It’s About Time!
That’s what I felt when my car-counting shift for Engineering 1A was finally over. I had started college as an engineering student, following the model of the elder brother I idolized. But by the end of my first year I switched majors, bored from the outset by my first assignment, counting passing auto traffic for hours on end. It was many, many years before I understood the lesson my instructor was trying to teach, a lesson about time.
In my eighth decade of life time still puzzles me. When I worked, long ago, in a government research agency I remember sitting in meetings bored out of my mind, struggling to stay awake and hoping for an end to the discussion. There are, of course, happier memories that remind me of the old song, “ . . . five minutes more, only five minutes more; Let me stay, let me stay in your arms.” What is it about time that seems to sometimes make it go so slow yet at other times pass incredibly quickly?
St. Augustine writes, in the fourth century (CE)
“ . . . what then is time? If no one asks me, I know; [but] if I wish to explain to him who asks I know not.” (Confessions, Book XI Chapter XIV)
Further on, in the same book and chapter, Augustine goes on to say
“Neither time past nor future, but the present only, really is.”
Several centuries later, in a somewhat more understandable translation, Episcopal Vicar James G. Pilkington translated Augustine’s comments this way:
“Time is in our minds. In our consciousness the past and the future have a being of sorts . . . insofar as the past is remembered and the future is anticipated.” But, he continues, repeating earlier translations, “ . . . the present only really is.”
In the early twentieth century William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It is not even past.” I understood his point better after reading his 1936 novel Absolom, Absolom, said to be a key factor in his winning the Nobel Prize for literature. The setting is the pre- and post-Civil War time. On one level Faulkner details, three-quarters of a century later, the continuing horror that slavery brought to the South, what he called the curse under which the South labors. Exposing this was, I believe, the underlying reason Faulkner was disliked, if not hated, by his neighbors in Oxford Mississippi. On another level the novel deals with the historical — and existing — culture of the South, where the past is always present yet in a state of constant revision by people who tell and retell the story over time.
As a key figure in the “magical realism” literary movement Faulkner emphasizes the on-going personal interpretation each individual makes as to the nature of his or her history. Indeed, if we take an analytic approach, it’s obvious that our interpretations of past events affect not only our memories but the way we interpret on-going, present, events. The “narratives” we construct to make sense of the past inevitably affect, in the present, what social psychologist Karl Weick called “sensemaking,” giving meaning to or making sense of things happening in and over time.
In his book Aging Well Harvard psychologist and psychoanalyst George Valliant reports the results of long-term studies of human development, recorded over individuals’ entire life spans. This research began in the 1930s at Harvard. (It continues today, following the few of the original participants who are still living.) When compared with actual records of past events the researchers found that people sometimes had rather different interpretations or recollections of those past experiences. One person might recall his mother’s leaving him to be raised by relatives as abandonment while another interprets a similar event as loving him so much that when she could not take care of him she found him a secure home.
Sometimes interpretive changes are actually false or “counterfactual.” In one case described by Valliant, a man recalled his mother with deep affection. He explained that she made him lunch to take to school every day. In fact, records showed that he had been abandoned and lived much of his childhood in an orphanage. Whether by reinterpretation or by invention, such modifications of memories, that is, of our personal “narratives,” show that — as has been said — it’s never too late to have a happy childhood.
In the past few years I’ve “revised” my own interpretations of my parents’ actions and thus recognized some acts of love instead of focusing on what I felt were acts of rejection. For much of my life I felt that my mother’s actions demonstrated a lack of love and care. I recall waking one morning with no one at home and wandering around the house calling for my mother. But now I focus on a different memory: when I felt ill in elementary school my mother received a phone call from the school nurse. My mother had been watering the lawn but, told that I was sick, she forgot about the water being on and ran to the school, several blocks away, to bring me home. I see this as one of many examples of my mother’s love and kindness, toward me as well as toward others. (But note that the change was to my interpretations and not to the memories themselves.) Narrative revisions can affect not only how individuals feel about the past but may determine the nature of current — and future — events and relationships as well. I believe that this change in my narrative interpretation has helped me to build better and closer relationships in my life today.
