In Japanese, Hebrew and all the Indo-European languages, including English, as well as languages as different as Polynesian and Bantu, speakers face towards the future. The flow of time streams by them towards the past. Not so for the Aymara, who appear to be unique in their orientation to the past and future. Their word for tomorrow, q’ipüru, has a literal meaning of “some day behind one’s back.” They would agree that time flows, but they look back at the wake of the present like passengers sitting backwards in a motorboat. Because humans share a common perceptual mechanism, our brains have all evolved to recognize the three basic components of time: duration, repetition and simultaneity. All languages express these three aspects of time, as well as the past, present and future. They are embedded in the grammar. And it’s at this level that some languages can veer off from each other profoundly.
The language of the Hopi people of the American southwest includes a verb tense not present in other languages. In his seminal 1956 book, Language, Thought and Reality, the American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf called this tense the “active segmentative aspect” because it characterized the action of wavelike or continuously emitted phenomena. In his book he gives the example of the Hopi verb nö’ya, which, in its present tense, means “several came out” as referring to persons or objects. But in its segmentative form, the verb becomes nöya’yata, which means “it is coming out in successive multitudes, gushing or spraying out,” like water coming out of a fountain. The segmentative form allows a very precise description of moving liquids or particles. Whorf felt that this new verb form allowed the Hopi to understand certain phenomena in a deeper way than we do, and he recommended that young physicists study Hopi, perhaps even learn it, in order to better conceptualize the elusive nature of quantum physics, a science that characterizes the universe in terms of particles and waves.
Formal Italian has three past tenses with progressively deeper levels of historical depth: the recent past, or trapassuto prossimo; the middle past, or past perfect, a long time ago; and the passato remoto, referring to events from quite a long time ago, at least hundreds of years. Dante’s La divina commedia was written in the passato remoto. In English there is the wonderful past pluperfect, denoting an action completed before a particular past point in time—“I had seen the owl before spring arrived.” It is the verbs, in all languages, that mediate the influence of time on our lives. By contrast, most nouns are almost entirely timeless, except when they refer to elements of time such as sundials, hours, schedules or seasons. (But time must be on our minds a lot. According to the Oxford English Corpus, time tops the list of the most common nouns in the English language.) And the only proper nouns we have for time, aside from noon and midnight, are dates. A phrase like “8:46 a.m., September 11, 2001,” sounds abstract, but it is a name for a particular point in time that everyone knows. Adjectives and adverbs can share properties of either realm, time or space: a car can move quickly, but it can also be shiny. Ultimately, it is the sum of all levels of metaphor and grammar that define the true relationship of any given language-speaking group to time.
TASTING TIME
But for all these characterizations of time, the qualities of time still elude me. What are they? What is time itself? What does it feel like? Could something like time, which is more ineffable than a vacuum, have any qualities at all? Even a vacuum, the absolute absence of anything, can be sealed inside a box, confined to a place. Time cannot. Colourless, odourless, tasteless, without shape, form or substance, it nevertheless shapes, directs and contains us. As an exercise I asked a dozen friends and acquaintances to imagine that they could grasp a handful of time. What would it sound like? I asked. Or look, feel, smell, even taste like?
There were some consistencies. As to colour, four of them agreed that time was blue, or silver-blue, though there was little agreement after that. Some of their colour associations were poetic—time was “the colour of diamonds underwater,” or “the amber of a nocturnal animal’s eyes.” Several people also agreed on the feel of time—one saying that it would feel like an oyster on the tongue and another that it would be slippery and shiny, while still another claimed that time would feel oily, or “slitherly.” A friend who refused to participate because he said he disdained synesthetic associations did mention that time sounded like a large highway from a distance. To others it sounded like the rustle of leaves or the ultrasonic calls of bats.
As to taste, well, there was hardly any agreement: saltpetre and wine, metal, Szechwan pepper sauce, capers. But it was the smell of time that seemed to have the most personal associations. It smelled like a cold, snowy day or burnt ants or elementary school cloakrooms. Everyone I asked had very private, idiosyncratic associations that were as varied as their personalities. At the personal level, time is as intimate and complex as the individual who perceives it.
As for me, I imagine that time would smell like Tutankhamen’s tomb when it was first opened in 1923. I imagine that attics and unused closets, like briefer versions of Tutankhumen’s tomb, also have the smell of time to them. These closed spaces are time capsules where months, sometimes years, pass before they are opened again. The air must have a scent of time, something above the vapours rising from the partially abandoned or rarely used objects, the camping equipment and fans, the old Halloween costumes. The interior of a closet, the disposition of the articles placed by whoever put them there, remains unchanged as all else changes. Neighbours move away, children grow up, but these things stay the same. Sometimes a decade can pass before you revisit the attic or storage space to get an old photo album or a family game. It is here, when you first open the door, that you can smell time. A time traveller has been here—yourself, when you were a little younger, perhaps a little stronger, and perhaps (you realize with some poignancy) a little more optimistic.
Chapter Six
TIME, SPACE AND ETERNITY
Eternity.
