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You see the bar above the title,
right. You've seen it on several of these pages. Colors stream through it
from left to right. Do you believe your eyes?
You adjust your eyes to focus on
the rest of the screen. You see words, a charcoal background. On
some pages you may see shadowy fringe areas with representations of our
website title. Do you believe your eyes?
If I wanted to distract you from
your reading, and were your computer capable of reproducing it, you could
be hearing some kind of wild music, maybe something eerie and mystical
sounding, like the movie music where you know something bad is about to
happen so you cringe in your seat, squeeze your butt hole tightly shut,
and hope it's not going to be too bad.
All of that stuff seems to be there
because the makeup of your brain allows you to utilize the phenomena we
call 'time' and 'light' to generate a perception of something we call
'reality'. We see time, not as a substance, but as a relationship
involving the ongoing movements of everything relative to everything else
that we sense as being outside ourselves, and all the events occurring
within. Movements which seem dependably repetitious give us a sense of
incremental measurements we can apply to time and utilize in many
advantageous ways.
We see light, not as a substance,
but as emanations or reflections from objects which gives us a sense of
detail and color. What is being reflected are radio waves, composed of
particles called 'photons', in wavelength/frequency combinations to which
our eyes respond. We have learned that other animals visually respond to
various other radio waves, some in wider, some in narrower ranges. We can
perceive more detail or color than some animals, others see so much more
that we feel envious. Sound is waves of variations in air pressure to
which our ears are attuned. Not all animals, nor humans, respond exactly
the same way to sound waves. Nor do all animals or humans respond exactly
alike to the taste of fresh green vegetables, the smell of dung, the
softness of female flesh pressed hard against their bodies, and it seems
obvious to us these things are common facts. Loss of one or more of these
senses may render life quite a bit harder to endure, but still does not
remove the conception of reality. Loss of all the senses would render one
unable to perceive time and, so, reality, and place him in a vegetative
state.
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That the particles which constitute
the first dimension (called 'strings' in theories still being developed)
at the beginning of time, should be required to have a size (estimated to
be sub .35 microns) bothers me. It sounds like a patchwork idea by which
an untenable notion gets plastered over and covered up. A particle of any
size is physically three-dimensional, with no exception, however small we
wish to serve it up as being.
I'm willing to acknowledge that, as
human pools of endeavor go, string theory is a relatively young school of
thought, now renamed M-Theory. I'm also willing to admit I'm an ignorant
clod who has spent a little less than half a century asking strange
questions and chasing after information related to that school of thought.
So, you probably know more about it than do I, and likely have the
pedigree to prove it. Still, I am allowed to talk about it and, if what I
say is wrong, you are allowed to correct my errors in language we all will
understand.
Even so, since time is considered
to be a dimension in other pursuits, usually relegated to fourth place in
whatever investigation or description of something that is being made, why
not do a little simple rearranging and state that time is the first
dimension. To me and my addled mind it makes perfect sense: Time has no
physical qualities but simply plays against things which do. "But," I hear
the argument coming, "you have to have a physical entity present before
time can occur." Really? I wonder what that physical entity could be. Time
is ongoing to places at which it has already arrived. How about this with
no quantitative terms: Time plus inertia equals matter. It may be from the
ongoing nature of time that energy gains the force needed to produce
material particles, which may only be perceived to exist from a viewpoint
such as that from which we look at reality.
Consider the rush of energetic
forces which must have taken place toward the point of original vibration
when the gigantic matrix which constituted the energy field of the empty
universe began collapsing, all of it seeking to reach the gravitational
center of the massive ball of matter which had formed, each particle
straining against the force of compressed time to maintain the vibratory
movements which had given them their original existences.
What was born when the Big Bang
occurred was not only the forms of stars and planets exiting from the
imploding mass, but also complex identifiable particles, which formed the
elements and compounds that enabled life to occur and flourish, and to
form individual items which could exist separately and discreetly from all
other things, and so allowed reality to come into being. |
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It may prove more productive to
ask: "Why is time a dimension?" but let's attempt to decipher the nature
of time first because it will lead to an understanding of the second
question.
