via The Age
On October 23, 1977, a diminutive Australian stepped onto the stage in New York. The audience saw an elderly woman whose regular uniform was a tweed skirt, twinset, spectacles, and sensible brown lace-up shoes with low heels. Her dark hair was permed and for adornment, she wore a string of pearls. At the age of 74, Dr Claire Weekes was the guest speaker at the 18th Annual Fall Conference of the Association for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. She was an unusual choice for this gathering, as she ranked as an unqualified outsider.
However, Weekes had one measurable claim to fame: her books on anxiety were a global sensation, hitting the bestseller lists in the US and the UK from the early 1960s onwards. She’d found a popular audience by identifying and describing the havoc nervous illness could create, and explaining and treating it in a fresh way. Weekes had been invited to address this professional association despite divided opinion over her approach. Many psychiatrists had heard of her methods from their patients, and a number accepted that some patients they had treated unsuccessfully had read her books and felt, if not entirely cured, then on the way to recovery.
While her audience saw a populist, Weekes started life as a scholar, an evolutionary scientist. In 1930 she made history as the first woman to gain a doctorate of science at the University of Sydney, and also won the university medal in zoology. By then she already had an international reputation in her field, which lives as vigorously today in academic circles as her work on nerves thrives in the popular market.
In 1945, she qualified as a medical doctor, eventually becoming a specialist general physician dealing with difficult-to-diagnose cases. She then hurdled what was then the highest bar in medicine, being selected as a fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians. Her medical peers recognised what went unappreciated by her New York audience: Weekes was a scientist and a doctor who had mastered an understanding of the nervous system.
Yet on the podium in New York, Weekes inspired no awe and many in the audience dismissed her as offering nothing more than the equivalent of grandmotherly advice. She was the author of self-help books, not a psychiatrist, and she was in huge demand in the media. Her fame invited critical attention to her lack of specialist credentials, which was enough to wound her reputation in her own profession.
The psychiatrists in the New York audience fell into one of two schools. They were either psychoanalysts, who followed the techniques of Sigmund Freud and his intellectual descendants, or cognitive behaviourists, who worked on changing habits of thought and associated behaviours. Weekes’ approach could not have been further from that of Freud. Referring to the legendary psychiatrist’s pioneering technique of interrogating his patients while they were prone, Weekes boasted of being “one of the first to deal a blow at the old Viennese couch technique. I led them out of the consulting room, into the world where they were to live successfully.” She was equally critical of attempts by the behaviourists to “desensitise” their patients using relaxation techniques.
She understood that trying to teach a patient to relax in the face of phobia or panic was not only counterproductive but an almost impossible mission. Instead, she argued that by fully experiencing the panic, the individual learnt it was possible to “pass through” to the other side. Their nervous system needed to be reordered, which they could learn to do themselves. They didn’t then need a shepherd or psychiatrist.
“To recover, they must know how to face, accept and go through panic until it no longer matters …” Weekes said. “Recovery is in their own hands, not in drugs, not in avoidance of panic, not in ‘getting used to’ difficult situations, nor in desensitisation by suggestion. Permanent recovery lies in the patient’s ability to know how to accept the panic until he no longer fears it.”
The New York audience made her acutely aware of their disdain. They looked at their watches and talked among themselves, and the famous South African psychiatrist Dr Joseph Wolpe tore her to pieces after she dared challenge an approach to treatment that he favoured. At least one psychiatrist in the audience appreciated her pioneering work, however. Dr Manuel Zane, who ran a New York clinic for anxiety and phobia, had firsthand experience of the success of her method, even with intractable cases.
“The remarkable thing was that patients came to me talking about her,” Zane wrote in a nomination he made for Weekes for a Nobel Prize in the late 1980s. “That was the difference between Weekes and other professionals. She was coming to us from where the patient is, and not from our top, where we were telling patients what it’s all about, why they are the way they are.” Weekes also offered something unique to the field: hope.
Years later, Weekes chided another professional audience. “I am aware that many therapists believe there is no permanent cure for nervous illness. When I was on the radio some years ago in New York with a physician and a psychiatrist, the psychiatrist corrected me when I used the word ‘cure’ and said, ‘You mean remission, don’t you, Dr Weekes? We never speak of curing nervous illness!’ I told her that I had cured far too many nervously ill people to be afraid to use the word.”
