by James Gleick
For space, the deeper reality is the network of relationships among all the entities that fill it. Things are related to other things; they are connected, and it is the relationships that define space rather than the other way around. This is not a new perspective. It goes back at least to Newton’s great rival Leibniz, who refused to accept the view of time and space as containers in which everything is situated—an absolute background for the universe. He preferred to treat them as relations between objects: “Space is nothing else, but That Order or Relation; and is nothing at all without Bodies, but the Possibility of placing them.” Empty space is not space at all, Leibniz would say, nor would time exist in an empty universe, because time is the measure of change. “I hold space to be something merely relative, as time is,” wrote Leibniz. “Instants, considered without the things, are nothing at all.” With the triumph of the Newtonian program, Leibniz’s view almost faded from view.
To appreciate the network-centered, relational view of space, we need look no further than the connected, digital world. The internet, like the telegraph a century before, is commonly said to “annihilate” space. It does this by making neighbors of the most distant nodes in a network that transcends physical dimension. Instead of six degrees of separation we have billions of degrees of connectedness. As Smolin put it:
We live in a world in which technology has trumped the limitations inherent in living in a low-dimensional space….From a cell-phone perspective, we live in a 2.5 billion–dimensional space, in which very nearly all our fellow humans are our nearest neighbors. The Internet, of course has done the same thing. The space separating us has been dissolved by a network of connections.
So maybe it’s easier now for us to see how things really are. This is what Smolin believes: that time is fundamental but space an illusion; “that the real relationships that form the world are a dynamical network”; and that the network itself, along with everything in it, can and must evolve over time.
He presents a program for further study, based on a notion of “preferred global time” that extends throughout the universe and defines a boundary between past and future. It imagines a family of observers, spread throughout the universe, and a preferred state of rest, against which motion can be measured. Even if “now” need not be the same to different observers, it retains its meaning for the cosmos. These observers, with their persistent sense of a present moment, are a problem to be investigated, rather than set aside.
The universe does what it does. We perceive change, perceive motion, and try to make sense of the teeming, blooming confusion. The hard problem, in other words, is consciousness. We’re back where we started, with Wells’s Time Traveller, insisting that the only difference between time and space is that “our consciousness moves along it,” just before Einstein and Minkowski said the same. Physicists have developed a love-hate relationship with the problem of the self. On the one hand it’s none of their business—leave it to the (mere) psychologists. On the other hand, trying to extricate the observer—the measurer, the accumulator of information—from the cool description of nature has turned out to be impossible. Our consciousness is not some magical onlooker; it is a part of the universe it tries to contemplate.
The mind is what we experience most immediately and what does the experiencing. It is subject to the arrow of time. It creates memories as it goes. It models the world and continually compares these models with their predecessors. Whatever consciousness will turn out to be, it’s not a moving flashlight illuminating successive slices of the four-dimensional space-time continuum. It is a dynamical system, occurring in time, evolving in time, able to absorb bits of information from the past and process them, and able as well to create anticipation for the future.
Augustine was right all along. The modern philosopher J. R. Lucas, in his Treatise on Time and Space, comes back around: “We cannot say what time is, because we know already, and our saying could never match up to all that we already know.” So was the Buddha (as translated via Borges): “The man of a past moment has lived, but he does not live nor will he live; the man of a future moment will live, but he has not lived nor does he now live; the man of the present moment lives, but he has not lived nor will he live.” We know that the past is gone—it is finished, done, signed, sealed, and delivered. Our access to it is compromised, limited by memories and physical evidence—fossils, paintings in attics, mummies, and old ledgers. We know that eyewitnesses are unreliable and records can be tampered with or misread. The unrecorded past no longer exists. Still, experience persuades us that the past happened and keeps happening. The future is different. The future is yet to come; it is open; not everything can happen but many things can. The world is still under construction.
What is time? Things change, and time is how we keep track.
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*1 Die Zeit ist nicht. But he adds, Es gibt Zeit. Time is given.
*2 Beth Gleick, Time Is When (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1960). The present author’s mother.
*3 “Time!”
*4 “By a curious caprice,” wrote the astronomer Charles Nordmann in 1924, “the French language, different from others, designates by a single word, the word temps, two very different things: the time which goes by and the weather, or state of the atmosphere. This is one of the peculiarities which give to our language its hermetic elegance, its concentrated sobriety, its elliptic charm.”
*5 Even this attempt at definition proved tricky. A test case came on August 19, 1898, at 8:15 p.m. (Greenwich mean time), when a man named Gordon was nicked by the police in Bristol for riding his bicycle without a lamp. The local law clearly stated that every person riding a bicycle (which fell under the definition of “carriage”) shall carry a lamp, so lighted as to afford adequate means of signaling the approach of the bicycle, during the period between one hour after sunset and one hour before sunrise. On the evening in question, sunset in Greenwich had occurred at 7:13 p.m., so Gordon was caught riding lampless a full hour and two minutes after sunset.
This did not sit well with the accused man, because the sun set ten minutes later in Bristol than in Greenwich: 7:23, not 7:13. Nonetheless, the justices of the city of Bristol, relying on the Statutes (Definition of Time) Act, found him guilty. After all, they reasoned, everyone would benefit by having “a readily ascertained time of lighting up.”
