The End of Time?

Ye of little patience: another story - another "exclusive", no less :) - is planned for later this week (up until and including Sunday).

Meanwhile, we've been pondering about the nature of time ad nauseam. Naturally, it never leads anywhere; or if it does, there is no way to confirm the validity of such insights..
But if you're anything like us here, you know musings about the nature of time are as irresistible as they are (or can be) maddening.

So, why not muse upon it in the company of a book that proposes there is no "time" at all?
It's not a particularly recent one, but then good work doesn't have an expiration date.

I am referring to Julian Barbour's book The End of Time.

And since you can borrow it from any good library - as I would recommend - this post can't even be construed as advertising. Be warned, however, that once you've read it - and if you're truly interested in the curiosities of what we call "time" - you might be tempted to keep a copy forever.
I know I was. And I did. (Relax: not the library copy!)


Here's Barbour's angle, in a nutshell:

"The main aim is to introduce a definite way of thinking about instants of time without having to suppose that they belong to something that flows relentlessly forward. I regard instants of time as real things, identifying them with possible instantaneous arrangements of all the things in the universe. They are configurations of the universe. In themselves, these configurations are perfectly static and timeless. But how and why can something static and timeless be experienced as intensely dynamic and temporal?"

So, it's all instants. Everything is NOW, in Barbour's opinion. Those individual "frames" in the seeming continuum of a lifetime, any lifetime, are the single core, the essence, of what our true four-dimensional experience is.; the rest is memory and/or imagination (and a very creative one, but I digress.)

Yes, I bet you already suspected that much.
But you might want to read about it from a physicist's perspective.

To whet your appetite or get a sense whether you'd like it at all, you can read this illuminating review here.

Or you can watch this Dutch video (23 minutes), about which Barbour says it has done "a remarkably good job of explaining the ideas of The End of Time in a non-technical way".







AFTERTHOUGHTS

Here are a few "dummy" questions that the interviewer should have asked, in our opinion, but either didn't or they were edited out.


* If there is no place for continuity of any sort, were all things created instantly in all their states and potentialities (and even their non-state opposites)? In other words, is a person created as a newborn, an adult, an old person, all at once?

That's what I get it from this interview, and that's what I've been suspecting for a long while now.
And if this is so, what is it that propels our perception to experience the seeming "arrow" of development always in the same direction, from young to old, from "cause" to "result"?

But the most essential question, in my opinion, is the following:


* Throughout the programme, Barbour uses - inevitably, of course - time-bound (and time-shaped) language: he "came" to the conclusion, he will" take a snapshot - and so forth.

Isn't "time" ultimately simply a name for our experience of continuity (illusory or not) between all these discrete instants?

I certainly think so; and if this is so, then the true nature of "time" is really a moot point, however interesting. In other words, if we are never going to experience it in any other way, why should we even care what the true nature of "time" is?

But is it so?
Are we really doomed to experience "time" as we normally do - in a linear fashion? (And the many entries in this very blog seem to attest we do not experience it linearly at all, ahem, times.)

This sub-question seems to me particularly interesting because it would indicate, regardless of the answer (positive or negative), the sort of mechanism that dictates such perception - and which perhaps could be transcended.

Theoretical physics can be great fun and certainly a great exercise for the abstract mind.
But unless it is also useful in a meaningful, existential way, it is mostly an exercise in futility.

Still, it is a great work that makes you think about such things.

Intermezzo: Haunted Hollywood

What the average man calls Death,
I believe to be merely the beginning of Life itself.
We simply live beyond the shell.
We emerge from out of it's [sic!] narrow confines like a chrysalis.
Why call it Death?
Or, if we call it Death,
why surround it with dark fears and sick imaginings?
I'm not afraid of the Unknown.

From an entry in Rudolph Valentino's diary
(or so I am told, I haven't read it)

As has been explained in another entry or two, we don't "do" ghost stories here.
Well... in principle.

Tonight, in honour of the upcoming Oscar night - an event that means absolutely nothing to me or to anyone in our team (with the possible exception of Lynx, who'll be watching the event for its fashion value) - I decided to make an exception and offer you a link to a brand new compilation of (sometimes first-hand) accounts about the "ghosts" that purportedly roam the hallowed halls of Hollywood and its water holes. Not because we don't have any "time slippage" stories to tell (one, especially, has our collective fingertips itching!), but because those that we do have deserve more time and attention than any of us have at this moment.

Besides, it's a very good excuse to point you to the very interesting and entertaining website that hosts it.

So, grab your favourite snack and click away!

