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CHAPTER 1

WHAT TIME IS IT?

Clocks slay time ... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.

— William Faulkner

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

— Henry David Thoreau

It is impossible to write a book about time travel without first addressing time itself. What do we really know about this crazy little thing called time? We know that time is an ingrained and significant part of our existence. Most of us live our lives according to the ticking of a clock, the number of days on a calendar, and the order of events that pepper our lives. We know that we had a past and that we are living in the present. We hope beyond hope that we will be around for the future. We want more time. In fact, most people will tell you that the two things they desire most in life are love and money. But when all is said and done, the reality is, we want more time to pursue love and money, and time to enjoy the fruits of our labors. Beyond this scant bit of knowledge, how much do we truly know about the mechanics of time?

Measuring Time

What exactly is time, and how do we measure it? Taken to the extreme, time to us is really nothing but a way of measuring what we are doing. It's a record-keeper of the events of our lives, all of which conspire to unendingly move forward in a linear fashion. This measurement of events, or intervals, as the Greeks suggested, can be broken down into smaller and smaller units, such as years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds, and milliseconds. The measurement of time can also be built up into bigger and bigger units, such as millennia, eras, ages, and epochs. Technological progression has allowed us to design means to more accurately measure the passage of time. The invention of recording devices such as sundials and clocks are simply humanity's attempt to not only keep time, but also possibly to gain control of it. If we could tell how much time was passing, we would then be able to best determine how to use it — or not use it.

Units of Time

In our naive arrogance, we often believe that we have achieved ultimate mastery regarding the knowledge of our reality and very existence. The truth is that we know very little. Even if we think we know what space is, how does that correlate to our understanding of time? And if the two are intertwined (and many scientists believe they are), can changes to one affect the other? This creates a philosophical and scientific paradigm of sorts. If space always existed, then time must have as well — or did matter and time not exist until the moment of the Big Bang?

Maybe time is just change. Before the Big Bang, there was nothing. Afterward, there was expanding change as space and time came into existence. Yet does this mean that if the universe one day collapses back into the nothingness from which it came, space, but also time, would cease to be?

Maybe time is motion. In a fundamental sense, time measures motion, and motion is itself a kind of change. A change in the motion of an object implies that time has passed, the time from the moment the object was at one place, and then another, or the time that the object was one thing, and then became another.

But to keep it simple, time is how we give order to the sequence of events that make up our lives, and the duration of each event, including the amount of time between them. As science fiction writer Ray Cummings wrote way back in 1922, long before others were credited with his brilliant insight, "Time ... is what keeps everything from happening at once!" We all buy into this concept, as in the Newtonian notion of "absolute time," in which time is considered universal, "with a unique, universally agreed upon notion of simultaneity of events and a unique, universally agreed upon time interval between any two events." That is how Kip S. Thorne described it in his book Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy. Makes sense to all of us.

Is Time Real?

The problem is, time may not even be real at all. There was a time when science labeled time as fixed, real, and an inherent part of the cosmic structure. Time was considered to be a fixed tangible that was neither flexible nor changeable. Philosophy asked if there could be more than one kind of time — the real firm kind of time described by science and a fundamental property of the universe, and a time that related directly to light speed; and the subjective perception and experience of time. In the former, there is no implication of human alteration of time. We have no power and no control. The latter implied that time only goes as slow or as fast as we subjectively experience it, something we discuss in more detail in Chapter 8. The former was Newtonian time — the stuff of realists. The latter was the stuff of philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, who suggested that time was neither an event nor a thing. Kant believed that time could not be measured, and therefore could not be traveled. Are you confused yet? Seriously? You Kant be. (Sorry — couldn't resist.)

Philosophers struggled to deal with time long before scientists came along and forced them to rethink everything based upon new discoveries and understandings of the way our world works. Until that point, time was all about looking at the past as what happened and is now gone, the future as what will happen and has not yet arrived, and the present, which is the gift of the moment. The now. And the now was really all we ever had, was it not? The arrow of time shot forward, but the only true experience of time we ever had in a conscious sense was the present moment one. We love the way physicist Fred Alan Wolf describes this in his book Time Loops and Space Twists when he says: "We think of the past as having slipped out of existence, whereas the future is even more shadowy, its details still unformed. In this simple picture, the 'now' of our conscious awareness glides steadily onward, transforming events that were once in the unformed future into the concrete but fleeting reality of the present, and thence relegating them to the fixed past."

We love time. We hate time. And for the same reasons: because it seems out of our control, even as it gives order to our lives.

