What Time is it? Is it only Now?(Kevin Hughes) Aloha Gang,

Bear with me on this one, as it is about TIME, and we all know how fuzzy that is. LOL Einstein once said that even TIME is relative. He did with a quaint metaphor:

“Have a young pretty girl sit on your lap for 20 minutes, or sit on a hot oven for 20 minutes. Time will seem to pass at different rates.” LOL

We all have experienced that in some manner. An hour walking on the beach holding hands with someone you love, is much different than being locked in a Time Share sales pitch. Sometimes, TIME flies, other times, TIME drags . If you are really interested in a book, or movie, or person, or project, you look up and go: “Oh, my, gosh, look at the time! It flew by.” Other times, like the Cookie Monster in that Award winning commercial, you put the cookies in the oven to bake, and TIME seems to just sit still.


But that isn’t the kind of TIME I have been pondering. I have been thinking about a much broader context for TIME, like the age of the Universe, and the fact that at the Quantum Level, Time may not even exist. At least as we know it. It appears for most Quantum particles, there is only NOW. All that is, is. I know, I know, it hurts the mind to think about this, and we are skipping all the paradoxes of TIME travel. We all know that if we went back in TIME, and killed our Grandfather in a fit of pique, well, we wouldn’t be here in the future, so who went back? That stuff isn’t just the fodder for Science Fiction Plots, it is the stuff that keeps physicists up late at night. For why should the arrow of time only move in one direction? And why only for us? It isn’t an issue for sub atomic particles.

Life is subjected to TIME too. But what is a Lifetime? For us, maybe 80 years or so. Isaac Asimov, the prolific writer of both Fiction and Non Fiction, got rid of using years for measuring Lifetimes on Earth- at least for animals with a heart. He came to the conclusion that heartbeats (yes, heartbeats) was a much better measure of a Lifetime. It turns out that all animals with a heart, get about the same number of heartbeats- around a billion or so, then- poof! We are done. No more beats, no more life. A hummingbird uses up its billion beats in a few years, human take “three score plus ten”, and tortoises, take a few centuries. And now it seems that some Sharks that live in very cold water, take four to six hundred years to reach their allotted billion beats.

What I want to talk about, and throw around is actual TIME as we know it: seconds, minutes, hours, days, years, decades, centuries, millennia, aeons, and the other side of the scale where TIME is unbelievably fast: micro seconds, nanoseconds, pita seconds, yettaseconds..and so on down the line. A linear progression - we think. So lets start with a big number, the Age of the Universe: 13.82 Billion Years (with a supposed error rate of 59 million years - give or take). For most of us, we just round up: 14 Billion Years.

Now here is where my thinking about TIME begins, so if you made it this far, this is the “meat” or “baloney” part of my thinking. LOL

If we go back 14 Billion years to the “Big Bang”, the Singularity, or the Beginning of TIME- which are three ways to say the same thing. LOL Well we know that number by two different methods: Light, and Cosmic Background Radiation. Actually, we couldn’t be as precise about when the Universe began using just light, as well, Light took a while to develop. But radiation was there from the beginning. So the 13.82 billion year ago starting point is actually a bit older than a lit Universe was. But for this mind wandering trip about TIME, we can stick withs the 14 Billion Number.


Now, the nearest Star, is Four Light years away. (Again, we round it up) Which means we are seeing that star as it was four years ago. Not now. It may not even be there now. In four years, we will know for sure. Except once again, it will be from four years ago. So the closest we can get to seeing light in real time from a Star, is our Sun. And that my friends, is nine minutes ago. If the Sun stops shining, we have about ten minutes before we will know. Unfortunately, once it stops shining, we will live long enough to notice, and it won’t be a pretty demise, nor will it be quick for most of us. We will live long enough to whine and complain about the cold and dark. The point being not the dystopian ending, but simply the fact that as far as TIME goes, NOW is a very prickly tentative concept.

