By Andrew Tomas

The Problem of Time

Einstein’s Theory of Relativity shows that our attempt to separate the three dimensions of Space—breadth, depth and height—from Time is purely subjective. By referring our experiences to a clock or a calendar, we artificially create Time as an objective reality.

To show how relative Time is, let us analyze the flight of an astronaut around the earth. Cape Kennedy rotates around the planetary axis once in twenty-four hours. But the U.S. Astronaut orbits the planet in some 90 minutes, so he sees sixteen “days” while we see only one. The length of the day is thus decided by the speed of rotation around the axis. If the astronaut is paid wages by the day, he should get sixteen times more than the technician on the ground, provided NASA accepts his calendar.

In The Conquest of Time H.G. Wells gives a good example of the relative significance of Time. He imagines himself standing on the North Pole and looking at the sun. It is 12 o’clock on Sunday. As he rotates with the Earth on top of the planet, it remains 12 o’clock on Sunday until he makes a complete revolution when it becomes 12 o’clock on Monday. What happens if one begins to turn oneself faster than the Earth? One gets to the starting-point sooner than the Earth.

History knows of a few oddities for which the god Cronus is certainly responsible. When the survivors of the Magellan expedition reached Spain aboard the Victoria under the command of Captain Elcano on September 7, 1522, they discovered, to their amazement, that in spite of an accurately kept log-book, a day had been lost during their westward voyage around the globe. As the seamen had not celebrated holy days on the right days, the Church asked them to do penance. We know now that the log-book of Magellan was correct and the penance should be credited to the souls of the sailors. In circumnavigating the Earth the explorers lost a day because there was no International Date Line in those times.

So that a similar oddity should not happen again, ocean liners traveling from San Francisco to Tokyo have two Sundays or two Wednesdays in one week.

The story of Magellan is the tale of one lost day, and not so bad as the case of eleven days which were torn off the calendars in 1732. England adopted the Gregorian calendar in that year and dropped eleven days. A riot was immediately staged by workers who demanded wages for the missing days.

In ancient times it was the business of priests, poets and philosophers to meditate upon Time and in the words of Shakespeare–

To see the minutes how they run,
How many makes the hour full complete;
How many hours bring about the day;
How many days will finish up the year;
How many years a mortal man may live.

That was an epoch when a minute was a minute and an hour an hour. In the last seven decades science has discovered that the world does not consist of points but of events. Nothing can exist in space unless it also exists in Time. Likewise nothing can have being in Time unless it has a place in space.

Unexplored regions have opened before our mental gaze. In the newly discovered curvature of space, straight lines vanished from the universe. Time had become dependent on the observer at a certain point in space. This was not only a revolution in science but an explosion of the myth that Time was something abstract—beyond the universe.

Clocks And The Soul

“The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.” ~ Albert Einstein

From this point of view no effort should be spared in trying to find definitions of something that can probably be described only in terms of abstract ideas, mathematics or by means of allegories.

It was the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus who thus spoke of Time: “You cannot step into he same river twice, for other waters are ever flowing on.”

Time and consciousness are closely linked. In the psyche Time may be the principal dimension. In the physical world we move in space by means of Time—it takes us a given length of time to perform certain actions, such as walking. In the mental world we move in Time by reminiscing past events, while occupying space—sitting in an armchair, for example.

Our time sense does not always give us the correct estimation of duration. One hour may seem long but another short. It is emotional reaction that colors the impressions.

If one hears a boring lecture or waits for a train at the station “time drags on”. If a person attends a party and has “a good time”, time flies.

Long before the birth of the Theory of Relativity, Shakespeare wrote: “Time travels in divers paces with divers persons.”

If a great number of events take place in a limited period of time in a new environment, the period seems to be much longer than it really is. Mr. Brown, a London businessman, went through the same office routine on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. He arrived at 9:30 in the morning and left at 6 p.m. Then he had his dinner and watched television. On Friday night he boarded a plane for Paris and had a stroll along the Champs Elysees. On Saturday morning he visited the Louvre, saw Paris from the Eiffel Tower, and enjoyed his lunch in a topnotch restaurant. Then he flew to Nice, basked in the sun on the Cote d’Azur, had a few drinks, following which he had supper and slept in the hotel. On Sunday he was in Venice with its canals and gondolas. On Monday morning he took a plane for Zurich—where he saw the clear blue sky and blinding snow of the Alps. Late on Monday night he was back in London where it was drizzling. On Tuesday morning Mr. Brown was not himself. It seemed to him that he had been away for at least a week or ten days. Saturday, Sunday, and Monday were much longer to him than Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