It was a provocative claim, but one that sat on an unshakeable foundation. Weekes’ work anticipated advances made decades later in both neurology and psychiatry, and her approach, akin to modern psychology’s Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), has been vindicated. She changed the way anxiety was understood and treated, yet her huge global footprint is invisible, and her achievement remains largely unrecognised by professionals.
Hazel Claire Weekes was born in 1903 into a modest middle-class Sydney home. Her father, Ralph, was a musician, and this clever eldest daughter of four children was the favourite of her mother Fan, a preference all too obvious to Weekes’ two brothers and younger sister. Fiercely proud of this child, who showed early scholarly success, Fan determined to see her daughter fulfil her promise. So off Weekes went to Sydney University, securing her first-class honours degree in science and university medal.
In 1928, at the age of 25, she identified a new challenge: a Rockefeller Fellowship, with which she planned to further her evolutionary studies in England after completing her PhD. But before she got there, she lost her footing and found herself in freefall. It started with a sore throat, followed by a botched operation on septic tonsils resulting in a haemorrhage.
“I’d had severely infected tonsils. I’d eaten very little for months and had lost two stone,” she said years later in an interview with the BBC. For a small, slightly built woman, 13 kilograms was a significant weight loss. In her weakened state, she experienced heart palpitations and was referred to a Sydney specialist she knew as a “famous cardiologist”, who gave her injections of calcium, which had little or no effect.
Fragile, emaciated, and with a racing heart, Weekes was a puzzle to her local doctor, who finally, with scant evidence, made a monumental diagnosis. He concluded she had contracted the dreaded disease of the day, tuberculosis. “I thought I was dying,” she recalled in a letter to a friend. “I was sent away to the country and I was told that I must make no effort, not even to pull a blind down.” Tuberculosis invoked the terror of the Black Plague of earlier years; the public response to it was a preview of that to the HIV/AIDS epidemic to come generations later.
Her studies were put on hold, and the young woman who hated being alone was packed off to the Waterfall State Sanatorium, 38 kilometres south of the Sydney CBD. Here there was no occupation and no one to keep Weekes company in the face of the death and dying around her. Her heart continued to race. “I was more or less confined to lying on the couch, with nothing much to do, and six months on my hands. So that I knew what it was to become introverted, worried,” she said of that period.
The sanatorium was the perfect petri dish for a fear that would grip and not let go. Yet Weekes was one of the lucky ones, for, after six months, the doors of the sanatorium swung open. The doctors concluded a mistake had been made; that she’d been wrongly diagnosed. Far from being relieved, Weekes felt immeasurably worse. Now she was convinced that she had a serious heart complaint as the tachycardia, or racing heart, was unceasing. Once outside the sanatorium, she was terrified and overwhelmed.
“I can remember, I had lost all confidence in what I could do, because I’d been told, ‘You mustn’t do this, you mustn’t do that!’ I remember walking out alone and thinking, ‘I wonder if I can walk as far as the corner of that street?’ I remember being aware of every footstep I took, and wondering how much faith I could still have in my body to get there,” she said in a media interview years later.
Rather than immediately returning to university, she chose to recuperate in “the country” with a female friend who was married to a doctor. Weekes hoped for some advice on her heart problems, but instead, found more medical incompetence.
“My heart would palpitate if I woke up at night, just the shock of waking up would make it accelerate. I can remember very clearly how, one night, I called out to her when my heart was beating fiercely and thought my last gasp was coming. Her husband, the doctor, said, ‘No. I won’t go to help her. She’ll think she’s worse than she really is!’”
The doctor was right in one respect. There was nothing wrong with Weekes’ heart. She was to live for another six decades. However, something important had gone unexplained. It was fear that was managing her heartbeat, and, without knowing this, she was trapped in a vicious cycle. It would be years before she cracked the anxiety code.
In 1929, aged 26 and not long out of the sanatorium, an unsteady Weekes boarded a Dutch liner. With a professional record that eluded most men of her generation, and the backing of eminent scientists in her field, she was finally heading to England on that Rockefeller scholarship, bound for University College London, where she would continue her studies in evolution.
The rhythm and vibrations of the ship helped camouflage the movements in her body, and she regained composure for the first time in two years. Yet on stepping ashore, a rapidly beating heart reclaimed her. The return of her symptoms was devastating. At night, she would just be dropping off to sleep when she’d wake with a start. “Then I would sit up for hours for fear that I would die if I lay down.” There was no way out. Newly arrived in London but close to collapse, she felt keenly the paradox of her situation. “I had everything to live for and I knew it. I had achieved so much, the whole of life lay before me, but I was incapacitated.”