With the help of his solicitors, Darley & Cumberland, poor Gordon appealed. The question before the Court of Appeals was described as “an astronomical one.” The appellate court saw it his way. They ruled that sunset is not a “period of time” but a physical fact. Justice Channell was insistent: “According to the decision of the Justices, as it stands, a man on an unlighted bicycle may be looking at the sun in the heavens, and yet be liable to be convicted of the offence of not having his lamp lighted an hour after sunset.”
*6 “If you stop, in dealing with such words, with their definition, thinking that to be an intellectual finality, where are you? Stupidly staring at a pretentious sham! ‘Deus est Ens, a se, extra et supra omne genus, necessarium, unum, infinite perfectum, simplex, immutabile, immensum, aeternum, intelligens,’ etc.,—wherein is such a definition really instructive? It means less than nothing, in its pompous robe of adjectives.”—William James
*7 Hooke proceeded to dig himself into a hole. “I say, we shall find a necessity of supposing some other Organ to apprehend the Impression that is made by Time.” What organ? “That which we generally call Memory, which Memory I suppose to be as much an Organ as the Eye, Ear or Nose.” Where is this organ, then? “Somewhere near the Place where the Nerves from the other Senses meet.”
*8 Lee Smolin tries to escape the circularity in Time Reborn by redefining “clock”: “For our purposes, a clock is any device that reads out a sequence of increasing numbers.” Then again, a person counting to one hundred is not a clock.
*9 McTaggart’s name bears explaining. He was christened (by his parents, the Ellises of Wiltshire) John McTaggart Ellis, after his fat
her’s uncle, Sir John McTaggart, a childless Scottish baronet. Sir John then bequeathed a considerable fortune to the Ellises on the condition that they take his surname. In the case of young John, this led to a redundancy. The double dose of “McTaggart” never seems to have bothered him, and he, not the baronet, is the McTaggart most remembered today.
*10 Where did this come from, this idea of a “Copenhagen interpretation”? First, “Copenhagen” is cool kids’ shorthand for Niels Bohr. For several decades, Copenhagen was to quantum theory what the Vatican is to Catholicism. As for “interpretation,” it seems to have started out in German, only the word was Geist, as in Kopenhagener Geist der Quantentheorie (Werner Heisenberg, 1930).
*11 “That there is a place for the present moment in physics becomes obvious when I take my experience of it as the reality it clearly is to me and recognize that space-time is an abstraction that I construct to organize such experiences,” says David Mermin.
THIRTEEN
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Our Only Boat
Story is our only boat for sailing on the river of time.
—Ursula K. Le Guin (1994)
YOUR NOW IS not my now. You’re reading a book. I’m writing a book. You’re in my future, yet I know what comes next—some of it—and you don’t.*1
Then again, you can be a time traveler in your own book. If you’re impatient, you can skip ahead to the ending. When memory fails you, just turn back the page. It’s all there in writing. You’re well acquainted with time traveling by page turning, and so, for that matter, are the characters in your books. “I don’t know how to put it exactly,” says Aomame in Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, “but there is a sense of time wavering irregularly when you try to forge ahead. If what is in front is behind, and what is behind is in front, it doesn’t really matter, does it?” Soon she appears to be changing her own reality—but you, the reader, can’t change history, nor can you change the future. What will be, will be. You are outside it all. You are outside of time.
If this seems a bit meta, it is. In the era of time travel rampant, storytelling has gotten more complicated.
Literature creates its own time. It mimics time. Until the twentieth century, it did that mainly in a sensible, straightforward, linear way. The stories in books usually began at the beginning and ended at the end. A day might pass or many years but usually in order. Time was mostly invisible. Occasionally, though, time came to the foreground. From the beginning of storytelling, there have been stories told inside other stories, and these shift time as well as place: flashbacks and flash-forwards. So aware are we of storytelling that sometimes a character in a story will feel like a character in a story, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, at time’s mercy: Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…Or perhaps we here in real life develop a nagging suspicion that we are mere characters in someone else’s virtual reality. Players performing a script. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern imagine they are masters of their fate, and who are we to know better? The omniscient narrator of Michael Frayn’s 2012 novel Skios says of the characters living in his story, “If they had been living in a story, they might have guessed that someone somewhere had the rest of the book in his hands, and that what was just about to happen was already there in the printed pages, fixed, unalterable, solidly existent. Not that it would have helped them very much, because no one in a story ever knows they are.”
In a story one thing comes after another. That is its defining feature. The story is a recital of events. We want to know what happens next. We keep listening, we keep reading, and with any luck the king lets Scheherazade live for one night more. At least this was the traditional view of narrative: “Events arranged in their time sequence,” as E. M. Forster said in 1927—“dinner coming after breakfast, Tuesday after Monday, decay after death, and so on.” In real life we enjoy a freedom that the storyteller lacks. We lose track of time, we drift and dream. Our past memories pile up, or spontaneously intrude on our thoughts, our expectations for the future float free, but neither memories nor hopes organize themselves into a timeline. “It is always possible for you or me in daily life to deny that time exists and act accordingly even if we become unintelligible and are sent by our fellow citizens to what they choose to call a lunatic asylum,” said Forster. “But it is never possible for a novelist to deny time inside the fabric of his novel.” In life we may hear the ticking clock or we may not; “whereas in a novel,” he said, “there is always a clock.”
