Why does time only move forward? Time is only known by the relation of one rate of change to another rate of change. It makes sense to say that one clock runs faster than another, but if time itself were to run faster, then all clocks (and ALL physical processes) would run faster together and there would be no way to know that anything was unusual. Time is relative. To say it moves faster or slower is meaningless unless it can run differently in different places. In the same way, saying it moves forward or backward is meaningless unless it can run differently in different places. If time ever did run backwards, we would also run backwards and thus never notice.
We only experience the present. We know the past through our memories, but memories are stored in the arrangement of our synapses in the present. For all we know there might be no past and our memories false. For all we know, time is already moving backwards, we have forgotten the future, and we remember a past that we will soon experience – but by the time we get there we will have forgotten our current present, not being able to remember the future. At every moment, we will have the compelling belief that we are experiencing time forwards. Since there is no way to tell the difference even in principle, it is actually meaningless to think of time “moving” at all. The real question is why we don’t remember both past and future. The real question is why we don’t see some objects evolving backwards relative to other objects. Why don’t we see spilled milk spontaneously leap off the floor back into the glass? If milk were to spontaneously leap off the floor we still might not interpret this as backwards time if there were no glass there to catch it – and it would have to be the same glass it fell out of in the first place. Otherwise, the milk is just hopping around and changing glasses. This would require someone to be standing there with it, requiring them to be moving backwards, requiring their surroundings to be moving backwards, and so on. If you continue moving forward in time, you will find yourself deeper and deeper in the milk’s past. This gives you the opportunity to interfere and create a paradox. Killing the cow before it has grown old enough to be milked will mean the milk will never exist and you will have indirectly interfered in your own past. There will be chaos. With different objects experiencing time differently, it will be impossible for any object to experience time in one direction for long. They will interfere with each other. Time can only be experienced by an object when the object’s surroundings experience time in the same direction, whose surroundings must also be moving in the same direction, and so on. In any given set of particles, time either moves forward together or else not at all. When energy is evenly distributed throughout a system, particles simply bounce around off each other in a way giving no hint which way time is moving. There is no way to measure time in this situation and so it is meaningless to say it exists. Time only exists when there is an unequal distribution of energy. The real question is not why time doesn’t move backwards or why it doesn’t run in different directions, but why we find ourselves in a universe with an unequal distribution of energy for measurable time to exist at all. Of course, one could always say that if there were no time, we wouldn’t be here to be asking the question, but that still doesn’t explain why. So why do we find ourselves in a universe with an unequal distribution of energy?
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Another day over
And you need your sleep But you know that this night You'll run out of sheep I know what you're thinking Because we're the same You're thinking of the one That you pushed so far away, baby So why don't you say hi tonight? You know God loves you, baby Why don't you put it right? Just call him up tonight Heaven watches out for you, baby Why not give it a try tonight? You've tried it all It always turns out bad Your heart can't take another try The thought makes you too sad Patience is a virtue Sometimes waiting is best Prudence is healthy, but This is not the day - for it So why don't you try tonight? You know God loves you, baby Why don't you set it right? Don't go down without a fight Heaven has your back, now, baby Why not give it one more try tonight? Give it a try tonight You know God loves you, baby Isn't it about time to make things right? You just might fly tonight It'll work out for good, somehow, honey Why don't you try tonight? You won't listen to me You've heard it all before Don't listen to me, baby But don't expect to ever be sure You may get hurt again And get in it too deep But isn't fighting with new problems Better than counting sheep, now darling? Don't wait another night You know God loves you, baby It just might be all right Just accept now all your fright It's only natural, baby Give it another try tonight So, why don't you say hi tonight? You know God loves you, baby Why don't you put it right? Just call him up tonight Heaven watches out for you, baby Why not give it a try tonight? If the electromagnetic force were just slightly stronger, protons would repel each other with such gusto that fusion of hydrogen into heavier nuclei would be impossible and it would be a very boring, lifeless universe of pure hydrogen. If the electromagnetic force were just slightly weaker, fusion would be so easy that stars would burn up and explode in no time and it would be a universe far too exciting for life to survive.