The potency of this experience would inform her advice, many years later, to patients and readers.
She knew the return of fear carried with it real despair, the death of the hope so badly needed but impossible to secure. In her books, she had a typically practical word to describe this state: simply, a “setback”. It was not defeat, she counselled, but was to be embraced as an opportunity to practise.
Stress, fear and panic could return, but it was possible to learn how to ride the terrifying waves back to the shoreline. In this way, what she would later call “the habit of fear” could be broken. Not long after she began working in her University College lab, a friend came to visit. Beyond dissembling, her first words to him were: “Oh, I can’t take this any longer. I’ve had it!” When told of her racing heart and indescribable distress, far from being surprised or concerned, he shrugged.
“That is nothing,” he said. “Those are only the symptoms of nerves. We all had those in the [World War I] trenches.” He told Weekes that her heart continued to race because she was frightened of it. It was programmed by her fear. This made immediate sense. “All the time I have been doing this to myself?” she asked. “He said ‘yes’ and laughed,” she would later recount.
His words spoke to the scientist in Weekes. War offered empirical examples: men got scared, their hearts raced, and they often continued to race after the threat had passed. Her friend, decorated for bravery in the savage battle of the Somme, had noticed that he and his fellow soldiers had become distressed by their racing hearts, which further aroused and primed them for panic. Yet there was nothing wrong with their hearts. They were consumed with a fear that felt overwhelming in the body, so the mind concluded something was terribly wrong and continued to feed the fear.
Fear could not be extinguished by the rational brain. Thinking inevitably lost the battle to feeling. Weekes’ substantial cognitive abilities, which delivered scholarships, awards and opportunities, were sidelined by an all-consuming dread. It was this feeling she was desperate to extinguish, this feeling against which she fought so futilely, this feeling that was accompanied by racing panicked thoughts.
The discovery that she’d been frightened of fear itself was a profound revelation. Weekes was shocked that not one of the handful of doctors and specialists she’d consulted had explained how fear could have such a deranging effect on the body. She immediately grasped the point that she needed to stop fighting the fear, an instinctive response yet counterproductive. There was no benefit gained by striving, trying to think rationally, or attempting to exercise willpower. She later reported it as the breakthrough insight.
“After my friend told me the cause, I just lay as calmly as I could, ‘Okay, I’ll just go to sleep, palpitating if necessary.’ ” When she ceased engaging so intensely with her symptoms, her heartbeat returned to normal. “The whole thing cleared up,” as she put it. Once she understood “fear” was bluffing her, she decided to ignore the messenger. She accepted the palpitations instead of fighting them. No battle, no fighting. The keyword was “acceptance”.
The turnaround was swift. If Weekes had been devastated by her lack of understanding of what ailed her, she now felt exhilarated, liberated by an explanation from what had been incomprehensible suffering. With this new understanding, she regained control. Her friend had planted the seed for the bestselling books that Weekes would eventually write, but years of professional medical experience were needed to shape this single brilliant insight of acceptance into a comprehensive understanding of the anxiety state.
Weekes’ own distress, which had so piqued her interest in “nerves”, was to find its professional purpose back in Sydney, when she began practising as a doctor, first in Bondi and then as a specialist general physician in Macquarie Street. Here she learnt that panic and anxiety played a medley of dissonant bodily tunes, from breathing, swallowing and digestive difficulties to headaches, dizziness and muscle fatigue among many others.
Now other doctors began to refer their difficult cases to her. With the support of her partner, the accomplished pianist Elizabeth (Beth) Coleman, and her mother Fan, she had unlimited time and sympathy for anxious patients. Determined not to be like the doctor who had long ago failed to ease her own suffering by explaining the effects of fear on mind and body, her dedication to those she deemed nervously ill went far beyond any normal professional boundary. She even invited some of them to live in her home, to better help their recovery.
Weekes knew the effect anxiety had on the body, later describing in her books “the whiplash of panic” and the “electrifying quality of sensitised panic” to communicate to a non-sufferer the way in which continued distress prepared the body to ever more swiftly respond. The nervous system became primed to experience anxiety more quickly and savagely than ever. It had become “sensitised”, and understanding this process was the key to recovery. Desensitisation would follow as a natural consequence. That is, there was no need to practise becoming desensitised to whatever was particularly feared.
