occur in the here and now, and the future is also just a concept happening strictly in the present, there seems nothing but now. Always. So is there really a past and a future? Or just a continuum of present moments?
This debate is not new. As we’ve seen, several classical Greek writers believed that the universe is eternal, with no origins at all. Possessing such an infinite past with no beginning made time seem meaningless. Eternity, after all, is fundamentally different from “time without end.” Even as long ago as the fifth century b.c.e., Antiphon the Sophist, in his work On Truth, wrote, “Time is not a reality, but a concept or a measure.”
In the town of Elea, Parmenides seconded this in his poem, On Nature, in a section titled “The Way of Truth,” in which he stated that reality, which he referred to as “what-is,” is one, and that existence is timeless. He called time an illusion.
Soon after, still in the fifth century b.c.e, in that same Greek town of Elea, the famous Zeno created his enduring paradoxes, which in the next chapter will provide critical instruction on how to tell the difference between the conceptual realm of ideas and math versus the actual physical world. (This will resolve that old nagging paradox of the tortoise racing the hare, which has been filed in your brain all these years in a section devoted to “miscellaneous mental torment.”) Zeno will also help show us how neither time nor space are actual physical entities.
In sharp contrast to the carefree Greek musings on eternity, medieval theologians and philosophers tended to see God alone as infinite. To them, His creation, the universe, must therefore indeed have a finite past, a specific moment of birth, and an assumed expiration date. By this reasoning, time is part of the cosmos and thus is itself finite.
Enough philosophizing. Though such debates continue today, they’ve been offered only to illustrate how time’s reality, so assumed by the public, continues to be seriously doubted among people with excessive leisure time who ponder such things. More central for us, it is doubted even in the mainstream of science. And it is the science alone that we will now continue to pursue as we heat up our hunt for a definitive resolution to the time business—our first key to understanding existence, death, and our true relationship with the cosmos.
We must shift to the only place in science where a directionality of time is assumed to be needed: the field of thermodynamics, whose second law involves a process called entropy. This natural inclination to go from order to disorder necessitates an “arrow” or direction to time. If such an arrow exists, then time is a real item after all and will disconcertingly tick away the remaining minutes of your life.
We’d better hurry up and get to the bottom of this. We’ll call on real people who helped clarify what’s going on. This odyssey will lead from Parmenides and Zeno, whose world was very different from ours, to nineteenth-century Europe and a name known to every physics student—the brilliant, fascinating, but ultimately tragic Ludwig Boltzmann.
2 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-time-an-illusion/.
ZENO AND BOLTZMANN
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Life . . . presupposes its own change and movement,
and one tries to arrest them at one’s eternal peril.
—Laurens van der Post, Venture to the Interior (1951)
We should probably begin with Parmenides, who was born around 515 b.c.e. in Elea, on the Greek mainland. He is known for founding Eleaticism, which quickly became one of the leading pre-Socratic schools of Greek thought. But though only small fragments of his principal work—the lengthy, three-part On Nature—survive, there’s really no need to complicate what is essentially a simple worldview, one that very much jibes with biocentrism 2,500 years later.
Parmenides’ views were seconded and championed by Zeno, born in the same settlement twenty-five years later. Both men tirelessly argued that the apparent multiplicity of objects we see around us, along with their changing forms and motions, are but an appearance of a single eternal reality they called “Being.” This was actually very much in sync with what had been written in Sanskrit texts a thousand years earlier, although Parmenides and Zeno seem to have arrived at their perceptions independently.
The Parmenidean principle boils down to “all is one.” This may seem like idle philosophy, but it’s pregnant with vast experiential perceptions that affect everyday experiences then and now. A babbling brook, for example, would be apprehended by the Eleatics as an expression of the limitless energy and play exhibited by Being or existence, whereas the opposing school (almost universally embraced in our modern time) is that a multiplicity of separate, quasi-independent objects like water molecules and pebbles are exhibiting cause-and-effect-derived actions in a space- and time-based matrix in which these disparate items come and go individually. And although the multiple-causation versus the “single animated essence” views may at first seem philosophical and unimportant distinctions, each in turn leads to very different conclusions about what’s actually unfolding and what kind of reality we’re part of. It’s actually a life-changing topic.
Perhaps that’s why Parmenides and Zeno, almost obsessively embracing their stone-simple concept of Being, felt a kind of Paul Revere–like need to spread the word. Doing so, they insisted that their view didn’t require faith or perception but could be proven through logic. Because they said that all claims of change or of non-Being are illogical, Zeno in particular created a series of paradoxes designed to disprove all time- or motion-based arguments, which he maintained would lead inexorably back to the simplicity of the One Energy. Even today, Zeno’s paradoxes are taught, debated, and still generally considered valid.
More than that, Aristotle admiringly credited Zeno as being the inventor of the dialectic, a word that later became synonymous with formal logic. This was ironic in a way, since Zeno’s entire purpose was to support and recommend the Parmenidean doctrine of the existence of “the one” indivisible reality, which is about as unconvoluted a position as is humanly possible to take. So in looking at Zeno’s paradoxes, we should always remember that their goal was not to be clever or to pull the rug out from under the machinations of logical thought, but to contradict and disprove the widespread belief in the existence of “the many”—meaning individual objects with distinguishable time-based qualities and separate motions.
Zeno created many paradoxes to prove his point, but we’ll only list the three best known. Probably everyone has heard of the Achilles and the Tortoise tale, called by various other names as well. It starts by letting the slower-moving tortoise have a head start, and then Achilles attempts to catch up and pass it in a race. Let’s say the tortoise goes half the speed of Achilles. Well, as soon as Achilles reaches the place where the tortoise was positioned at the outset, the tortoise has meanwhile moved on by half that distance. When Achilles reaches this new position, the turtle has meanwhile slowly advanced to yet another new position, halfway beyond its initial advancement and Achilles’ new position. And when Achilles attains the new tortoise position, there’s no avoiding the fact that the animal has managed to move ahead by another half of that distance. The halves keep getting further halved, but Achilles can never catch the tortoise.
A second paradox is similar: If Homer wants to reach a man selling grapes from a cart, he must first advance to half the distance between his front door and the fruit vendor. Then, he must arrive at a point that is half of that distance. Then half of that. It’s obvious that half of the remaining distance will always have to be attained first, and this creates an infinite task that has no conclusion. Homer can never buy the grapes.
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