Although it’s extremely rare, there are some people with memories so perfect that reinterpretations, let revisions, aren’t possible. I once asked a high-school classmate who has such a memory if he recalled whether a particular individual had been in a class we had taken. The answer was, “I not only remember him, I remember sitting behind him in that class and smelling his body odor.” In dramatic contrast, my memory of another classmate, who had been close to both my friend (with the exceptional memory) and me, turned out to be dramatically wrong. I realized this after I found several fifty-year old letters he’d written me. For years I’ve had a strongly negative judgment toward this person, because of the way he treated someone close to us both. That judgment had literally erased any positive memories of companionship. I had even removed any memory of attending his wedding, which I found clearly documented in a note his wife had sent me.
I brought this up with my friend with the amazing memory. (My friend, now a psychoanalyst, referred to my reaction as “traumatic amnesia.”) We discussed actual events involving our mutual friend that involved the three of us in positive interactions over a period of years. In this way, and by reading through the several letters I had received so many years ago, I was able to revise my judgments. I realized that I had been so harsh partly to avoid recognizing my own responsibility for the damage I’d done this other person, damage I had blamed only on him.
The process of rethinking and reinterpreting events of the past is an important element of a philosophical approach called “phenomenology.” Edmund Husserl was a philosopher of the late 19th and early 20th century who played a key role in the development of this approach. His often-quoted advice for understanding the meaning of interpretations we make of events was to “go back to the events themselves.” That is, interpretations can vary, can be more — or less — accurate, but to understand them one must begin with the events themselves, which are real.
The apparent ease with which memories and interpretations of past events can change raises the question of the nature of events, that is, the extent to which events are “real” in terms of being caused or may be the result of random chance. This brings up a related question, regarding the very nature of time itself. That is, some physicists have proposed that the nature of time (the proper term is “spacetime”) may be such that the past actually continues to exist in real and physical form. This is not to suggest that one can physically return to the past, but just makes explicit Albert Einstein’s notion of what is often referred to as the “block universe.”
Einstein held to a “deterministic” view of the universe, that is, he assumed that there is a strict chain of cause and effect that defines all events from the beginning to the end of the universe. If one knew precisely all of the variables at any time — but especially at the time of the “big bang” when the universe began — one could predict perfectly all events from then on. The implication is that everything, from the beginning of the universe to its end, was actually determined from the instant of its creation.
A recent popular memoir by Kate Bowler is titled Everything Happens for A Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved. Einstein may not have believed everything that happens has a reason but he did believe, and many physicists today still believe, that everything has a cause. Not everyone agrees.
An opposing viewpoint is defined by quantum theory, one important basis of which (curiously enough) also comes from Einstein’s work. In quantum theory all events are probabilistic and there may — or in some cases may not — be causes. What’s more, while the probabilities (or chances) of some events are very high and of other events are very low, there is an element of randomness in the universe that makes it impossible to make perfect predictions.
Einstein rejected this basic premise of quantum theory when he said “God does not play dice with the universe.” Some of his colleagues, in particular Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, disagreed and went on to further develop quantum theory and its application in quantum mechanics. Stephen Hawking, the theoretical physicist who discovered black holes and wrote a best-selling book with the tongue-in-cheek title A Brief History of Time, commented that God not only plays dice with the universe, He often hides the outcomes of particular rolls.
Quantum theory plays havoc with our understanding of the nature of time. I can blame the fact that I can’t recall the sequence of some personally important events that happened many years ago on my imperfect memory (very imperfect, compared to that of my friend as described above). Or it may be that the very nature of reality — as described by quantum theory, as perceived by our imperfect senses, and as made sense of by a brain process that can only give “best guess” approximations — is uncertain.
Just as all of the predictions based on Einstein’s theory of relativity have proven correct, all tests of quantum theory have also been shown to be precisely accurate. The puzzle is that the basic assumptions of each are in conflict and no one has figured out how to resolve this. Some, like the physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson, suggest that we just use quantum theory when dealing with very, very small things and use relativity when our concern is with the larger aspects of the universe. Most physicists, however, find this sort of “solution” unappealing.
What this comes down to is that we really know little about the true nature of time. In the “Einsteinian” universe time is the fourth dimension of spacetime, which has three spatial dimensions and one of time. However, while the three spatial dimensions are fixed, it has been demonstrated that the faster one moves, in relation to other objects, the slower time passes in relation to those other objects. That is, despite often being referred to as a fourth dimension, time does not seem to have a fixed physical meaning. And in the quantum universe time is not even a dimension and seems not to have a physical meaning in the same sense as the three “standard” dimensions of space.