Our grasp of the nature of time is
heavily related to the manner in which we perceive it. To us, time
consists of past, present, and future. The past is, to us, that which has
already occurred. The present is that point, in the midst of the
conflagration of events which involve each of us wholly and apart, at
which we perceive reality when it is most sharply in focus to our various
senses. The future is that portion of the ongoing flow of events which is
coming into focus to our awareness, and all points beyond that which have
yet to present themselves to our senses and awareness. Because we are
discussing our own perceptions, it is unimportant here whether time
exists on its own, and to ponder any other way of perceiving time would
only serve as a distraction and should be saved for some other discussion.
Each tiniest piece of the natural
universe grows with the flow of time in the path of its individual
continuum (it is irrelevant to our conception whether it is time, or us,
that is 'flowing'). The continuum begins at the point in time where that
item began existing, and ends when and where its existence stops. As long
as that item continues to exist, its continuum meanders and flows along
with it wherever it goes, and so gives rise to a measurement of the length
of its existence. A 'chunk' of its continuum can be measured at any point
during its existence, and represent the limited view we have of it, and by
which we recognize its physical nature. Its actual existence, then, is
made up of that physical 'chunk' and the entirety of its continuum, even
though the full duration of its existence may not have yet been completed.
A "length of time", then, when referring to the existence of any
particular item in the universe, is the length of whatever portion of its
continuum we are interested in, or the entirety of that continuum. |
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When we give anything a name, we
are granting our recognition of it as an event; it matters not whether it
is an explosion or a rock. An intertwined series of events which
produce a recognizable result is called a 'process'. Billions, perhaps
trillions of events and processes, most of which go unrecognized and
uncatalogued, constitute that event which makes you; and, the same is true
of every individual, animal, tree, planet, system, galaxy, and thing which
exists. All are systems of events, or processes, including "empty" space.
Activities by humans and Nature are
recognized to become events by their performances, the effects of which
determine their natures. We can recognize functional qualities in events
when we observe them to be occurring, as being attributable to demons or
daemons, by which terms recognition can be given to the constructive or
destructive natures of various events (and that each event is, itself,
demonic or daemonic). Those are value judgments made, of necessity, from a
human point of view. We will regard what seems harmful to ourselves and
others like us, as
evil.
Demons, therefore, have long been regarded as evil, entropic, destructive.
This is not about the supernatural, which has never been demonstrated to
exist. This is a way to understand entirely natural events and processes.
The process called 'Daemons' can be seen to exhibit the attributes offered
by awareness of evil or entropy by which one learns to avoid destructive
activities. Whether an event or process is demonic or daemonic is a
matter of perception and viewpoint, and generally depends upon its
contribution to or detraction from the wellbeing of mankind. Some, as seen
by some, are daemonic and, as seen by others, are demonic.
Whether these things, or
attributes, exist in nature is meaningless
except to the perceptions of human beings, and the effects they can have
upon them. We give recognition to various features of nature so that we
can communicate about them, teach each other about them, pass on knowledge
about them to future generations, make warnings about them, learn how to
utilize them to our own advantage and, if we are generous, to the
advantage of others. Things we recognize about nature, and learn to
describe and put to use, feel concerned about, or somehow feel affected
by, must exist in our perceptions of reality. Things we fail to recognize,
and so have no knowledge of, and no way of sensing, do not exist as far as
we are concerned, and so we believe it does not matter whether they are
present in the natural realm, they are not there if we cannot, or refuse
to, acknowledge them. This practice is the backside of religion: If
something can be claimed to exist that's unobservable, of course
something can be denied existence when we can show it to be true!
That, you might concede, could be
why no one has set forth these
principles
of existence relative to time until now. The idea seems, at first look, to
be mundane and fruitless. It is not; it sheds a light on human enterprise,
and humanity's place in the scheme of things, that actually is dignified
by its verifiability. Moral and ethical principles derived from its
practical aspects will be cogent, poignant, and correct. Let this stand up
to testing for those who claim secular people have no principles for
morality!
Time
Travel relative to
other conundrums . . .
Much of what
gets mistaken as science in the literature that gets generated about it,
is actually nothing more than tentative proposals concerned with notions
that have never been investigated. Because some big name person is
credited with a statement, ordinary people suppose that he actually made
it, and that he knows what he’s talking about, even in fields requiring
great expertise with which he is unfamiliar.