It is the sea mingled
with the sun.
—Arthur Rimbaud
When Arthur Rimbaud wrote those lines in Une saison en enfer in 1873, he was only nineteen years old, yet he already had an old soul, old enough to see eternity dance in sunlight on waves. For Rimbaud, the motion of those sun-dazzled waves contained a hypnotic secret, not just the fusion of particle and wave, of flow and time, but also a special emptiness that echoed something in his soul. He wasn’t the first poet to equate infinity with sunlight. In the fifth century B.C., the Greek poet Aeschylus described a similar oceanic vista in Prometheus Bound as the “myriad laughter of the ocean waves.”
I can’t claim to have seen eternity in a sunny ocean, but I have seen moonlight on waves at night. A more subtle spectacle, perhaps, and yet completely mesmerizing. It was years ago. I was alone in northern Ontario, on a high rock overlooking a remote lake on a summer night. The stone was still warm to the touch from the heat of the day, though it was close to midnight. A full moon had just risen and it hung over the water. There was a breeze, enough to raise small waves, so the reflection of the moon in the lake laid a dazzling path to the far shore.
I stared at that shimmering corridor for half an hour, entranced. I lost myself in a kind of reverie, and as I did the reflections on the waves transformed themselves from dancing water into a glittering loom of sparkles and points of light. I lost track of time, and perspective. There were moments when I seemed to be looking at a vertical, flashing tapestry of lights that could have been electric, they were so quick, so precise and myriad. Eventually it seemed I was looking into the heart of some vast, nocturnal computer making innumerable calculations of cosmic equations. I was outside of time and space for that half-hour, and when I finally, regretfully, left the spectacle, I was almost dizzy with what my eyes had drunk in.
There is a reason why light has such mesmeric power—it is beyond time. All light is, even the light from a firefly, or a candle. Light moves at 186,281 miles per second—which, as Einstein discovered, is the ultimate velocity in the universe. But Einstein discov
ered something else about light, something extraordinary, which is that the closer something gets to the speed of light, the slower its “on-board” time proceeds relative to the rest of us. When that object reaches the speed of light, its time-warp factor (the amount by which its on-board time slows relative to the rest of the universe) reaches infinity. In other words, for something travelling at the speed of light, time freezes.
But it gets stranger. There are other effects of time warp that don’t require reaching the speed of light, effects that show just how “local” time really is. Imagine twins. One twin leaves earth for twenty years in a spaceship that approaches the speed of light. The other stays behind. When the space-travelling twin returns, she will have aged much less than her sister has. If her spaceship travelled at 86 percent of the speed of light and she left earth in the year 2,000 for twenty years, upon her return she will have aged a mere ten years, while her twin will have aged twenty. Also, her on-board calendars will show the year to be 2010, not 2020. That’s because, for the space-bound twin, only ten years did elapse. But her time went more slowly relative to the earthbound twin. The only two “simultaneous” times that they will both be able to agree on will be the arrival and departure dates in earth time: otherwise they’ll have completely different, and relative, time experiences.
Einstein once put his theory of time warp in more prosaic language for a reporter. He said, “When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity!” In other words, the “local” time for each twin was like the “subjective” time in Einstein’s analogy. You might object that there is a universal, fixed time relative to both their timelines, but, according to Einstein, there isn’t.
This is because of the fixed velocity of light. If the spaceship the travelling twin took was moving at 86 percent of the speed of light and it flashed a light ahead of it, that light would not include the speed of the spaceship—it would still move at 186,281 miles per second! Imagine an Olympic javelin thrower. He runs as he throws the javelin to boost its speed; his velocity is added to the javelin’s velocity. But if he were throwing a light beam instead, it wouldn’t matter if he ran, stood still, or walked backwards—the light-javelin would still travel at exactly the same speed. It’s all very counterintuitive, even to scientists.
So where does the added velocity of light go? Time. Which is why the faster the spaceship goes, the more time slows down on board relative to the rest of us. And here is where things get weird. Since time-dilation effects occur when objects are travelling at appreciable fractions of the speed of light, even the electrons orbiting the nuclei of heavy metals create time-dilation effects. Scientists have suggested that the colour of gold is not due to the pigment of the metal itself. Its glitter is produced by the relativistic effects of the speed of its electrons circling the gold atoms within the metal. Gold’s very substance is slightly out of synch with our time, and that slight difference creates its lustre. But the electrons in gold move at a snail’s pace compared to those in masses of pure uranium, some of which move incrementally faster than the speed of light. The time warp causes nuclear fuel rods stored at the bottom of heavy-water pools to glow an unearthly blue. The glow is called “Cherenkov radiation,” after the physicist who discovered it.
