to adopt a more practical approach to the question of ‘time’s real nature’ – going back to the very basis of what makes us think of it all in the way we do.  And that will be the subject of my next blog, wherein I will reconsider a far more grounded and so basic starting-point for time.

NEXT BLOG (15)  “So why can’t we remember the future – really?”

13 .Farewell To Reality?

Summary

Three recent books concerned with time have lately come my way.  So that I will next conduct a brief commentary on each in turn.

Farewell to Reality?

First therefore in this mini-Pantheon of time physics is “FAREWELL TO REALITY”.  This is an erudite and timely  work by independent scientist Jim Baggott, who maintains a broad interest in science, philosophy, history.  

Baggott’s argument is that too much of modern physics has gone badly adrift from its traditional strong moorings in reality.  So that today the public is being subject to an endless media barrage of ‘fairytale physics’ from populist science presenters, ideas entirely derived from theory and with little or no experimental proofs of any kind.

Among these far-fetched notions Baggott lists String Theory, the possibility of a Multiverse, and the speculation that reality consists of holographic information stored on the boundary of the universe!

There’s also the Anthropic Cosmological Principle of which two versions exist. The weak version holds that our status as observers of this particular Universe is biased by the fact that we can exist in it.  Which then leaves open the possibility of numerous other regions outside our own little uinverse, regions forever unobservable because we couldn’t exist in them.

The strong Anthropic Principle proceeds even further: “the universe – and all those fundamental parameters from which it is constructed, must be such as to admit the creation of observers at some stage”.  This brings in the possibility of divine intervention through intelligent creation, which would undermine the very basis of science as practised so fruitfully over the past 500 years.

Baggott therefore dismisses most or all such scientific theorising as fairytale physics.  They’re more in the manner of metaphyics than useful constructs, for example those familiar laws of magnetism derived from hard experiment.  But ‘if scientists can set themselves up as the high priests of a new metaphysics, and continue to preach their gospel unchallenged through popular books and television, then the ctredibility of all scientists inexorably starts to be eroded”.

To which the more pragmatically minded or even irreligious  among us can only say ‘Amen!’.   

 Precedents from history

There are of course precedents from intellectual history.  One such might be early mediaeval concerns about how many angels could dance on a pin.  Though that may have been just an examination test for debate among students, and not a serious intellectual exercise.  But that some of the brightest mediaeval scholastic considered related problems is quite clear.

More definite is Malleus Maleficarum, a handbook of instructions for recognising and persecuting witchcraft.  This went through some 30 editions eventually, causing  hundreds of innocent women to be burned throughout the 15th to 17th centuries.  To the modern mind it now reads as a very  evil and mostly quite mad book.  But the point is that its two authors -  Heinreich Kramer and James Sprenger – were among the brightest Dominican scholars of their day.

Finally there’s the story of James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh around the mid-17th century.   He’s now infamous and much derided for having precisely dated the moment of Creation – to the nightfall before Sunday October 23, 4004 BC.    Ussher added up the ages of the patriarchs in the Bible to calculate this date.   But a great many scholars of his era – from Isaac Newton  to Sir Francis Drake – did much the same thing, all accepting some Creation date around 4,000 BC as genuine.

Where Ussher excelled was in the meticulous accuracy of the scholarship he brought to the task.   An ardent book collector who owned 10,000 volumes, he was probably the foremost expert in ancient  manuscripts, for his time.  Such is proven by the fact that his pioneering dates for the deaths of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great (44 BC and 323 BC) are still accepted scholarship.   In short he was one of the ablest scholars of his age.  His error was just that he accepted those ancient manuscripts - like the various Bibles that he owned - as the sole repository of truth.

In our own era also mathematics – perthaps sometimes developed too far from reality ? - are accepted as a sole and unquestioned repository of truth likewise.  So concerning those cosmologists who theorise about the first billionth (or even trillionth?) of a second after the Big Bang, one wonders if our descendants may not regard them, as we regard brilliant but erroneous Ussher now. 

