Thoughts about time
04/08/15 05:11
Friends, we leave on a two-week trip today. Although we expect to have access to the Internet for most of our trip, we will be on vacation and visiting with our grandchildren. I expect my routine to be disrupted and I may not write at the same time each day. Don’t worry if my blog post doesn’t appear first thing in the morning or if there are days when it doesn’t show up. I’ll get it published eventually. Thanks for your patience. Having said that, here are some rather esoteric thoughts:
Common sense gets its name from the fact that many people share the same opinion. Common means that many people hold that particular bit of wisdom. The problem with it is that just being held by a lot of people doesn’t make something the truth. In general, I’m a big fan of common sense. I learn a lot from listening to what other people think and believe. But there are times when we need to break out of the box and think differently. Sometimes a different opinion or a different way of looking at a problem can lead to the discovery of a deeper wisdom.
Take, for example, our way of thinking about time. People have not always thought about time the way that we do. Our language has a whole host of tenses - ways to use words to indicate nuances of time, but we are unlikely to think of time in its perfect, pluperfect, conditional or subjunctive sense. We think primarily in three categories: past, present and future. It is a concept that our language inherited from Latin, which appropriated it from Greek. Those Greek thinkers had an incredible impact on much of modern thought. But their way of thinking about time wasn’t the only way that people have thought about time. In Biblical Hebrew there are only two tenses, roughly corresponding to things that are finished and things that are on-going. People lived, thought, spoke, and developed significant intellectual ideas by thinking of time in just two ways. The concept of monotheism grew out of that two tense language. The stories of our people were told for millennia in that two tense language. People were able to communicate and think without a need for three tenses.
Modern scientific research bears out the notion of two tenses rather than three. Stick with me here. This is not an easy concept. When you look at an object, it takes 13 milliseconds for your brain to process that image. Now a millisecond isn’t much time - 1/1000th of a second - but it is long enough to be measured. That means that what you experience as the present is actually the past. By the time your brain can process an experience time has moved on. From this perspective there is no actual present, only past and future.
Think of it this way. When you look at the edge of a body of water, say a lake with a sand beach, you see the water and the sand and you see what looks like a line dividing the two elements. In reality, however, there is no line. There is only sand and water. In reality, there is no present, only past and future. The present is a projection to help delineate between the two types of time.
Using this two tense way of thinking it is clear that there is a big distinction between past and future. The past can be observed. It has been experienced. There is a sense in which we can claim knowledge of the past. The future, however, cannot be observed. Our attempts at prediction, based on our experience of the past, are merely speculation.
It doesn’t matter if you are a theologian or physicist, when you begin to speak of the future, you are engaging in speculation, not observation. No amount of bluster or over confidence will change that simple fact. The future remains unknown until it has become the past.
Of course there is plenty of the past that we cannot observe because of the limits of the span of a single human life and the inaccuracies of the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. Although modern science has given us some marvelous tools for learning about the nature of the universe and things that have happened, there are huge gaps in our knowledge. When it comes to talking about the ancient past, such as the time when light now visible first left a very distant star, there is nearly as much speculation involved as when we try to speak of the future.
We develop theories in an attempt to explain what we can’t observe. Sometimes our theories appear to be right, other times we can disprove them. The problem with most theories is that they can’t be proven outright, only disproven. Old theories are often replaced with new ones simply because they appear not to be the best explanations for observed phenomena.
Theologians and some religious thinkers that are less academic than theologians will from time to time speak of the future as if they had some special insight and understanding of things to come. They will confidently declare what they “know” about things to come. History has shown that those who do so are often wrong and that their predictions are less than accurate. This has resulted in no small amount of criticism of religion by members of the scientific community.
With all due respect, theoretical physicists engage in a similar style of bold speculation about things that they do not understand. They observe inconsistencies in the physics of this world such as how the measurement of time is altered by speed or the existence of gravitational pull where there is no observable mass and then offer their theories to explain these phenomena. The growth in the popularity of quantum physics in the end of the 20th century is an example of a set of ideas commonly held to explain a physical phenomena that so far only offers a partial explanation and gives no reliable information about the future.