A few years ago I was having a conversation at the local off-leash dog park with a retired engineer from Georgia Tech. His political views confirmed to my mind that he was indeed “a rambling wreck,” but he made a point that’s stayed with me. He said that to be a good engineer all you really need is an understanding of Sir Isaac Newton’s calculus and how to apply this mathematical tool. Newton invented the calculus in order to deal with problems of motion over time, for example, the motion of an object thrown (or shot from a cannon) at a certain velocity. Using Newton’s tool one can solve many engineering problems by calculating how objects move through space over time.
The implications of this came to me when I read a quotation from the work of a pagan philosopher, Simplicius, written about a hundred years later than the Bishop of Hippo’s Confessions. It was because of that brief quote that I finally understood what my engineering instructor was trying to teach me all those years ago, by having me count cars as they moved down the road.
Simplicius, who lived from around to 490 to about 560 CE, was the last great philosopher of pagan antiquity. He fled Athens after the Roman emperor Justinian decreed that all pagans had to convert to Christianity or be exiled. (Perhaps not incidentally Justinian got Simplicius’ property, which was valued at about a thousand pieces of gold.) Simplicius is remembered today not for his own philosophical works but for his commentaries on Aristotle and many other ancient philosophers, which preserved much information that would have otherwise been lost. But the comment of his that I saw was very much both a philosophically — and physically — important observation:
πάντα ῥεῖ (panta rhei)
Or, in English, “everything flows.” This was, I believe, the intent of my first lesson in engineering. I was counting the flow of cars on Westwood Boulevard in the hope that I would learn that everything is, ultimately, about flows. Automobiles flow in traffic much as water flows through pipes, as blood flows through veins and arteries, as air flows through a jet engine, and so on. To analyze such flows is, I think, a basic reason why Newton invented the calculus. Unfortunately, that point was never made clear by my engineering instructor and I simply interpreted the task as an especially boring lesson in data collection, a reason to watch the clock more closely than I watched traffic so I’d know when the ordeal would be over. When it was, my frustrated reaction was, “It’s about time!”, not realizing that the assignment was, in fact, about time.
However, the most important point here is not that time flows. Everything flows, said Simplicius, but time is not a “thing.” Time, as Augustine observed, exists only as “now,” the forever-present, in our minds. That notion is consistent with Faulkner’s, who stated — and illustrated — that the so-called “dead past” is not even past. Like Augustine, we may not really know what time is. But if he is right, if time exists only within us, then it may be that Augustine unknowingly tapped into quantum theory. Time does not flow through you and I, as often seems the case. Rather, quantum theory suggests that you and I — or actually our consciousnesses — flow through time.
What this means physically is uncertain; despite decades of efforts by great (and not-so-great) physicists, no one has been able to develop a clear and understandable concept of the quantum universe. The great theoretical physicist Richard Feynman constructed “Feynman diagrams” that are used in quantum mechanics to give a pictorial and more readily understandable representation of the complex mathematical expressions describing the behavior and interaction of subatomic particles. But with respect to quantum theory itself Feynman famously said, “No one understands quantum theory.”
Some quantum physicists, such as Carlo Rovelli and Mark Wilde suggest that a good (and perhaps the only) way to understand the universe in terms of quantum theory is to turn to information theory. This does seem to define reality — and the universe — quite well, in mathematical terms. Unfortunately, it doesn’t offer a recognizable picture of the universe as we see it. Nor does it add to our understanding of the nature of time. It may be that time is merely a human invention, real — as Augustine said — only in our minds.
Still, when we apply the equations of quantum mechanics they not only show that we (that is, our conscious minds) flow through time, they even make it possible to calculate how fast we flow. Specifically, we flow through time at the speed of the one invariant flow in the universe: the speed of light. I’m not yet a “wreck” like my Georgia Tech engineer friend, but along with the rest of humanity I’m surely rambling — that is, flowing — through time. Toward what end, of course, no one really knows but, as the old spiritual says,
Cheer up my brother,
Walk in the sunshine,
We’ll understand it,
All by and by.