BLOG 12: CHRONOCULTURE (2) – The Intrusion of Time

Summary: Throughout the course of history humanity often had very different notions of time compared with we have now.
As I’ve already considered in Blog 11, humanity throughout 99% of its history therefore seems to have lived in a relatively timeless state.   Our remote ancestors knew nothing of hours, minutes, seconds – nor likely were often accurate about some individual’s age.  They didn’t let time  intrude on their lives too much, nor give it time the high importance we do nowadays.  But neither could they have much idea of how due time management can make life more efficient and tolerable - though only if not carried to extremes.

All of which means that the chronocultural attitudes of our primitive forebears must have been very different to our own.

There are also some grounds for suspecting that western time attitudes, may have taken much of their present form from the Indo-European language family which originated about 8,000 years ago. This was the style  of thought expression that later evolved into Greek and  Latin, and then into their  various modern descendants like English, French, Spanish, Italian, German.

Importantly too these were the languages through which most later science was expressed.

But the Indo-European language system is unique in being such a highly tensed  one. That is to say Its grammatical structures are replete with finely tuned notions of past-present-future, and further fine verbal distinctions of tenses between them all.  So that we can now readily express ideas on ‘sooner or later’, ‘was-is-will be’,  ‘will have been’, ‘might have been’, ‘could happen’ and so on.

Seldom however do we stop to analyse what such expressions may imply.  So that in reality   we are expressing time notions through largely unexamined language, and with thoughts handed down without much checking from those primitive Indo-Europeans so long ago.

But various other less developed languages - for example Innuit (Esquimaux) -  often lack our fine tense discrimination between future-present-past. This can seem to leave their users in a sort of perpetual present, where future may only be denoted by pointing forward, and past by pointing back!   So that, as again I’ve already stated, such peoples can hardly regard time as we are accustomed to.

TIME’S START, TIME’S END?

In any case evolving western chronoculture received another important input when formal  counting and writing began in ancient Sumer ca. 5,000 BC.  Thereafter the written record – preserved on baked mud, stone or later paper - could inform future generations about what their ancestors had been, or claimed to have been, doing.

Henceforth therefore human memory could be extended far beyond the lifetime of one individual, or perhaps a few generations of fallible oral tradition at most.  Such was the start of historic, as distinct from prehistoric, times. 

Western chronoculture gained another important input around 600 BC when the Jewish Old Testament  formalised the Creation fable, soon dating it  to some 4,000 years before.  Creation was believed to have started the entire Universe and all things in it – which also meant a tidy starting point for time.

Hence came our western idea of linear time  stretched out from past through present to future – a notion not always found in oriental societies.

Judaism’s main offshoot of Christianity later put an equally tidy end to this linear process.  For from about 100 AD the first Christians began to believe that all things would come to an end on the dreaded Last Judgement Day – so also implying a clear final boundary for time.  

Devout early scientists like Newton (1643-1727) believed this ending would occur on or near the significantly tidy date of 2000 AD.  After which everyone who had ever lived would participate in an eternity (lit: timeless state) of Heaven or Hell. 

Stripped of such religious connotations, this Judaeo-Christian notion of time - with clear progression  from definite start to future conclusion - therefor became the western chronocultural norm. It was formalised into science by Newton with his erroneous definition of Absolute Time (somehow supposed to ‘flow’ onward all by itself!), and later just partially displaced by Einstein’s Relative Time of 1905.

Time linear, bounded and progressive in this way, still finds expression in the widely accepted Big Bang theory of current cosmology.  An idea first suggested by Belgian cleric Abbe Lemaitre in 1926, the Big Bang theory can be seen as the latest version of the Creation story: it holds that time itself began along with everything else some 14 billion years ago.   

Likewise cosmologists can logically speculate that time must also come to an end eventually, when matter itself may have ceased to exist uncountable billions of years ahead. 

But whether the entire Big Bang theory may just turn out to be the latest version of old religious thinking, seems a question best left to future generations to decide.....

RELIGION WAS THE ‘GUARDIAN OF TIME’

In any case and as also already considered in Blog 11, organised religion has always served as the “guardian of time” since very ancient days.  Like formal counting and writing, its role can be traced at least as far back as 10,000 years ago.  Then agriculture was introduced and settled societies began.  

And the main original practical function of those astronomer-priests appointed to watch the heavens may have been as agricultural advisers: they could best anticipate the changing of the seasons and when crops should be sown.

