Let’s start at the very beginning,
A very good place to start.
- Do-Re-Mi – Rodgers and Hammerstein
Time. What exactly is time? We experience it every day, every second of our lives. Yet how many times have you actually taken time to try to figure out just what time is? What does it do? Why does it exist?
What do we know. As current quantum physics and cosmological theories tell us, time is actually part of the fabric of our universe, or as Brian Green more elegantly calls it in his book, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality
I think I may have some answers. I’m going to approach this from a somewhat spiritual outlook. I am fully aware that there are other possibilities and I’ll discuss them at a later time, but for many people it is easier to think of things this way. All my life I’ve heard people talk about God being eternal and endless. That doesn’t really capture the totality of things to my mind though. If God created the universe and time is part of the universe…..then it only makes sense that “the Creator” was actually outside of time.
But if “the Creator” is outside of time, what does that mean? What does time accomplish? It is the thing that separates one moment from the next. It provides a framework for causes and effects, a direction for experience if you will. If the Creator is outside of this construct, that means the Creator is all things and all possibilities at one instant of zero time. Everything that could possibly be, all at once. There would be no experience of this “everything”. To such a being there would be only one over riding and all encompassing need. The need to experience “everything”. This being would have to create a universe, or more likely more than one universe, maybe even an infinite number of universes, and utilize the concept of time to spread the everything out so that it could all be experienced. Yes, I know I’m explaining this in a cause and effect relationship when it all happens at once, but being stuck in time, I have no other way to describe it.
So, we live in a universe where time spreads out all the possible things that can be in at least two directions. Yes, I’m positing at least two time dimensions. They must exist. One dimension gives us the past->future relationship we all know and lo–ahh…..let’s just leave it at know. The other dimension must exist for the multiple possible “next” moments that each moment represents. At every moment in time, the next moment can be one of either a very large number of next moments, or even an infinite number of them. Every decision made by a sentient (even low sentience) mind, every random bounce of a quantum particle, sends the current experience of the universe in another direction. The question then becomes do all possible moments of our universe exist and our consciousness moves from one to the next? Do our physical beings move through the time space continuum and our so called consciousness is just a fancy electro-chemical reaction? Or does each possible moment exist independently and what we think of as our consciousness is just the current state of where our mind would have to be at that point in space-time as posited by Julian Barbour in The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics
To me, I have to discount the last possibility since there are so many process that are dynamic in nature. Our thoughts, for instance, are dependent on the movement of electrical signals, not where they are at any given moment. The choice between the other two possibilities is a subject for another time. Other variables come into play for me there which I will address in the future.
Next up…….The Blue Lion’s Theory of Relativity.
Good day,
BL
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