The same
happens with big-name writers, or unknown writers who happen to get
articles published in big-name magazines. When people have seen their
names a few times, they get credited as being authoritative and, once
they’ve run out of revelations about things of which they do have
knowledge, they get pushed into guessing about the unknown in order to
defend what they’ve already written. No one needs to feel guilty about any
of this—Most of the people who have done this have long been dead, and
left their guesswork behind for us to fight about. Bearers of tidings have
been doing this for ages of generations, since ancient days when
recipients expected them to provide instant answers or have their heads
lopped off. Wars have been won and lost by the guesswork of messengers.
Writers and
scientists in our own time are not trained to deal with troops of pompous
pushy people poking microphones into their faces—a year of training with
Toastmasters International is never required for one to become a scientist
or writer, to prepare either one to be able to think on their feet and
dare to say, "I don’t know," when they get led astray from their areas of
expertise. The evolution of humanity will prompt them to do otherwise,
since those with the derring-do to do that duty have long been deleted
from the gene-pool.
The truth
about Nature is that, for the ordinary individual, it stays pretty mundane
and boring, and represents a pile of hard work. Without a mountain of
literary enhancement with exciting rumors along with the reporting of
scientific discoveries, the average response will be a shoulder-shrug and,
if anything gets said at all, it will be, "So, what?"
Like: "They
found a thirty-foot-long saltwater crocodile plugging up a sewer in New
York City."
Response:
"Yeah? I’ll bet his breath stinks!"
Or: "They’ve
discovered a rock in the solar system they predict will strike the planet
Earth in 840 years and destroy everything alive."
Response:
"Do we turn left or right here, or am I supposed to go another block?"
Let that
croc be a threat to babies, or mention the possibility its children could
be living in sewers under any seaside town, or that 840 years is provided
the rock misses us when it comes around next year, and you have ‘most
everybody’s attention. Maybe you can claim you were misunderstood if
anybody calls you to account for it.
As material
for scientific treatises, time has gotten blown away out of its element as
a part of our senses of reality. Time is not a ‘thing’ which exists; it is
simply a condition of existence that is present wherever ‘things’ are.
Where no ‘things’ are, ‘things’ exist as energy, usually on its way from
being one ‘thing’ to becoming another as time passes. This is true,
whether we see the universe as ‘complete’, or as ‘dismantled’ into its
smallest energy components. Time passes because, whatever their stages of
existence, all that exists are events as components of a natural process,
and time is a condition brought about by that.
That’s just
too boring to deal with, right?—and too simple to accept as true. "Things
are obviously more complicated than that!" I can hear you shouting now.
"Just look all around yourself; you can see there has to be more to it
than that! Where are God and the angels? And Heaven, how does that fit
into this picture?"
The biggest
reason I chose to be a writer, instead of an orator, is that instead of
answering the same questions over and over again, I can simply send you
back to the beginning to reread them until you begin to understand their
answers. Orators don’t stand a chance to ever make it through a
dissertation according to the manner of the intentions with which they
started. Filled with disconcerting visions of their own heads rolling
across the concrete, speakers tend to feel like they have to deal with
distracting questions before they can go on.
I wrote a
book about time travel, entitled Time Loop,
ISBN 0-595-19946-1. It’s
unnecessary for me to defend it because I know the principles behind
suspension of disbelief, and that my readers are people who are smart
enough to know it’s just a story. Look at all that would have to occur for
time travel to be possible:
The universe
expands at an ever-increasing rate in all directions away from the point
of its initiation, the forces of the Big Bang still pushing its
acceleration. To travel into the past, all of that would be required to
stop and reverse back to the positions everything occupied at the
instant you would travel to—otherwise, nothing would be remaining at that
point for you to visit because every body of matter would have left that
spot, and your best hope would be that something new occupied it so you’d
have a place to land on. To travel into the future, the opposite would be
required to occur. That might be possible if time were an event or process
on its own, but it is not, it is a condition of all other processes and
events and is ongoing because they are ongoing—and even when they stop
they are ongoing until the point where they start up again. The proof: We
could calculate—or guess!—how much time would pass between the ending of
one universe and the beginning of a new one.
NOT just
a story!
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