Time for a Song

We spend so much time thinking about time, we even sing about time all the time! Remember some of these popular songs about the temporal dimension?

"Time in a Bottle" — Jim Croce

"Time After Time" — Cyndi Lauper

"Does Anybody Really Know What Time it Is?" — Chicago

"Time Is on My Side" — The Rolling Stones

"Time Won't Let Me" — The Outsiders

"Time Passages" — Al Stewart

"As Time Goes By" — Jimmy Durante

"Too Much Time on My Hands" — Styx

"It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" — Andy Williams

"Time Has Come Today" — The Chambers Bros.

"No Time" — Guess Who

"The Times of Your Life" — Paul Anka

"Time Warp" — Rocky Horror Picture Show

"Funny How Time Slips Away" — Willie Nelson

"Time of Your Life" — Green Day

"For the Good Times" — Ray Price

"More Today Than Yesterday" — Spiral Staircase

"Time" — Pink Floyd

"Crying Time" — Ray Charles

"Time of the Season" — The Zombies

"Second Time Around" — Frank Sinatra

"Funny How Time Flies" — Janet Jackson

"Remember the Time" — Michael Jackson

"Anytime" — Journey

"It's Too Late" — Carole King

"It Only Takes a Minute" — Tavares

"Seasons of Love/525,600 Minutes" — Rent

"The Age of Aquarius" — Hair

"Day by Day" — Godspell

"Time Is Tight" — Booker T and the MGs

"Tomorrow" — Annie

"The Way We Were" — Barbra Streisand

"It's Just a Matter of Time" — Brook Benton

"This Is the Time" — Billy Joel

"Yesterday" — The Beatles

"Turn! Turn! Turn!" — The Byrds

"Always and Forever" — Heatwave

"At Last" — Etta James

Meanwhile, religion stated that there might be different "times" for different cultures. The speedy life of busy New Yorkers might be measured in time far differently from the dreamtime of the Aborigines. Time might be linked to belief and action. It might be part of the Maya of illusion in the Buddhist tradition. Heck, even good ol' Einstein himself stated, "The distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one." Thus, the timelessness often described by those who attain deep spiritual or meditative states may be nothing more than the lifting of this veil of illusion. Does time shape our concept of reality? Or does our reality shape our concept of time?

The Arrow of Time

Time is analogous to an arrow. Consider the idea of the arrow flying in one direction only. However, it is made up of three elements: past, present, and future. Once the arrow is set free, its trajectory cannot be changed, or can it? Something can step in front of the arrow (and hope it's not sharp!), suggesting that the future might be more malleable than we think (and possible in time travel terms). But the past trajectory cannot be changed, because it happened and is over and done with. The arrow, then, is really always only in the present because, as it moves, the past falls away and the future is about to become. The now keeps on going, as many metaphysicians tell us, and the present is really all there is. Using this analogy, it would appear almost as if time consists of an eternity of present moments. Nothing happens anytime but in the now.

In his book Time Loops and Space Twists physicist Fred Alan Wolf writes that "We usually put the facts of our lives into a tabulated form we call temporal order, tending to compare the instant moments of our lives with moments to come or those have gone by." He goes on to explain how we use space to help us do this tabulation, as when we say "I will meet you here, then." Then we can look around and see if where we are is the same or different from where we were or where we hope to be. And often we link space to time, as it should be, by saying things like "Meet me in an hour on the corner by the deli."

When Einstein came along, his theories of relativity and general relativity as well as his work with light and speed of light limitations forever changed our perception of and, ultimately, the overall face of time. Relativity states that two simultaneously occurring events, when observed from one point of view will appear to occur at different moments when viewed from another point of view, provided the second observer is moving relative to the first. Wolf explains that because of relativity, even the concept of a now is truly not an absolute, because "one person's now is simultaneously another's future and past, provided the two are simply moving relative to each other. Throw in the invariant speed of light, and things get even more interesting. Einstein postulated that the closer an object comes to traveling at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second), the more time would appear to slow down from the perspective of someone who was not moving in relation to the object. This slowing of time due to motion is called time dilation.

Time, motion, change, lightspeed, relativity. We'll revisit Einstein's views on time, and time travel, a bit more in depth later. First, let's explore a little bit more about time itself.