Scientists, mathematicians, and physicists, of all kinds, regularly accept that SPACETIME, that funny curved space concept that Einstein came up with, where gravity bends the fabric of both TIME and SPACE using gravity to bend them in to well, our Universe. We use those equations to determine how big the Universe is, if it is expanding, or accelerating, or shrinking. Currently, most folks think we are expanding at a much faster rate then we thought do to a funny little glitch way back in TIME called: Inflation. Other’s think we are just a “bubble”, “brane", or a series of constant “Bangs- a tiny few even think we may be a “one of.”

(Hang in there, get up and walk around. Have a glass of wine, or another one. LOL I am getting to my point. Give me TIME. LOL )

Alright here we go: TIME as we know it, only goes in one direction - forward. None of us grow younger. Broken things do not suddenly reform as an unbroken coffee mug, after having fallen to the kitchen floor and shattering. (Again, we have to kind of ignore Quantum Chromodynamics, were possibilities rule. A cup might just indeed fall back up to the table and reconstruct itself, it is just highly unlikely. LOL ) This simple fact that things age, fall apart, and move apart, is what Scientists call : Entropy. In layman’s terms (like me) it is simply the ARROW of TIME. The equations say that it should, like any good equation, be able to work in both directions ( Like a number line with negative numbers, zero and positive numbers).

But TIME does not do that. Not in our experience. WE can look far into our past, but can’t go there. We can look a bit in the future and make a prediction - for where the moon will be tomorrow at noon, but we can’t guarantee that we will be here tomorrow. So predictions kind of have a fuzzy precision based on the premise that if nothing changes, the moon will be there at noon tomorrow. But we might have gotten hit by the proverbial bus on the way home, so it is irrelevant to us. Maybe.

Now here is my weird theory. ( I can hear you all practically shouting in unison: “Finally, you rat bastard!” I am sorry but all that was necessary for this simple statement:

I think (drum roll please) that there is no past. None. All that 14 billion years of light and radiation is gone. All TIME is now. The light left there 14 billion years ago, but got here…now. In some weird Einstein like twist of SpaceTime, TIME itself loops in “front” of us to give us the sensation of TIME passing. Here is a little thought image that might help you see what I think I mean:

Picture one of those hamster balls. You know the clear plastic sphere that rolls across the floor as the tiny hamster churns its stubby little legs to get the doggone thing moving. The clear ball contains the hamsters entire world inside, and it moves with him as he churns away. I think we may have a lot in common with that hamster (in my case, even down to the stubby churning legs) The Universe is Rolling TIME with us, moving it from the “past” to just in front of us. Once that ball rolls out of the Kitchen, the Kitchen no longer exists, but the hallway (with carpet) is NOW. The rooms keep being added, and discarded as we move thru TIME.

I think we draw TIME up behind us, and it ceases to exist, we use it as an envelope to move forward. Those stars shining billions and billions of years ago? Gone. But as we move farther along, those lights will go out, we know that happens. We have seen stars explode (Super Nova) but the glow we see from the explosion is a mirage. For that star is gone, all we see are the plumes of gas and hot plasma, and a bit of the solar wind. My point being, if we went back to before the light from that NOVA hit us, it wouldn’t be there. Neither would the pocket of the Universe that held it. Gone. Moved on. Right along with us. Like putting a railroad track down, moving forward, tearing up the track behind us, and putting it in front again. I know these analogies suck. But I am trying my best to explain how I think about TIME on my long walks.

Living things die, and decompose. My Mom and Dad are gone, their Mothers and Fathers are long gone, any further back then that, and they have truly returned to dust. All living things decompose when they “stop.” Why wouldn’t TIME? If enough TIME goes by, wouldn’t TIME just dissolve back into well, no time? Just like life “stops” and turns back into non life?

So I think, TIME as we know it is either arbitrary, a mathematical construct of great convenience. In my mind, TIME has a time limit, and fades with TIME. LOL

Okay, time for your third glass of wine. Smiles, Kevin just kinda thinking about stuff, since I had the TIME.

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