This is only one of many such examples of the constants of nature being “fine-tuned” for life. This raises the question of why the constants are the way they are. Nobody knows. There are those that have suggested that this proves the existence of God, assuming that God created the universe with life and humanity in mind. Others point out instead that if the constants were different, we would not be here to ask the question, so it should surprise no one that we find ourselves in a universe with constants fine-tuned for life. They say, “Of course things are the way they are; if they weren’t you wouldn’t be here asking about it.” This is called the anthropic principle. As far as we know, there may be very many universes with random constants, and statistics predicts that at least one of them will be friendly to life simply by chance. Coupled with the anthropic principle, this explains much. However, there are limits to the principle’s explanatory power. It only explains away those things that are absolutely necessary for sentient life to evolve. It does not explain the incredible complexity and redundancy of our ecosystem. In all the possible universes where life exists aware enough to pose the question “why these constants?” the fraction of them with ecosystems as complex as ours must still be very small – so where did it all come from? Even if it turns out that evolving sentience requires conditions leading to the state of affairs we now see on Earth, it certainly does not require that life evolved anywhere else in the universe. Evolution is such an unlikely process to begin with that it would be far too unlikely to happen twice. If we ever meet aliens, we will know something more is going on. Since we have already asked the question “why these constants?” there is no more reason that we must necessarily survive to ask other questions. There is nothing guaranteeing that the laws of nature will not change. There is nothing guaranteeing our surviving the next meteorite impact or gamma ray burst. Which is the more likely universe? One in which life survives just long enough to invoke the anthropic principle before dying? Or one in which life survives indefinitely? The longer we survive and the more we learn that can go wrong but doesn’t, the more we will know that something else is going on. Of course, if humanity were to survive another ten billion years and meet trillions of other sentient species, one could always say, “Of course things are the way they are; if they weren’t you wouldn’t be here asking about it.” This is a poem I wrote in 2015. I imagine all of my poetry set to music but I am rarely able to come up with my own tunes. This poem I imagine set to the tune of Hey There Delilah by Plain White Ts. Hey Jeremiah Thought I'd stop by and say hiya See how things were with you You're a friend that's always been true Me I'm not so well I'm fighting with my woman Israel She and her sister Judah too And I just don't know what to do I prepare her every path But she just tries to provoke my wrath I really think we might be through I really hope it isn't true Hey Jeremiah I think I'm gonna crya I might be omniscient but I don't have a clue And I've had centuries to think this problem through - oooh And I really don't know what to do Well there Mr. God You know I might be wrong But have you shown her all that she means to you? Maybe she doesn't know all you do I think she receives your help Thinks she did it all herself You know sometimes she doesn't have a clue Maybe you could create some new flowers for her too Hey there Mr. God I could also put in a word Let her know the stuff that you do Tell her that you're awesome too I'll show her the right way I'll tell her every night and day Who sends the rain and the dew She'll see she means the world to you - oooh What would she do without you? Hey Jeremiah What else can I trya She certainly didn't listen to you And now she's praying to the moon By now I thought she'd learn But she still takes that same wrong turn Makes fun of all the commandments I drew Mocks the instructors too She makes up her own paths Always gets caught in traps Then flirts with her captors too Right in front of me too Hey Jeremiah What else can I trya She only treats me like a fool She never listened to you - oooh And at this point I don't know what else to do Hey there Mr. God I agree that's quite a load I can't believe she'd do this to you It's very obvious your love is true I'll talk to her again Let her know that you're a friend She's got to learn her lesson soon She's got to see she's on the edge of doom I'll tell her she has one last chance Deliver one of my famous rants Maybe I'll smash a jar or two Surely then she'll listen to you Maybe when she sees you gone She'll realize that she was wrong Then she'll come running back to you I really think you should go away for a few - oooh Well, at least that's what I would do Hey Jeremiah I think I'm gonna crya I feel like I've a spear running through And my hands are nailed down to boot She still refuses all my help Still runs off by herself I even had to rescue her from you-know-who And it cost me so much to pay the due She gets herself hurt every day Won't listen to a word I say Won't let me patch her up like new So I just stand and watch as she turns black and blue I'm sick of seeing her get hurt Scratched and covered in the dirt And teeth, well she's lost a few And I still don't know what to do - oooh I just don't know what to do I learned a new word recently: bombogenesis, the process by which a storm rapidly intensifies. Rhode Island (which is not an island) was recently hit by one of these storms, which brought a lot of snow and even more wind. When I went out to pick up the newspaper (which some fool had actually taken the effort to deliver), I found I could not face north at all without cold, wet, pointy bits of ice continually slamming into my eyes at speeds in excess of forty miles per hour. The next day, there were some pretty intense drifts. Snow depth ranged from practically zero inches up to six feet. The area around the house was clear, but the wind curled around it and dumped a lot of snow on our southern-facing porch. I haven’t been travelling much lately because I am taking care of my grandfather now that my grandmother has died. I am continuing to write my science fiction book and my philosophy book, but have not taken any time to draw. I am also still conflicted with which direction to take some of my other fiction ideas. In the meantime, I have decided to go ahead and publish more of my musings and observations on the blog in spite of having no true adventures to pair them with. I had wanted this blog to be about travel, but my thoughts are part of my life too. My life is in a slow season. I am also having some baffling computer problems I have to keep working around, so this delays blogging still further.