Gravity fields also stretch time, the reason being that, in the final scheme of things, gravity is equivalent to constant acceleration. The greater the gravity at the surface of a planet or star, the more time is slowed down. If you could survive standing on the surface of a neutron star (one of the densest objects known to exist), the universe that you saw around you would be billions of years younger than the one we see. Even on a smaller body, like our earth, there is a measurable difference in the flow of time in the upper atmosphere and the surface of the earth. This was proven conclusively in 1976, when two scientists from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Robert Vessot and Martin Levine, synchronized two hydrogen maser clocks and rocketed one of them fifty miles above the earth. They discovered, with an accuracy of seventy parts in a million, that time was flowing slightly faster fifty miles above the earth than on its surface.
There are even stronger gravitational fields among the stars. The most massive of these are adjacent to black holes. If a space traveller could hover just outside a black hole and video conference with someone on earth, both space traveller and earthling would be able to see the effects of gravity/time dilation. On the space traveller’s screen, the earthling would seem to be hyper-animated, like a film on fast-forward. Even his voice would be high and squeaky. On the earthling’s screens, the space traveller would appear to be moving in slow motion, his voice low and distorted. But what would happen if the space traveller’s engines failed and he fell into the black hole, and, as he did so, he looked back at the universe? What he would see would be time outside the black hole speeded up fantastically. He would see the universe expanding and see galaxies spinning like Catherine wheels while stars whizzed by. Some stars he would see explode and wink out, while still others would be sucked into black holes. And just as he fell into oblivion, if he was lucky, he’d see the universe beginning to fade into nothingness. As Paul Davies wrote in The Last Three Minutes, his book about the end of the universe, ”A black hole is a little region of space that contains the end of time.”
STOPPING TIME
Today, a clear, sunny summer day, I tried to imagine what it would be like if time stopped. At first I imagined the whole world frozen, like statuary—the rustling of the leaves of the tree in my front yard rendered completely still, as if transposed into a museum diorama, that car turning the corner also arrested, the faint blue cloud of exhaust hovering motionless at the end of the tailpipe. I realized that my body, too, could not be immune from this spell. I’d be frozen like the leaves and the car and I would stare out of myself like some sort of conscious statue. Following the fantasy further, I realized that if time had really stopped, I wouldn’t be able to move my eyes. “So, I couldn’t look around. Big deal,” I thought. I could still enjoy the scene my eyes had fixed on, couldn’t I? But then it struck me that if time had stopped, how could it still be running in my mind? How could I have thoughts ? How could impulses still be moving along the nerves in my brain? Like the Greeks, who attributed rational thought to Cronos, I understood that thought would be impossible. Time, and any sort of awareness, would cease.
And then it occurred to me that time could stop, and restart a little later, and we’d never know it. We are so completely enmeshed in time that if it stopped we’d have no way of knowing that it had. I had another idea. What if time was stopping every once in a while? Perhaps time isn’t a continuous flow, but a series of stops and starts. Time could stop for a few seconds, or even a thousand years, and within that timeless period we’d be like unconscious statues—the car forever turning the corner, the motionless leaves. Would beings from other time dimensions take tours through our world to gawk at us?
I wondered if, as David Finkelstein’s speculations about chronons suggest, time wasn’t like the quanta in quantum physics, where light and mass come in small, discrete units that are neither waves nor particles, but something else, like mathematical points. Perhaps time unfolds in quantum pulses, and between each pulse it stops, though these “time stoppages” might be so short in duration that they would be undetectable, even if we had some way of detecting them. Our equipment, of course (at least according to my fantasy), also being operated by time, would likewise be oblivious to having been “outside” of time.
So then I asked myself, what if the whole universe were linked to this quantum pulse of time-on, time-off, like a cosmic, universal clock ticking? In other words, what if everything in the universe stopped and started, in a sense disappearing and reappearing like a stroboscopic light that used matter instead of light? Would this pulse transcend local time and become a sort of universal time? If it were 2:00 p.m. “universal time” on earth, would it als
o be 2:00 p.m. “universal time” on Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the sun, 4.22 light years distant? I’d like to think so.
It’s appealing to imagine that someone on Proxima Centauri could look at a clock, or however they measure their time, and say, “Right now, on earth, someone is also looking at a clock, even though we are light years apart.” This sense of a universal time—an omniscient and ever-present moment continuous throughout the universe—is more like a belief than a possibility. It is the closest thing I have to an article of faith, an idea of God. If a super-being tapped into such a universal time, that being would know what was going on in all parts of the universe in a simultaneity that transcended the speed of light. A “now” that was everywhere.
But that is impossible. Unfortunately for my fantasy, and as we have seen, Albert Einstein proved that a universal “now” is impossible, that “now” is totally local and relative. Einstein believed in God, but probably not one that could know everything. Relative velocities and the speed of light are absolute limits, and it turns out that light is the closest we can get to that absolute, the infinite. Miraculously, we are bathed in it every day. So what would it be like to move at the speed of light, to be a photon—half wave, half particle—slipping through space on your way to infinity? What would time be like for it?
From light’s perspective, the universe it illuminates is continuously changing like a time-lapse film. In fact, it looks very much like the view our unfortunate astronaut had as he passed through the outer edge of the black hole. Stars are born, age and explode in minutes. Spinning galaxies collide and recede dizzily into space.
Soul of the World Page 10
