Friday 29 January 2016

The Problem Of Time

The Problem of Time   

Weaving the classical physics and quantum world together 

On reading Greg Braden's amazing book 'Fractal Time' he states that scientists have reached a sticking point they are calling 'the problem of time'. It set me to thinking. 
As I understand it, if time is relative then our relationship with it is the imperative. The problem is that we can only view time from our perspective. We have to learn to look as if we are outside the box. 
In a talk I give I compare the Russian Doll model to the idea that all the beings in our universe exist like this within the Fibonacci mathematical model. This I know is not new. I express the idea that each body from an atom to the universe itself are all just mini dimensional versions of our Universe. I remember one gentleman afterwards being quite upset and tried to explain to me that a cell was not at all comparable to the solar system as I had implied. He told me that electrons do not travel around the nucleus in the same way the planets go round a sun. 
I wanted to question this but couldn't find the words. I needed to sleep on it as all Pisceans know (this talk had an astrological theme which always upsets scientifically orientated people). After some thought I began to query whether the random movement of the electrons around a nucleus were possibly only apparently random to us because being so small and so fast we couldn't actually track the movement of the electrons. Just as when we move something fast, like wagging a pencil between our fingers, our eyes only pick up a single image out of the blur. Maybe if we could slow the movement of an atom down and increase the size to that of a solar system then it would travel at a speed our eyes could handle because it's nearer to our own sphere of existence, now that we have computers that can track these large scale movements. Similarly if we sized down a solar system to mirror that of an atom then maybe the planets too would seem to appear in random places or in two at the same time. It is all relative and it is all relative to us. Surely that is the whole crux of the new science we are having to embrace: the new laws of relativity. 
I think this can also be seen on much closer sections of the dimensional spectrum, if we choose to see it as a spectrum, which works for me with most ideas I explore. If we contemplate the idea that as time is inseparable from space so that it should only be called 'spacetime' then objects of a slightly different size will also work within a slightly different time frame. When I read A T Mann's 'The Divine Life' He explains it as if we work on a varying spectrum of frames per second. So a moth that has a life span of one of our days would experience many more frames per second in the their body pulses, heart beat, cell rejuvenation and of course visually, literally, how many frames per second it would see, than us. The opposite would be true of an animal such as a tortoise. This is why when we see a bird fly past the bonnet of our car and we feel we have experienced a near miss situation, the bird, working on a much faster time frame than us, has sailed through the gap thinking it had as much time as if we were on a boat sailing through a swing bridge. It's all relative and the sooner we grasp this the quicker we can move on with our understanding of time and its so called problem. 
I find it funny that whenever we humans discuss great ideas we always forget to put ourselves in the middle of it. Surely this is the only place in the physical world we can see the world from. But whether it is ecology - I am still waiting for the term to become 'our environment' rather than 'the environment' so that people can start to understand the importance of our part in our responsibility here on this beautiful Earth - or science the lofty view of the Aquarian style average scientist always forgets that it is impossible to experience the world in any way except through themselves. 
So when we contemplate the weird bendiness of time surely we have to put ourselves in the centre again. 
When we watch our clock ticking away on our phones or in our cars it seems like it is a constant, an immoveable force that we have created out of own amazing logical, systematic calibration of time. 
However, when I get in a car and plan to arrive at a certain time, even though I know it is probably an impossibility, whether it be too long or too short, it all to often makes me turn into the drive or where ever I am arriving just as the clock ticks onto the time I'd set in my mind. How can this be? 
One classic time was when leaving London late after the theatre, with a group of friends, to return to Somerset I had said in my mind and possibly to my partner who was asking when he should expect me, that we should be home at 2am. I was probably over estimating it so he shouldn't worry if we were late and allowing for things that often crop up, late after show drinks, getting lost, you know the kind of things you don't plan for. Well, we actually left early and we should have been home by 1am as traffic through London was quiet at that time, which isn't always the way but this time it was. 
We were making good head way and the mood was light. We left the M25 and as we went to turn off to the M3 the exit was closed, the motorway was shut. This seemed bizarre. We somehow had to turn back on ourselves and make our way to the M4, not a terrible detour but not great either. We'd thought we'd turn off at Chippenham and not lose too much time. After half an hour down the motorway we saw a big sign 'M4 shut junctions 12-14'. This was getting outrageous why would two motorways be completely shut at certain points, well, more importantly the points we wanted to use. So we turned off at junction 14 and our poor driver who was tiring by now had to drive down a whole sequence of B roads to try and get back to the M3. We were hoping that this far down it would be open by now. Half an hour later and time is ticking on, we reach the M3. It is open, thank the Lord and on we go. By now, I Spy and any other silly games we can remember are brought out to keep our spirits up and our driver awake. As we begin the home stretch and turn to the A303 which was always our invented route the cones started to multiply, I've never seen so many and again we soon realised that this was because the entire road had been shut down. Our last leg was being denied us and another major road on our route was completely closed. Exasperated, we made our detours and after a while someone asked what the time was. I began to see a significance. It was 1.40 and we were about 20 minutes from home. My good old clock setting mechanism had pulled rank and the Universe had colluded to get me home at the time I had requested. 
Now I can hear you laugh and so did my passengers when I begged forgiveness that I had made all this happen (in a light-hearted funny way of course) but I cannot recount without completely boring you how many times things like this have happened to me. This was just one of the more outlandish. Well I mean, 3 major roads just to get my physical world and my world of intention to collide is quite a feat to manifest but isn't that what the quantum world is helping us to understand: that our thoughts create the world. The world is how it is because we are not the observers but the participators. 
So, does time move? Yes if course it does, it bends. That's nothing new. But what I'm trying to show is that we don't see the time bending because firstly we are part of the bending so can't see it. But also the increments of movement, like those of an atom, are too small for us to observe. We can watch the second hand tick we we can't feel the minute bending of time that we create because it's too small, literally, on a different dimension from us. 
The bottom line is of course that time doesn't exist. It exists only as part of our experience of life in the third dimension as we travel through spacetime in our projected expanding experience of the Big Bang. It's real to us because our experience of it makes it so and that is real enough. However, when we learn to expand our consciousness out of our limited physical realms, like our ancients did, then our conceptual understanding of the universe will grow many fold and start to resemble the understanding that our ancients had and many indigenous communities still hold. How else did we understand the layout of our Solar System to invent the ancient wisdom of Astrology. How else could we understand the deeper aspects and wisdoms of our universe, if man had not been able to go beyond the physical world and see the it from beyond the limits of our human perspective: understandings that our scientists are only just beginning to see themselves. 
I believe science is slowly realising the huge potential that we have at our fingertips if we go beyond the fear of the unknown and dive in. Then we will realise that there is no problem with time, because time will disappear as something to be tied down and will be allowed to move and change in much the same way we can change our whole world if we choose to. 
Our thought waves are the things that are really real and they shape and form our world and our movement within it. So let's decide to use those thoughts in a positive way and see what kind of reality we can truly create. I don't want to stress the urgency in this because, of course, there is no time to lose.

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