Sky-watching of course was also almost readymade for more mystical methods of controlling society.  For example it could readily pretend to divine communications from the gods supposed to rule the realms above. Astronomy, agriculture, time and religion have therefore always been intimately related since settled societies began.

This also meant that one of religion’s functions was to serve  as the “guardian of time”, and  up until recently in the western world.

To some extent also this ancient role of religion as “time’s guardian” still persists. For example our current western calendar, which parallels Nature through years and leap-years, was introduced at Rome by Pope Gregory 13 in 1587. And Gregory was just modifying Julius Caesar’s calendar of 47 BC, which in turn derived from religious practice in Ancient Egypt 4,000 years before.

Another striking survivor of the old domination of time by religion is the public holiday of Easter, still wandering across the calendar on all dates between March 20 and April 25.  Easter Sunday remembers the day when Christ was said to have risen from the dead. Strangely however the anniversary of this momentous occasion never had a fixed date, rather being calculated through an ancient formula linked to the variable risings of the moon!

This complex formula was known as computus (lit: calculation) and from it the modern term computer has derived.

 THE INTRUDING CLOCK

But with the invention of mechanical clocks in mediaeval Europe – probably by some unknown monk around 1280 AD – the old traditional dominance of time by religion began to fade.   Those first ticking clocks were large affairs constructed by the local blacksmith, and may have derived from SuSung’s Chinese design of two centuries before.  His clock progressed by slowly inflowing water which gradually filled up one bucket on a mill-wheel, which then advanced by one click every time.

But in any case all over Europe in the late mediaeval era, municipal boroughs like Prague and Cologne began building public clocks of ever more intricate design.  These also implied a  challenge to similar clocks being installed on church steeples: commerce had started to contest religion for control of time.

As clocks began to shrink and grow more portable, they intruded ever further into everyday affairs.  Queen Elizabeth 1 of England (d.1603) is said to have had no less than six portable clocks or primitive watches, some with skull motifs warning of time’s intimate link with religion, fate,  destiny.  Similar concerns are voiced by her contemporary Shakespeare, who frequently wrote of time in portentous or doom-laden terms.

PROGRESS IS A RECENT IDEA

But with the onset of The Industrial  Revolution after 1700 AD, time started to become ever  less a matter of religion and more of commercial concern.  So that, as historian Lewis Mumford first clarified, the clock was just as important as the steam-engine for the new industrial regimes.  Indeed the very idea of social progress - which implies advancement towards better living standards - stems from this era. 

Before the Industrial Revolution therefore, most people broadly expected to live their lives much as their ancestors had done for generations before. But afterwards, through making best use of personal time, they could reasonably aspire towards a higher standard of living than their fathers knew.

Time therefore became viewed as another commodity which could be bought and sold.  A merchant could buy, and a labourer could sell, an hour or a day’s work, so assigning  specific monetary value to the latter’s time.  Wherefore Benjamin Franklin’s (d.1790) dictum that “time is money” has come to rule much of the modern world.  

However Franklin’s famed statement must be essentially wrong. For, as any physicist of dimensions will readily realise, time is certainly not the same thing as money in any shape or  form.   What Franklin should really have said – though perhaps not so pithily – is that “time (worked) is proportional to money (earned)”. 

But the widespread acceptance of his original dictum is just one of those many confusions which still cloud most popular thinking about time.........................

BLOG 11: CHRONOCULTURE – 1: TIME AND THE ANCIENTS

SUMMARY: Chrono-culture can be defined as the sum of a society’s attitudes, beliefs and practices towards time. This is a sense in which it doesn’t seem to have been widely used – if indeed atall? -hitherto.

Though ancient societies displayed various forms of chronoculture, these were usually very different from our modern western attitudes. Temporal ignorance in various versions was a common theme throughout. Nor can we reasonably expect that we have reached a final true version nowadays: our descendants will more likely develop chronocultural attitudes very different to our own....

DEFINITIONS CLARIFIED

That the term ‘culture’ can be notoriously difficult to define is a fact well known to sociologists. In fact at least 30 different definitions have been proposed. Most of these however merely refine or elaborate on the central idea I will adopt here. So, for any particular aspect of experience, I take ‘culture’ to be ‘the sum of a society’s attitudes, beliefs and practices’.

