Moving past the illusion of time.

‘Time waits for no one’

This is a sentence we often here from people who try to remind us of the importance of properly utilizing our time. There is a notion of time being wasted if not used for something productive. This seems to be true as all of us as human beings are ultimately on a journey towards the same place which is our death. Between the moments of our birth and death, there exists a linear timeline of life experienced by us as a sequence of events. Some of these events seem to be within our control through our actions and decisions while others are thrust upon us by the universe in an uncertain fashion.

The eminent physicist Albert Einstein showed us that time isn’t absolute. There is no one massive clock ticking somewhere in the depths of our universe that measures time for everyone. Time rather, is relative in nature as as a result is experienced differently by everyone. Our inner biological clocks too experience this relativity. Sit hundred people down in a room for one hour and then ask everyone how much time they believe has passed. You will get multiple different answers. When we sleep, we enter a completely different state of mind. As a human being, you may have experienced that what was actually eight hours of sleeping time may have seemed nothing more than a whiff.

What we can certainly agree on for now is that there is indeed a linear timeline of events through which each individual passes. However we cannot agree upon the fact that each individual moves through this timeline at the same perceived speed. The perceived speed at which the passage of time is experienced fluctuates from person to person.

Science has attempted to explain time as a fourth dimension much like our three dimensions of space. These four dimensions combined together as one give us what is known as space-time. In such a concept, space and time are not different but rather just different dimensions of the same space-time. As three dimensional beings, we have control over the way in which we move through the three dimensions of space but the fourth dimension of time seems to be beyond our control for now. In other words we cannot change the nature of our movement through this fourth dimension which will always be unidirectional. However as discussed before, it is possible to experience this movement at different speeds relative to each other. This is akin to two cars that have no choice but to move from point A to point B in space. However since one might have a more powerful engine than the other, it is able to cover the distance faster.

Let us assume that none of the car drivers have any idea of the speed at which they are travelling. An interesting point to note would be that if both the car drivers measured the amount of space covered by how quickly they reached their destination, each would come up with widely different answers. However since space is measured absolutely, we know that both the cars indeed covered the same distance and their calculations of distance covered on the basis of how quickly they felt they reached the destination or on the basis of time taken would be wrong. Maybe in such a case, the drivers would have come up with an idea of relative space!

This again leads us to question whether time is indeed relative as we believe it to be, or is the experience of relativity simply a consequence of a lack of understanding of our passage through time.Maybe what we experience as time dilation is simply a consequence of the fact that each of us has an internal engine that makes us move through this dimension of time at different speeds thus giving an illusion of relativity where there might actually be absoluteness!

However here a contradiction arises. If each of us passes through time at a different speed, then how do we measure this speed? It may seem that in order to measure this value, we may have to create a different time that could be used to count how fast we moved through time itself! This again creates unnecessary complications.

An alternative way to look at it would be to assume that it is possible to experience time the same way that we experience space and that for some reason whatsoever, we humans are unable to control our movement through it. In such a reality, every single point in time would exist simultaneously and we would freely be able to move from present to past to future just like we are freely able to move through space.

However this again poses more questions. Our current understanding of time leads us to believe that actions in the present affect our future and those in the past are already affecting our present. Every action we take at any moment in time seems to play a role in deciding the future outcome. Hence in the reality discussed above, maybe all the possible futures for any given moment of time could exist simultaneously. Time would give up it’s linear structure and rather become a tree where each node branches off into infinite different possible futures.

It seems truly marvellous to consider all these possibilities for what the nature of time indeed is but for now we can only truly agree on what is perceivable to our five senses. Everything else though not necessarily an untruth is still simply a result of ideation.

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