Not anymore. We have evolved a more advanced time sense—freer and more complex. In a novel there may be multiple clocks, or no clocks, conflicting clocks and unreliable clocks, clocks running backward and clocks spinning aimlessly. “The dimension of time has been shattered,” wrote Italo Calvino in 1979; “we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. We can rediscover the continuity of time only in the novels of that period when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded, a period that lasted no more than a hundred years.” He doesn’t say exactly when the hundred years ended.
Forster might have known he was oversimplifying, with modernist movements rising self-consciously all around. He had read Emily Brontë, who rebelled against chronological time in Wuthering Heights. He had read Laurence Sterne, whose Tristram Shandy had “a hundred difficulties which I have promised to clear up, and a thousand distresses and domestic misadventures crowding in upon me thick and threefold” and threw off the shackles of tense—“A cow broke in (tomorrow morning) to my uncle Toby’s fortifications”—and even diagrammed his temporal divagation with a timeline of squiggles, back and forth, up and around.
Credit 13.1
Forster had read Proust, too. But I’m not sure he had gotten the message: that time was busting out all over.
It had seemed that space was our natural dimension: the one we move about in, the one we sense directly. To Proust we became denizens of the time dimension: “I would describe men, even at the risk of giving them the appearance of monstrous beings, as occupying in Time a much greater place than that so sparingly conceded to them in Space, a place indeed extended beyond measure…like giants plunged in the years, they touch at once those periods of their lives—separated by so many days—so far apart in Time.”*2 Marcel Proust and H. G. Wells were contemporaries, and while Wells invented time travel by machine, Proust invented a kind of time travel without one. We might call it mental time travel—and meanwhile psychologists have appropriated that term for purposes of their own.
Robert Heinlein’s time traveler, Bob Wilson, revisits his past selves—conversing with them and modifying his own life story—and in his way the narrator of In Search of Lost Time, sometimes named Marcel, does that, too. Proust, or Marcel, has a suspicion about his existence, perhaps a suspicion of mortality: “that I was not situated somewhere outside of Time, but was subject to its laws, just like the people in novels who, for that reason, used to depress me when I read of their lives, down at Combray, in the fastness of my wicker chair.”
“Proust upsets the whole logic of narrative representation,” says Gérard Genette, one of the literary theorists who attempted to cope by creating a whole new field of study called narratology. A Russian critic and semioticist, Mikhail Bakhtin, devised the concept of “chronotope” (“time-space,” openly borrowed from Einsteinian spacetime) in the 1930s to express the inseparability of the two in literature: the mutual influence they exert upon each other. “Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible,” he wrote; “likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.” The difference is that spacetime is just what it is, whereas chronotopes admit as many possibilities as our imaginations allow. One universe may be fatalistic, another may be free. In one, time is linear; in the next, time is a circle, with all our failures, all our discoveries doomed to be repeated. In one, a man retains his youthful beauty while his picture ages in the att
ic; in the next, our hero grows backward from senescence to infancy. One story may be ruled by machine time, the next by psychological time. Which time is true? All, or none?
Borges reminds us that Schopenhauer asserted that life and dreams are pages from the same book. To read them in their proper order is to live, but to browse among them is to dream.
The twentieth century gave storytelling a roisterous temporal complexity like nothing that had been seen before. We don’t have enough tenses. Or rather, we don’t have names for all the tenses we create.*3 “In what was to have been the future”—that simple clause is the opening of Madeleine Thien’s novel Certainty. Proust lines a temporal path with mirrors:
Sometimes passing in front of the hotel he remembered the rainy days when he used to bring his nursemaid that far, on a pilgrimage. But he remembered them without the melancholy that he then thought he would surely some day savor on feeling that he no longer loved her. For this melancholy, projected in anticipation prior to the indifference that lay ahead, came from his love. And this love existed no more.
Memories of anticipation, anticipation of memories. To make sense of the time loops narratologists draw symbolic diagrams. We may leave the details to the technicians and savor the new possibilities. Mixing memory and desire. The point is that for novelists as much as for physicists the timescape began to replace the landscape. The church of Marcel’s childhood is, for him, “an edifice occupying a space with, so to speak, four dimensions—the fourth being Time—extending over the centuries its nave which, from bay to bay, from chapel to chapel, seemed to vanquish and penetrate not only a few yards but epoch after epoch from which it emerged victorious.” The other great modernists—especially Joyce and Woolf—likewise made time their canvas and their subject. For all of them, Phyllis Rose has observed, “the prose line wandered in time and space, with any moment in the present acting as a kind of diving platform offering access to a lake of memory, anticipation, and association.” Storytelling is unchronological. It is anachronistic. If you are Proust, the narrative of life blends into the life: “life being so unchronological, so anachronistic in its disordering of our days.” The narrative itself is the time machine, and memory is the fuel.
