For example, imagine a perspective where a lifetime is measured not in tens of years, but in billions of years, and traversing across galaxies is as easy as going from city to city for us. You could see the life cycles of stars, the formation of new planets, life, evolution… and truly appreciate the vastness of the universe. We, on the other hand, exist for such a vanishingly small amount of time on such a small little chunk of the universe.

It’s also limiting that we are experiencing time in a one-dimensional, collapsed manner. The past is continually fleeing from us and the future is nebulous… but that could easily just be our perception.

It’s like we’re stuck on a train, with only a rear window, traveling at a constant speed forever. We can always look back and see from where we came, but we have no idea how the track turns up ahead, or even if it will be running for much longer. How ignorant must we look to an observer who can see the track in its entirety? To something not bound by our limited perception of time, its idea of the universe would be quite different than ours.

But maybe it’s good that we suffer this “limited perspective” of ours. When you’re only around for less than a century, the only appreciable wonder we can experience in the universe is each other. The Earth, the stars, space, and time are not going to give a damn about what you or I do with the rest of our lives, but the people around us will.

Friends will come and go, love, hate, death… all complex and powerful forces that we, in our limited perspective, can nearly get a hold of and experience them as they change and evolve throughout our lives. Could somebody who can skip around galaxies on a whim really appreciate something as delicate and fragile as love?

So maybe we don’t have that limited of a perspective after all? Maybe the most impressive things to witness in the universe are the relationships and emotions we experience with others happening right here on this frail little blue marble spinning around one lonely little star…

This interest in time was re-invigorated in my senior physics class in high school when we started to learn about Einstein’s Relativity theories… in particular Special Relativity. In a nutshell… one aspect of his theory states that the consequence of the speed of light being constant regardless of reference frame is that time is relative. That is, the rate at which different observers pass through time can be, and in fact is, different.

This effect is all but un-observable in normal-day contexts, but as relative velocities approach the speed of light, the effects of this “time dilation” become more evident. These effects have been observed in a multitude of experiments and its effects are exploited in modern communication devices like GPS and other satellite systems.

Einstein’s theories provide a very predictable and accurate description of time experiments in all domains. But something I’ve always wondered about is the general perception of time.

Both Newton and Einstein’s description of time base it on the fact that time progresses from the past towards the future… and the current point in which we occupy is the present. But what if that description is merely our perception of time, but is completely inaccurate as to the actual description of time?

Reality Check

Before I go any further into this ridiculous entry I think it’s important to note the futility of trying to determine the accuracy of perception. The world is what we perceive it to be because that is the only means by which we have to observe. It is by this fact that we will never know whether or not our perception is accurate. This is a weird thought and pretty damn hard to really grasp… but think about simple situations.

If you see a ball on the ground, how do you know it is REALLY there? We perceive it to be there because light bounces off it and is focused to the back of our eyes, causing a chemical reaction that signals our brain to “see” an object. We don’t actually see the object but rather the effects of the object (in particular, the chemical reactions to the photons that bounce off of the object).

That being said… let’s continue!

Linearly Progressing Time

The way in which we perceive time, and the way in which almost all scientific contexts describe time, is as the independent variable. It progresses continually with our without our permission. One way to describe time in this interpretation is that it is linearly-progressing and single-dimensional.

This “interpretation” of time is the most natural, and is built into our minds intrinsically. Based in this context, the past is over and done with and never to return, the present is right NOW, and the future is unknown and yet to happen.

An Alternative Idea

But what if the concepts of past, present, and future are just manifestations in our mind? Maybe chronological ordering isn’t something natural but rather a false construct used by our minds to make sense of something more complicated. It’s possible that instead of such definitive descriptions as “before” and “after”, that collections of events are far more general.

One could even go further to say that it is possible that time itself is a complete fallacy, that in fact all events exist at once and everything that is to happen, in actuality, already exists. Concepts such as causality and simultaneity dissolve because, in fact, no such framework (i.e, time) is available for these concepts to hold any meaning.

Further consequences of this concept would be that the past, present, and future are all the same: the past is no more gone than the future is unknown, and the concept of the “present” is completely arbitrary.

Pushing Einstein’s theories around a little bit seems to even slightly suggest this: another consequence of his theories about relativistic time and length is that the concept of simultaneity is relative as well. That is, the fact that two events are held to be simultaneous is relative to an observer.

Observer A can say Event X happened at the same time as Event Y, and be correct, while Observer B can assert that in fact they happened at different times. Given the relationship between their positions and velocities, they might both be correct, within their own reference frame.

Going a little further, one could suggest that given any two arbitrary events in space-time, there exists some reference frame from in which those two events can be correctly held to be simultaneous to a given observer. This suggests that both your birth and death can be seem as happening at the same time… given the correct reference frame. Another way to look at this is to realize that an observer in another reference frame could have witnessed events that you hold to be in the “future” before you’ve witnessed them. This suggests that your death might have already happened within somebody’s reference frame.

Combining that extreme perversion of relativity with the notion that time is not what we perceive it to be… we arrive at some interesting conclusions. For example: the future… as much as it might seem “free” an up to you to determine… already exists and in a sense, has happened. In fact… this would mean that every action/choice/decision you seem to make within your own means is already set and is as concrete as something that happened in the “past” and is already done.

This can be thought of as instead of living in the present and determining your own future, your mind is simply trying to digest the universe, and in doing so, creates the illusion of time to better understand it.

What the hell??

The above is posed more as a thought on which to ponder than an actual stating of a theory or anything concrete. It’s an interesting example of the complexities associated with time and the concept of perception vs. reality, and just overall some weird shit to think about. So don’t flip out about it… just read it over and let it marinate in your mind for a while… or talk to your buddy about it next time you find yourselves jasterbatingly pussy-footing around on an otherwise uneventful evening.