Further my term ‘chronoculture’ seems to have been used only in limited terms of anthropology or archaeology so far. It’s been applied when researchers seek to assign the relics of some ancient civilisation to their proper date in history. So that for examplepre-historians speak of the chronocultural sequencing of Stone Age artefacts from Britanny.

Here however I will employ the term ‘chronoculture’ in a much wider sense – as ‘ the sum of any society’s attitudes, beliefs, and practices concerned with time.’

ANCIENT THOUGHT

One striking feature of modern temporal studies is the amount of effort devoted to ancient or primitive time thought. The sheer volume of such studies can be taken as reflecting a strong suspicion that there is something missing or even mistaken about the overall modern chronocultural viewpoint. Or in contrast there is little similar effort to establish what the ancients thought about sciences like chemistry or geology - since modern paradigms are wholly satisfactory in such spheres.

In any case we can hardly know very much about the chronoculture of far prehistory. What we can discern is almost entirely based on archaeology. But we do know that humans were making weapons and tools at least 1 million years ago. Whence it seems they must have had some realisation of a future wherein these constructs would be used.

However tool-making is not entirely a human capacity as anthropologists once believed. It’s now been repeatedly demonstrated that various other animals, and even birds, can demonstrate similar capacities. Though whether this means that they too must be conscious of a future is still anybody’s guess.

People in any case began to concern themselves with much more than the immediate future at least 60,000 years ago. So much is suggested by various Neanderthal graves, which are the first known burial sites. Frequently these contained weapons and utensils as if providing for a world beyond our own. As such these graves provide the first suggestions of belief in an after-life, which extends beyond the individual’s mortal term and has been a prime constituent of most religions until recent years.

And some of these early Neanderthal graves had floral decorations – which must make our modern custom of funeral flowers one of the most enduring chronocultural customs of all!

TIME MEASUREMENT

By 30,000 BC in any case some Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age) peoples seem to have been recording the lunar cycle as 29 dots, so forming the first calendars in cave paintings or scratched into small bone. Such was the contention of Alexander Marshack (1918-2004), America’s leading Ice Age specialist who studied the motivation and belief systems behind cave art and Palaeolithic thought.

Otherwise our notions of prehistoric chronoculture are based on observing certain Stone Age societies - like the Australian Aboriginals or the Brazilian Amondawa - which have survived in cultural isolation into modern times. As might be expected such societies normally reckon days by the obvious lunar or monthly cycle, rather than the much longer annual or solar cycle which is harder to record. Subdivision of the day is usually reckoned in terms of mealtimes, and may be refined in terms of altering shadows from sunlight.

With little or no concept of large numbers beyond 3 or so, such peoples usually exhibit poor sense of dates, the exact age of an individual, or the greater sweep of history. So that they are little conscious of time as we know it, being wholly unaware of its higher refinements and possibilities.

And yet such has been the chronoculture of all humanity throughout 99% of its whole million years!

AGRICULTURE, TIME, RELIGION

But with the onset of agriculture and more settled societies in the Middle East 10,000 years ago, early societies required more time-conscious attitudes. Good plant cultivation requires a developed sense of seasonal timing, which can only be gleaned from close observation of the sky where gods were thought to rule.

Wherefore agriculture, astronomy, time measurement and religion have always been closely intertwined throughout most of history, indeed right up until the start of the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago.

This four-fold inter-relation (agriculture – astronomy – time – religion) is very obvious in the first major societies we know of, beginning in The Middle East and especially Ancient Egypt over 5,000 years ago. And because its agriculture depended so closely on the seasonal accident of the annual Nile floods, Egyptian society was the first to employ a yearly or solar calendar, indeed one from which our modern version still derives.

The Nile floods could be predicted by astronomer-priests who observed the night sky very accurately. Likewise the day could be subdivided by observing solar shadows measured either by length or by angle, as indeed various 20-metre obelisks surviving from that period still attest.

But these first astronomer-priests also interpreted their objective sky-watching in more subjective religious terms. This meant that, apart from the solar calendar, the chrono-culture of Ancient Egypt often differed radically from our own. For example over the first few thousand years – say from 5,000 to 2000 BC - they seem to have had no unified chronology or proper accounting of historical dates. Apparently history was considered to commence with the start of each new ruler’s reign.

