A fascination with such Eastern views arrived in Western countries in the late nineteenth century, abetted by visits of a succession of influential, articulate Indian teachers such as Paramahansa Yogananda, Swami Vivekananda, and more recently Deepak Chopra. In the 1940s, Yogananda, through books such as his best-seller Autobiography of a Yogi, attempted to justify the Eastern view of the cosmos through science. By most accounts, such efforts sounded forced and the science arguments were less than compelling. They probably persuaded only those who were already on board.
But the quest itself was noble. If a person seeks knowledge of reality and one’s nature and one’s place in the universe, what if she has no spiritual calling? What if she solely demands fact-based evidence? Can these deep issues be tackled decisively by science alone?
That is our sixty-four-thousand-dollar question—and the real starting point for our journey.
1 Being far ahead of everyone else in the world, especially concerning some fundamental facet of life, has rarely bestowed any benefit. Who knows the name Aristarchus today? We checked; there isn’t a single high school named for him in the United States. At least he wasn’t put to death, unlike many other pioneers in thinking.
IN THE BEGINNING . . .
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All is change; all yields its place and goes.
—Euripides (c. 416 b.c.e.)
No matter what picture of the universe one embraces, time seems to play a key role. Indeed, our existing models are so thoroughly time based, they can neither be understood nor disproved without also understanding time itself. Thus we must tackle it before anything else.
This is no mere philosophical matter. It goes to the heart of our perceptions and lies at the fulcrum between the observer and nature. Certainly, we use time constantly. We make appointments and look forward to vacation plans, and some of us fret about the afterlife. If there is one big difference between people and animals, it is not that we are unafraid of vacuum cleaners. It is that we are time obsessed.
On one level, what we commonly mean by time is inarguably real. Our car’s GPS announces that if we stay on this highway we will reach Cleveland in 3 hours and 48 minutes. And we do. Moreover, while we do that, countless other events unfold in our bodies and elsewhere on the Earth.
Yet this agreed-upon interval is, on closer inspection, as fishy and intangible as the question of what exactly happened at midnight on New Year’s Eve.
The question of time has tormented philosophers for millennia, and this torture shows no signs of abating. Happily, unlike the intricacies of, say, Middle East politics, here we have only two contrasting viewpoints.
One is the opinion held by such noted smart people as Isaac Newton, who saw time as part of the fundamental structure of the universe. He believed it to be inherently real. If so, time constitutes its own dimension and stands separate from events, which unfold sequentially within its matrix. This is probably how most people view time.
The opposing view, argued for centuries by other smart people such as Immanuel Kant, is that time is not an actual entity. It is not a kind of “container” that events “move through.” In this view, there is no flow to time. Rather, it’s a framework devised by human observers as they attempt to give organization and structure to the vast labyrinth of information whirling in their minds.
If this latter view is true, and time is only a kind of intellectual framework along the lines of our numbering systems or the way we order things spatially, then it certainly cannot be “traveled,” nor can it be measured on its own.
This means that clocks do not determine or keep track of time, but merely offer evenly spaced events as one digital number is replaced by another, or a minute hand is now here and now there. While these events proceed, other reliable rhythms simultaneously unfold elsewhere. And, of course, the lengths between each tick and tock are arbitrary, having been agreed upon by human council rather than some decree of nature.
The tick-tock idea began with Sun-based changes observed by people occupying a far more outdoorsy world than today’s. Sumerians and Babylonians more than six thousand years ago utilized the concepts of “day” and “year” and “month.” Soon after, the ancient Hindus defined specific units of time such as the kālá, which corresponds to 144 seconds.
The Hindus created a dizzying variety of intervals. At either end of their time spectrum the units were so extreme, they were useless in practical terms—and close to incomprehensible. These included the Paramaṇu, with a length of about 17 millionths of a second, and the Maha-Manvantara, which is 311.04 trillion years. Their long-interval units meshed with their creation and destruction myths, in which the cosmos undergoes cycles of clarity alternating with periods of human darkness, each called a yuga.
More practically, the ancient agrarian world relied on seasonal ways of reckoning, and these cycles were determined with amazing accuracy in civilizations like the Maya. Smaller units than months and days trickled into everyday usefulness, first with the creation of the dripping-water or falling-sand hourglass, and later the discovery of the pendulum effect by Galileo Galilei. In 1582 he noticed that the chandeliers hanging from long chains in the Piazza del Duomo kept swaying back and forth in the same period regardless of the swing’s amplitude, and—following an impressive bit of procrastination—wrote about this in 1602. This effect, experienced by children in playgrounds, amounts to the fact that when a parent gives a child a strong push, the swing’s period of travel from one end of its oscillation to the other is no different from when she is just sitting quietly with the swing barely moving at all.
The period is basically determined by the length of the chain, a property called isochronism. It turned out, a string or chain 39 inches long produces a back-and-forth period of exactly 2 seconds. It wasn’t long before this principle was utilized in grandfather clocks, whose long metal rods, just over 6 feet, ticked off near-perfect seconds.
Portable timekeeping took a leap with the invention of the balance spring watch in the second half of the seventeenth century, thanks to breakthroughs by Robert Hooke and Christiaan Huygens. Then accuracy skyrocketed after the 1880 discovery by the Curie brothers, Jacques and Pierre, that quartz crystals naturally vibrate when a bit of electricity is applied to them. If cut to a particular size and shape, they’ll reliably oscillate 32,768 times a second, which is a “power of 2”—it’s 2 multiplied by itself 15 times over. An electronic circuit has no trouble counting these oscillations and thus marking off evenly spaced seconds. This ultimately made precise portable timepieces—the quartz movement still utilized today—cheaply available beginning in 1969. With everyone now able to agree on the “right time,” the busy modern world with its appointments and scheduling settled into a shared, time-focused reality.
Through it all, however, the fact of pendulum swings, mechanical balance beam oscillations, and quartz vibrations was still no evidence of time. They all merely provided regular repetitive motions. One could then compare some repetitive events with others. One could notice, for example, that while a grandfather clock pendulum makes 1,800 swings, a candle might burn down 1 inch, and Earth would turn one-forty-eighth of a full rotation. Certainly, one could call the elapsing of all these events “a half hour,” but that didn’t mean that the time period had some independent reality, like a watermelon.
Then the whole business suddenly grew much odder with the discovery that some events could start unfolding faster than they had before, relative to others. Things started to become seriously disconcerting with Einstein’s strange