Ten Oscar-related ghost stories from Hollywood

If you liked the stories above, then there is a good chance you'll like the book (by the same author, Laurie Jacobson), too:

Hollywood Haunted:
A Ghostly Tour of Filmland

If not, you can try another book on the same subject (by Tom Ogden):

Haunted Hollywood:
Tinseltown Terrors, Filmdom Phantoms, and Movieland Mayhem

I wish the Olympic games - another event that rates 0,00 on my scale of interest (and it's because I like sports) - had such an entertaining collection of otherworldly stories.
Then again, after this year's eventful edition, they might see the need to create one...

Dream Time - is it a timespace of its own?

Some people love to hear about other people's night dreams and to talk about their own.
I don't; never did. The only dreams that interest me are people's so-called "daydreams".

It's not that I don't find dreams interesting. It's just that there seem to be different types of dreams, and it's very difficult to understand their meaning unless one is deeply involved in the dreamer's life.
Some dreams seem to "recycle" past events, others seem to (and sometimes do) predict future events, and others just seem to be... a timespace of their own - a territory unknown, yet oddly familiar while one is in it.

But today I find myself wondering: is that dreamscape, the apparent "spacetime" of dreams, perhaps an actual (para-physical) field, accessible from outside the dreamer's mind?

Two nights ago I had a series of dreams; they were - as my dreams usually are- convoluted and alien to the everyday world in their imagery, to the point of being impossible to retell (although they made perfect sense in their own "spacetime").
When I woke up, the only thing I remembered was the "tail" of the dreams: a beautiful music that had something - I couldn't remember what - to do with stacks of gold coins or money.
I didn't dwell on it, but I did try to recall the music; and for a few minutes after waking up I was able to repeat the tune. (It was something I had never heard before.)
And then, of course, I stopped thinking about the dream altogether, all the more so because there was no specific mood associated with it (I do remember feeling very happy hearing ht music, but there was no impression of a powerful "message" lingering, as sometimes happens).

In the afternoon I met with an aunt of mine and her daughter, my cousin. As we were talking about some unimportant things, my aunt mentioned a cashier. At that point my cousin jumped in and said: "Right! That reminds me! I had the weirdest dream last night: about a cash register playing a song..."

Walfrido Garcia: Dockside Dreams, taken from here.

At this point I found myself staring at her and remembering my dream at the same time: yes, that was it - it was an open cash register that the music was coming out of. That's what all those stacks of "gold coins" that I vaguely remembered were.

I told my cousin that I had the exact same dream. I told her so with a straight face, and even though she said she believed me, I am not sure she did.

I asked her - and tried to remember myself - whether there was anything on television or in the newspapers in the previous days that could have made us both dream of that. She couldn't remember, and neither do I.
(At this point probably I should mention that I have an exceptionally good memory and, even more to the point, that I am usually very "aware" of my own thoughts and reactions to my surroundings. In other words, it's not easy to pump anything into my head without my knowledge.)

I asked my cousin about the details, but there few she could remember: that she was happy and she laughed when she saw those cash drawers open rhythmically, with all those stacks of coins, and the music came out of it.
So was I. Her description sounds exactly like what I remember from my dream.
(At least now you know what makes our hearts sing...;)

In order to test... I don't really know what, I even tried a trick - I asked her: "Didn't you have a similar dream a while ago? Remember?"

She didn't remember.
(Of course not.)
Nor do I remember having a similar dream at any point in my life.

Whatever it was, nobody will convince me it was a "coincidence". I mean, what are the odds of that happening?

But whatever it was, it was not the first time it happened in my family.
My mother told me, a long time ago, that when she was a girl she shared a dream with her mother.

My grandmama being the down-to-earth-person that she was (and I must say, most of my family are like that) didn't dwell on it or even try to analyse it. Luckily, my mother remembered it. And I'll always regret Carl Gustav Jung never got to learn about their dream, as I am sure he would have been fascinated by it and would probably offer some interesting explanation.

What could be the explanation for such a phenomenon?
Based on other, non-dream experiences and lifelong thoughts about these matters I am inclined to think that families and friendships - perhaps any sort of interpersonal relationship - are more than more or less temporary physical conglomerates. The "pool" of their shared input - thoughts, emotions, experiences - may transcend the mere visible physical realm; and it may even outlive all of the individual members that contribute to it and tap from it.
If that is so, then it could be considered a sort of "timespace" in its own right.

And that is the reason why I wrote about this here, even though it doesn't seem to have anything to do with time "slips".
If something so deeply individual-seeming as a dream image is accessible, or generated by, or both, by more than one person at the same time, it inevitably opens the question about the nature of space - and thereby the question of the nature of Time.