Further, as their surviving Pyramids and numerous mummies (both human and animal) still tell us, Egyptian society was hugely focussed on the after-life or next world which would come after this one that we know. And that to a degree which seems very alien to us now.

ANCIENT CHINA

Large scale organisation of Chinese society apparently began about the same as in Ancient Egypt, that is around 3500 BC. But, according to scholars like the late GJ Whitrow, the great difference was that the Chinese were the most historically minded of all ancient peoples. So they devoted great effort to provide chronological continuity between different regimes in different parts of the country, with works like The Book of History extending over several thousand years.

And by 1500 BC astronomers of the Shang Dynasty had amassed very long records of the heavens to show that the year was 365.25 days long.

Chronoculturally however such impressive accuracy in ancient Chinese astronomy and history was still inextricably associated with astrology. So rulers paid high regard to oracles, with divination ceremonies intended to fathom a future regarded as at least partly knowable. To some extent such beliefs survive in the modern Chinese penchant for gambling, often involving procedures which western wisdom would now reject perhaps too automatically.

High achievement accompanied by low superstition in China was again evident when Mandarin Su Sung constructed his great astronomical clock in 1084 AD. This clock took the form of a house-sized waterwheel – which advanced intermittently by just one step or ‘tick’ once a bucket was weighed down sufficiently from a constant inflow.

This earliest of all mechanical clocks was also strongly correlated with astronomy through a sighting tube pointing at some selected star. And it was accurate to a few minutes in 24 hours - much better than the first weight-powered clocks which didn’t appear in Europe until two centuries afterwards.

And yet the whole purpose of this magnificent mechanism must now seem ridiculous to the modern scientific mind. Apparently it was built to ensure that star positions would be known even if the skies were cloudy, so that exact astrological charts could be drawn up whenever a new child was born to the Emperor’s family!

Which again just goes to illustrate that chronocultural lesson already evident from Egypt: advanced development in one temporal region need not imply a similar sophistication overall!

THE MAYANS

The same lesson applies to the Mayans, whose foremost Meso-American society peaked around 750 AD. Totally isolated from Europe and Asia, the Mayans were one of the most numerate societies of old, though their expertise was mainly arithmetical rather than more widely mathematical. They used a number system based on 20 where we just use 10, presumably because they counted with toes as well as fingers from the start.

The Mayan ‘Sacred Year’ of 13 x20 = 260 days only coincided with the real or ‘Vague Year’ of 365 days every 18,980 days. But the real length of the real or ‘Vague’ Year was determined by prolonged astronomical observations on the planet Venus, and so accurate to 1 day in 5,000 years. This was twice better than the Gregorian calendar we still use.

Further the Mayans kept a continuous ‘Long Count’ of all days since the current world was thought to have been created, a ‘great cycle’ which most scholars now calculate as starting on September 8, 3114 BC.

But, as in China, such great accuracy was again very much contaminated by astrology. So each of the Mayan time divisions was assigned to a particular god who would carry the burden on his back before handing it on to the next deity. And since they were measuring time through circular recurrences, the Mayans also shared in that common primitive mistake of regarding time itself as circular So they expected history to repeat itself, with outstanding events doomed to recur as the Great Year came around again.

Such concerns also led the Mayans to design elaborate stone Calendars carved out in circular form. And yet apparently nobody, in all of Ancient American society anywhere, ever thought to insert an axle through the centre of such circles and so invent the wheel!

From which again we may draw the prime chronocultural lesson so evident throughout ancient history: High sophistication in one temporal region does not necessarily imply similar competence overall.

Which of course is also a lesson quite possibly still applicable today.

BLOG 10: TIME AND LANGUAGE

SUMMARY: The language through which we describe temporalities is currently very much undeveloped  and confused.  Lacking clear definition and terminology, Its descent from Indo-European sources carries with it various potential  misdescriptions, along with untested assumptions which may or not be true.

 A first step towards true time science may therefore be to  identify, challenge and test out such uncertainties.  This could require ignoring all notions of time we’ve ever assimilated  through the connotations of language, and thence reconsidering the whole topic anew.... 

THE LESSON OF HISTORY

Imagine if you were a learned person in the Middle Ages trying to discuss scientific matters – such as the chemical properties and reactions of materials.   In that case your language must often have been lacking, confused, and indeed misleading, so further making for unproductive thoughts and activities.