Physicists and theologians agree that there is more to this universe than what we can observe. And it is the quest for that which lies beyond that fuels their passion. None of us knows what we will discover in the future.
Common sense gets its name from the fact that many people share the same opinion. Common means that many people hold that particular bit of wisdom. The problem with it is that just being held by a lot of people doesn’t make something the truth. In general, I’m a big fan of common sense. I learn a lot from listening to what other people think and believe. But there are times when we need to break out of the box and think differently. Sometimes a different opinion or a different way of looking at a problem can lead to the discovery of a deeper wisdom.
Take, for example, our way of thinking about time. People have not always thought about time the way that we do. Our language has a whole host of tenses - ways to use words to indicate nuances of time, but we are unlikely to think of time in its perfect, pluperfect, conditional or subjunctive sense. We think primarily in three categories: past, present and future. It is a concept that our language inherited from Latin, which appropriated it from Greek. Those Greek thinkers had an incredible impact on much of modern thought. But their way of thinking about time wasn’t the only way that people have thought about time. In Biblical Hebrew there are only two tenses, roughly corresponding to things that are finished and things that are on-going. People lived, thought, spoke, and developed significant intellectual ideas by thinking of time in just two ways. The concept of monotheism grew out of that two tense language. The stories of our people were told for millennia in that two tense language. People were able to communicate and think without a need for three tenses.
Modern scientific research bears out the notion of two tenses rather than three. Stick with me here. This is not an easy concept. When you look at an object, it takes 13 milliseconds for your brain to process that image. Now a millisecond isn’t much time - 1/1000th of a second - but it is long enough to be measured. That means that what you experience as the present is actually the past. By the time your brain can process an experience time has moved on. From this perspective there is no actual present, only past and future.
Think of it this way. When you look at the edge of a body of water, say a lake with a sand beach, you see the water and the sand and you see what looks like a line dividing the two elements. In reality, however, there is no line. There is only sand and water. In reality, there is no present, only past and future. The present is a projection to help delineate between the two types of time.
Using this two tense way of thinking it is clear that there is a big distinction between past and future. The past can be observed. It has been experienced. There is a sense in which we can claim knowledge of the past. The future, however, cannot be observed. Our attempts at prediction, based on our experience of the past, are merely speculation.
It doesn’t matter if you are a theologian or physicist, when you begin to speak of the future, you are engaging in speculation, not observation. No amount of bluster or over confidence will change that simple fact. The future remains unknown until it has become the past.
Of course there is plenty of the past that we cannot observe because of the limits of the span of a single human life and the inaccuracies of the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. Although modern science has given us some marvelous tools for learning about the nature of the universe and things that have happened, there are huge gaps in our knowledge. When it comes to talking about the ancient past, such as the time when light now visible first left a very distant star, there is nearly as much speculation involved as when we try to speak of the future.
We develop theories in an attempt to explain what we can’t observe. Sometimes our theories appear to be right, other times we can disprove them. The problem with most theories is that they can’t be proven outright, only disproven. Old theories are often replaced with new ones simply because they appear not to be the best explanations for observed phenomena.
Theologians and some religious thinkers that are less academic than theologians will from time to time speak of the future as if they had some special insight and understanding of things to come. They will confidently declare what they “know” about things to come. History has shown that those who do so are often wrong and that their predictions are less than accurate. This has resulted in no small amount of criticism of religion by members of the scientific community.
With all due respect, theoretical physicists engage in a similar style of bold speculation about things that they do not understand. They observe inconsistencies in the physics of this world such as how the measurement of time is altered by speed or the existence of gravitational pull where there is no observable mass and then offer their theories to explain these phenomena. The growth in the popularity of quantum physics in the end of the 20th century is an example of a set of ideas commonly held to explain a physical phenomena that so far only offers a partial explanation and gives no reliable information about the future.
Physicists and theologians agree that there is more to this universe than what we can observe. And it is the quest for that which lies beyond that fuels their passion. None of us knows what we will discover in the future.