Is time a dimension? We know that we exist in a three-dimensional physicality. We have three spatial dimensions of height, width, and depth. So if time also measures something, like motion and change, does it by default become a dimension of its own? This fourth dimension is temporal, and yet directly interlocked with the spatial. Just imagine standing on a New York street telling a friend to meet you for pizza in an hour. You would tell your friend where you are in a spatial sense, but also what time to be there in a temporal sense. And if he or she got the spatial and temporal together according to your directions, you would enjoy a great Brooklyn-style pizza and an ice-cold beer with a friend.

An Ancient Look at Time

In my studies of ancient cultures, I was surprised to learn that many of them view time in ways that seem quite different from the ways I had been accustomed to conceptualizing it. For example, in modern Western cultures we typically think of time as a kind of linear progression, based on a future that lies ahead of us and a past that slowly trails out behind us. But in societies such as the modern-day African tribe from Mali called the Dogon, or the Na-Khi of Tibet and China, the instinctive conception is that the future lies behind us and the past ahead of us. Though this mindset may seem counter-intuitive at first, it makes better sense if we consider it in the proper way. For example, try to envision your ancestors and relatives as a long line of passengers riding together on a bus. Envision the oldest of your ancestors — your great- great-grandparents — getting off the bus first, followed by your great-grandparents, then your grandparents, then your parents, and, finally, you and your siblings, followed by your eventual offspring. Thought of in this way, it becomes much easier to imagine your ancestors (the past) as the ones who stand before you and your descendants (the future) as the ones who are destined to follow you.

Consistent with our modern notion of linear time, it was common among ancient societies in Europe, native tribes in the Americas, and other societies around the world to associate time with the image of a river. It is easy to see how the movement of time at its steady pace in only one direction might be compared to the flow of water from the headwaters of a river to its mouth. Likewise, time has been alternately associated with the concept of an arrow — an object that also moves in a straight line and at a steady rate, but again in only one defined direction.

Many cultures of the Eastern traditions conceptualized time not as a line, but as a circle. One of the earliest depictions of time — dating from the Neolithic era in China (around 6000 BC) — was as a serpent or a dragon, described in myth as eating its own tail. Similar concepts existed among other cultures such as the Egyptians and Hebrews and even persisted thousands of years later in Greek mythology, where the serpent was given the name Uroboros, derived from Greek words meaning "tail eating."

It is consistent with this worldview that we find concepts of time expressed in many of the earliest ancient hieroglyphic languages — including those of ancient Egypt and ancient China and Tibet — in words that center on the figure of a circle with a dot in the center. In some ancient religions, such as the Vedic tradition of India, the continuum of time is also measured in grand cycles that would be comparable to, but on another level of order greater than, the familiar centuries, years, months, and days of our everyday experience. These very large recurring periods (roughly 26,000 years) of the Vedic tradition are referred to as the Great Year and are thought to relate to a very slow apparent rotation of the constellations that astronomers call precession. The Vedic teaching is that humanity proceeds through long epochs called ages. During the very long cycle of the Great Year, humanity is thought to go through periods in which the capabilities of individuals increase and then diminish, similar to the normal daily periods of wakefulness, rest, and sleep that might occur in a normal day, and comparable to the familiar agricultural cycles of growth and dormancy that happen every year. These long stages of humanity are said by some to be governed by the conceptual "seasons" of this lengthy Great Year rotation.

Ancient European societies such as the Celtic culture are thought to have associated the symbol of the spiral with concepts of time. Accordingly, the Celtic year was described as "spiraling into autumn." The Tabwa tribe in Africa also conceived of time as a spiral and associated it with the shape of a shell that moved clockwise when viewed from the outside and counter-clockwise when viewed from the inside. It is interesting to note that that some modern-day geologists also find it useful to depict long periods of geologic time as a spiral.

For many ancient cultures, such as the Vedic, Buddhist, and Dogon, traditional concepts of space and time were considered to be an illusion — a mere "reflection" or "image" (the Dogon say a "correct image") of a more fundamental reality that resides on another, more fundamental plane of existence. In fact, certain events that transpired during the creation of the universe and of matter were considered to be eternal, in that they effectively existed "outside of" the bounds of time, or were said to have come about "before" the creation of time. If our sincere belief is in time as an illusion, then it would seem that we might be able to train ourselves to see beyond that illusion — just as one can learn to "look past" an optical illusion and see the vase instead of the faces — and effectively step "outside" of the constraints of time. The Vedics actually have a concept that expresses this very notion called kala-vancana, or literally "time-cheating."

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Excerpted from "This Book is from the Future"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Marie D. Jones and Larry Flaxman.
Excerpted by permission of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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