For example gases and their sometimes explosive properties would have been associated with ghostly powers because of their invisibility, as indeed their etymology from the German word geist still shows. Neither had mediaeval chemists any clear words – and so no clear definitions - for phenomena like combustion, pressure, atoms, molecules. So they would have been quite unable to visualise such concepts, much less consider them usefully.  

But now such agreed term-concepts can serve us as a sort of ‘shorthand for thought’ – and so make their associated phenomena much easier to describe, comprehend, communicate, manipulate.

We can therefore expect, and indeed readily observe, something similar for time science at its present early stage.   For the words people use, for whatever temporal notions they may have, are still obviously very much ‘presumptive, untested, and confused’. 

Time language is still in the Middle Ages as far as term-concepts are concerned

TIME AS INSTANT

Confusion of this sort is therefore evident in those two recent presentations about time (from New Scientist and Scientific American) which I’ve just reviewed in Blog 9.  For neither even attempts to clarify an important fact already well known to  philosophers – that we use the word ‘time’ with at least 3 distinct meanings in our everyday affairs.

First then is the idea of time as an ’instant’ – the sense in which you look at the clock or maybe ask your neighbour “What time is it now?”   And when he truthfully answers something like “It is now 9.31 in the morning”, you might then reasonably ask him further “But what do you mean by it?”

Further clarification would then eventually reveal that ‘it’ just means the number of degrees a combined hour/minute hand would have notched up on a circular 24-hr. clock-face since midnight.  And the clock-face in turn is just a mechanical version of the equally circular sun-dial which told the extent of Earth’s daily revolution as evidenced by a static sun.

So that when you ask “What time is it now?” you are really querying how many degrees the Earth has revolved, in its 360-degree daily rotation around its axis, since the arbitrary midnight point.  Though ‘midnight’ of course is another temporal misnomer, hardly ever equating with the actual middle of any night anywhere!

A similar question of circular motion is also involved whenever you look up your calendar to query “What date is it today?”.   Here again you are really asking how many degrees of another, but much greater, 360-degree circle (or really oval) the earth has traversed since its artificial starting line of January 1.  

Though on this occasion of course the circle is not one of daily revolution, but rather the greater circumference Earth slowly traces out over 365.24 days in its annual voyage around the sun.

TIME AS DURATION

A fundamentally different usage of that common word ‘time’ occurs when we talk of non-present events.  For example we speak of World War One as having happened “a long time ago”.   Or conversely we may be awaiting the arrival of the 2.30 train which should enter the station “a short time ahead.”

The basic property of time expressed here is one of duration, or time as durable and lasting - and possibly spread out over many of those instants I’ve dealt with above. (Though here I’m ignoring the very debatable connotations of those various temporal descriptors – i.e. “long, short, ago, ahead” – which in any case we can consider further below.)

Time as duration can therefore be considered as the sum of its many instants – be these reckoned in terms of days, years, circular degrees or whatever other unit you may choose.  So that for example people speak of World War One as having happened either “a long time ago” or “many years ago” (i.e. many time units), both phrases conveying much the same idea.

However a really rigorous physicist or philosopher might choose to describe all those accumulated instants in terms of chronons – or maybe Plancktons? - those still theoretical basic “atoms of time” I’ve already considered in Blog 5.  

To rethink our common perceptions of duration in terms of these ultimate chronons might then be a fruitful line of enquiry - much as when England’s  John Dalton rethought chemistry in terms of ultimate atoms around 200 years ago ?

TIME AS ABSTRACTION.

Thirdly in any case there’s the meaning of time as an abstraction or idealised entity.  This is much as when we abstract the single concept of ‘velocity’, from all those numerous objects we see moving or changing at various rates in the world around. It’s also the sense in which people try to research time’s nature or properties, or indeed as when I’ve titled this blog as “The Future of Time” throughout.

To tease out and clarify some of its various properties may be one thing, but time as an abstraction can still prove excruciatingly difficult to define.  For example elementary physics may define time as distance divided by velocity.  But this is a circular definition because velocity is then distance divided by time! 

And the same holds true of Aristotle when he defined time as “the measure of motion in respect of before and after” – these two adverbs being again time-referent words!