Southern Rhode Island must be the cemetery capitol of the world. I see a tiny one outside a Rite-Aid, another tucked behind a Burger King, one at the edge of a field, a big one just down the road from where I’m staying, and then I read a story in the local paper about all the cemeteries in the next town, including the one where my grandfather’s parents are buried. We went to go see them and some people my grandfather went to school with. It was an uneventful trip. The newspaper article on cemeteries was more interesting. It mentioned a mass grave where a scorned traveler had his revenge by burning down a house with dozens inside. It mentioned two women who were rumored to be vampires, possibly because they had frozen solid during the winter and had not decayed come springtime when the ground had thawed enough to bury them. It also mentioned a single, unmarked grave outside a cemetery that took some sleuthing to find out who was there. New England seems to have a lot of “layers” to it. New developments are built, new neighbors move in, roads are changed, trees grow up, and spots that used to be locally famous become inaccessible and are forgotten. My grandfather speaks of a “split” stone that one can walk through. It is still in the woods somewhere, but surrounded by homes. I’ve also read about a nearby boulder that pivoted atop another to make deep booming sounds heard long distances. Many families used to dump trash such as bottles or old frying pans on their own property. These spots hold a wealth of archaeological data. They have since been covered over and the original families are long gone, but my grandfather still remembers where some of them were. A literal reading of Genesis would imply the stars to be well under seven thousand years old, but then how is it we can see light from galaxies so far away that the light should have taken billions of years to get here? Several explanations have been presented.
Could the stars not be as far as we think? Distance is measured in different ways. The closest stars can be measured by parallax. When Earth is on one side of the sun, we see the star at one angle relative to the background stars. When the Earth is on the opposite side of the sun six months later, we see the star at a slightly different angle. Determining the distance is then a matter of trigonometry. It is hard to see how this method could fail. Determining the distance of farther stars is done using various other methods (such as the relationship of color to brightness) that are proven accurate in those cases where the stars are close enough to use parallax also. It doesn’t seem possible for astronomers’ estimates to be off by enough for all the billions of stars we see to fit into a sphere less than seven thousand light-years across. Could God have created the light from those stars already on route to us so we could see them right away? God can do anything, but putting false images in the sky makes him a liar. Astronomers have observed stars explode that were much further than a few thousand light-years. The light should not have reached us yet from whatever is left there now, which would not be a star anymore, yet we saw it as a star for many years before we saw it explode. This means that if God put the light there in the sky, he planted images of stars that never existed. If God is omnipotent and a liar, there is no hope that anything in science is true and we might as well just give up trying to learn anything about anything. This is not a very satisfactory explanation. Could the speed of light have been higher in the past? This is very unlikely. Pulsars are stars that spin very fast, sometimes thousands of times per second. They hold themselves together by being as dense as an atomic nucleus. This means they are only a few kilometers across yet have mass in excess of our sun. At those scales, gravity is able to keep them from flying apart. If the speed of light had dropped in the past, the pulses seen from these incredible stars would arrive slower than they were sent out, meaning that pulsars actually spin faster than we see. In order for light from objects fourteen billion light-years away to have reached us, the speed of light must have dropped so much that pulsars would be spinning so fast that there is no way under known physics for them to exist. Could Genesis be meant metaphorically? Might the days of creation week be longer than twenty-four hours? Perhaps, but each “day” is divided from the others by a night cycle. Also, the Genesis account has plants being created before the sun and moon. While there was already light for the plants to possibly live, the lack of a sun to produce this light just raises more questions. The most likely interpretation is that the days are very short – literally twenty-four hours. Could Genesis simply be wrong? Might the mainstream scientists be right that the universe is well in excess of ten billion years old? This is by far the most popular explanation, and I’m willing to entertain it, but could there be another? Starlight And Time: Many years ago, Dr. Russell Humphreys published a short book titled Starlight And Time, suggesting that due to the shape of our spacetime, six thousand years on Earth might have been twenty billion years at the edge of the observable universe. We know from Einstein’s theories of special relativity and general relativity that time need not run at the same rate for all observers. Whether his model makes sense I cannot tell. His book is packed with math that he never explains. This makes my crackpotometer go off. I need someone reputable to take a look at it, but I already know from overwhelming experience that mainstream scientists are heavily biased against anything that might threaten their pet theories. They are just as bad. This continues to leave me hanging. Fortunately, I don’t need to know. It isn’t as if believing the wrong thing will send me to Hell. I don’t believe that. It’s just fun to think about the possible forms reality can take. This brings me to one other possibility I thought up myself. What if time has more than one dimension? Stephen Hawking writes of something called imaginary time, which would be at right angles to normal time (think imaginary numbers on the complex-number plane). I’m not sure if that applies here, but if there is another dimension to time it could mean that billions of years passed on Earth while God experienced creation lasting only a week sideways. His ways are not our ways. Could it be that all of history is like a novel God is writing and continually refining, going back and changing the past in order to make a better story? What do you think? |
AuthorMy name is Dan. I am an author, artist, explorer, and contemplator of subjects large and small. Archives
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