A rapid flow of Time in a dream is another strange psychological phenomenon. During the French Revolution the Marquis De Lavalette experienced a dream while he was in prison and the clock was striking twelve. Events of five hours were seen by him in less than a minute: “I was in the Rue Saint Honore. It was dark and streets deserted, but soon a diffused dull murmur was heard. Suddenly a troop of horsemen appeared at the end of the street—terrible beings, bearing torches. For five hours they passed me by, riding at full gallop. After them came a vast number of gun carriages loaded with dead bodies.”

Professor Vasilieff refers to the case of a famous playwright who came to see the performance of his stage play but went to sleep in his seat. In the dream he saw his play from beginning to end and watched the reaction of the audience. At last the curtain went down to thunderous applause and the playwright woke up in surprise to hear but the first sentences of the dialogue in Act One. The duration of the performance of the whole piece on the stage in his dream had thus taken only a few seconds.

The acceleration of events in dreams is quite common. There is another psychological phenomenon in which memories of a whole life flash in seconds before one’s mind. Drowning or a mortal danger brings on this state in which one’s life unfolds like a motion picture in a few seconds.

An acquaintance of the author in Moscow, an engineer, was knocked down and injured in the Metro several years ago. In the course of seconds his long life arose before his mental vision, complete in every detail. He was not sure whether he moved through the episodes of his life at a fabulous speed, or if the chain of happenings from infancy to the day of his accident appeared all together, as in a vast painting.

Skydiver Bob Hall, who survived a jump when his parachute failed to open, thus relates his experience: “I screamed. I knew I was dead. That my life was ended. All my past life flashed before my eyes, it really did.”

Drugs such as mescalin, hashish or opium cn cause visions in which the events of decades are compressed into a few brief hours.

Many years ago the author had a Chinese cook in Shanghai who was an opium addict. One night he was the Emperor of China in the Peking Palace surrounded by beautiful wives and concubines. On another occasion he was a pirate in the China sea. Then came the exciting night when he was a Taoist alchemist making gold by ingots. The amazing thing about these psychological films was their acceleration—long lives being squeezed into a few short hours.

One morning the cook was sad and I asked him why he was so depressed. “Last night I was a cook,” he said. I told him that it was no use smoking opium any more—it was merely a waste of money and a risk to his health. “But how do I know that I am not dreaming now that I am only a cook?” he asked. That reminded me of the tale of Through the Looking Glass in which Alice says: “So I wasn’t dreaming after all—unless, unless we’re all part of the same dream.”

The French speleologist Michel Siffre spent sixty days in caverns in 1962. In this experiment he was deprived of methods to measure time and had to rely on his biological clock. When he emerged out of the dark underworld, Siffre thought he had spent only thirty-three days in the caves.

On January 15, 1969, two French spelunkers surfaced at the end of a five-month cave-living experiment organized by Michel Siffre. Jacques Chabert and Phillipe Englander entered the caves in the south of France in the middle of August, 1968. When they emerged from their solitary confinement in two separate caves, both thought it was November 15, 1968, instead of January 15, 1969. With no watches, depending on their biological time-sense alone, they were two months behind in their estimation of Time.

Businessmen making frequent jet flights across continents complain of the difficulties they have in adjusting to time changes. They find it hard to adopt new eating and sleeping hours in places with different time. Evidently their biological clock protests against the sudden change of geographical time.

Guatama the Buddha was aware of the subjective character of Time when he asked a Brahmin these questions two and a half thousand years ago:

“Where is your self? Your self to which you cleave is a constant change. Years ago you were a baby. Then you were a boy, then a youth and now you are a man. Is there any identity of the baby and the man? Which is your self—that of yesterday, that of today, or that of tomorrow for the preservation of which you are so longing?”

“You have confused me,” responded Kutadanta, the Brahmin.

The duration of Time is assessed by man in different ways. As the Buddha said: “Long is the night to him who cannot sleep. Long is a mile to the weary.”

The central thought in understanding Time is the realization that Time does not flow. It is matter and consciousness that move through Space-Time. Time is an endless road with constantly changing landscapes, some of which we create ourselves before we arrive at a given point in the future.

Excerpt from Beyond The Time Barrier