Or as all who have pondered the subject will cheerily admit, it has proved almost impossible to provide an adequate definition of time so far. Which also helps to explain why, at this late date in scientific progress, we still have no proper ‘Science of Time’ at all......

OUR  INDO-EUROPEAN TEMPORALITIES

This may also relate to the fact that all western science has developed through languages evolved from the same ancient Indo-European source about 8,000 years ago.  The Indo-European language family apparently was – and remains - unusually rich in grammatical structures which convey fine distinctions between Future, Present, Past.

For example consider the temporal subtleties involved in the simple statement that “X could have been a great President”...

Greek, Latin, English, French, etc. (those languages of science all descended from the same Indo-European source) therefore all employ highly tensed forms of description, but ones  accepted with little or no consideration throughout history.   And their largely unthinking assimilation into modern usage still inclines people to consider time in various untested ways. 

Various other languages however make no clear distinction between Future, Present, Past.  Often they use just one verb form, accompanied by pointing forward, up or back respectively.  But whether these untensed languages should be regarded as less time-sophisticated - or alternatively more so - than our own is still unclear.

Most or all languages however do seem to share the common conflation between time and space implicit in our terms long and short – which can be applied to time or distance equally.    

A short time however can also be described as a brief one, which immediately highlights another kind of deficiency in our current terminology.  For there is no antonym (opposite descriptor) to describe non-brief, as indeed is true for various other temporal terms.

COMMON NOTIONS ARE OFTEN UNTESTED

There’s also the common idea that the future lies ahead of us all.  But, as first clarified in the 19^th century, this untested notion likely derives from the facts of human mobility: what will be encountered next lies at head of the crawling infant.  (While behind stretches back from its hind quarters likewise!)  

If however we humans had evolved as a completely immobile species, always  rooted to the one spot like a sentient tree or vegetable, it is doubtful if we might regard the future as lying ahead  of us at all!

Equally it’s seldom realised that ‘the past’ derives from ‘ passed’ events, which most people take to mean happenings which have now passed them by.   Such however may be a primitive or typically egocentric way of looking at things.  For alternately it might the people themselves who have passed by these events, as indeed Relativity Theory now seems to imply very forcefully.

To a certain extent too this untested notion of time’s passage may resemble the old erroneous notion of the passing sun.  For any mediaeval person nothing could have seemed more obvious: he or she had only to look up as the sun traversed the sky each day.  And so when Copernicus dared to propose the opposite – i.e. that is really we who pass by the static sun - the threat to human egocentricity immediately caused a huge outcry!

Something similar may now well be true of time......

Then again the distant passed is described as ‘long agone’ – or ago in  shortened modern form.  Ago is another temporal descriptor with no clear antonym.  But in any case it carries the unspoken implication that if the passed has gone it must have gone somewhere? – at which point again ensues large  confusion and perhaps mystery....  

Conversely there’s the notion of ‘the future’ whose simplest current definition is just “what will be”.  If so however the future can’t logically be changed!  Which kind of thinking would seem to forbid you to make a sensible jump sideways, if you suddenly found yourself in the path of a speeding car? 

From which one may infer that the common blanket notion of ‘the future’ is  sorely in need of clarification and perhaps redefinition into clearer term-concepts. for example ‘the personal future’, ‘the general future’, ‘the most likely future’, ‘the least likely future’ and so on.

All of which also helps to explain the dilemna of St.Augustine (ca. 400 AD),  now generally considered to be the premier psychologist of time.  Often he  confessed himself baffled by time’s many seeming contradictions, as for example when he queried: “How can it be that the future is not yet, the past not now, and the Present not always?”

Now we can see that Augustine was merely talking himself into needless knots tied up by the temporal limitations of Indo-European language – a conclusion which may well apply with equal force to much modern time thinking still.... 

Overall therefore the common language of time must obviously be employed with very great caution when deeper consideration is desired.  Instead, we may need to “sit down before reality like a little child” as Einstein advised and JL Synge suggested (Blog 1). This would require a recheck on those various assumptions which come inbuilt with the temporal language we have inherited from those primitive Indo-European sources, and thence perhaps commencing to reconsider time anew.

Possibly only then might a true and more productive science of time emerge...