So instead of structured exposure to fears, she prescribed total acceptance of the fear as the way out of distress and panic. The problem was inside, not outside. To address it required total acceptance of what felt unacceptable. For it was exactly this fighting against tension, fear, anxiety and panic that perpetuated the problem. Weekes’ treatment protocol was just six words: face, accept, float, let time pass. It was not designed to eradicate all the stresses of life, but to enable people to find their own way out of distress. It was, she would later say, simple but not always easy. Her point was that it worked.
Weekes put her success as a doctor down to her scientific training, telling the BBC years later that it allowed her to see the trunk of the tree, rather than being distracted by the leaves. She had a gift for discerning the relationship between the mind and the body – what was clinical illness and what were symptoms driven by fear and anxiety. Understanding fear and its relationship to physical illness had become a mission.
Such was her success that throughout the 1950s, people were referred to her from across the nation.
She came to believe she had something unique to offer the huge, unmet market for effective treatment for severe anxiety. In 1962, she wrote the prosaically titled Self-Help for Your Nerves, and by the time she was standing on the podium in New York 15 years later, there had been two more books, which were prominently displayed in airports and translated into at least eight languages.
Two more were to follow in the next decade. She later explained to an American doctor that, instead of writing research papers, she had seen “the need was so great” that she went directly to the people.
The books were slim volumes that explained the nervous system and how it could go awry, how the mind and body were interconnected in arousal, and the trouble this could cause. Yet the clarity of work that drove the books’ runaway success also repelled professional recognition. Self-help was not yet a genre that inspired psychiatrists’ attention or respect. In a field more familiar with failure, and one riven with division, Weekes achieved success and as psychoanalysts struggled to prove that their methods worked, Weekes had the numbers running in her favour. People bought her books and queued to thank her for “saving” their lives. She was writing about “them”, and they often chose a religious metaphor to express their gratitude: the books were their “bible”.
Weekes died in 1990, aged 87. Along the way, she’d hurdled a series of different careers – evolutionary scientist, travel writer, singing coach, GP – and it was a lifetime of scholarship and deep experience of the anxiety state, as well as exceptional communications skills, that delivered the books that saved lives, and changed history.
People as diverse as 1960s housewives, the daughter of Richard Nixon’s drug czar, a British television producer, the late poet Les Murray, the singer Clare Bowditch, the famous US environmental activist Erin Brockovich, even prisoners have benefited from her work. The eminent anxiety specialist David Barlow, professor emeritus of psychology and psychiatry at Boston University, confirms she “created a treatment protocol to the unending benefit of tens of millions of patients over the years”.
It was her training as a scientist and a doctor that enabled Weekes to understand the nervous system and explain it in a way that is state-of-the-art today, although many mental health professionals are unaware of the debt they have to a woman whose work was discovered by a wide, thankful suffering public.
Her face, accept, float, let time pass method was based on a biological understanding of fear. Today, psychologists use a version of her method; neuroscientists study the interaction between different fear circuits in the brain and many psychiatrists are revising the mind-body connection that was the hallmark of her work. “Acceptance” is the treatment du jour, and many mental health professionals explain fear in the same way she did all those years ago, when she identified how the body’s simple alarm system, the unconscious fight-or-flight system – which she called first fear – could be distressingly perpetuated by what she called “second fear” which kicked off a vicious “fear-adrenalin-fear cycle”, as she called it.
Weekes was chagrined by the professional resistance she faced over decades as it so starkly contrasted with her huge success in the marketplace, where she met intense, continuing gratitude. When she spoke on US television networks, switchboards were overwhelmed, and in England in the 1980s, the BBC post office could not handle the avalanche of letters that followed her appearance in an interview series on daytime television. The broadcaster was forced to rent extra space and employ outworkers to handle the mail.
Over time, the professionals were educated by their patients who had found her work so useful, and some leaders in the field, such as England’s renowned anxiety expert, Dr Isaac Marks, and Albert Ellis, considered one of the originators of the so-called cognitive revolution in psychology, came to understand the power of her books. Yet her loyal audience never needed persuading and her enduring public value is easy to identify to this day.
Her books are still being read and a social media foreign to her continues to share her work. If history has forgotten Weekes, her public remembers. In 2014, when US magazine The Atlantic invited readers to respond with tips on anxiety, just three writers were cited and their books listed. One of these was Self-Help for Your Nerves, or, as it was retitled for the US market, Hope and Help for Your Nerves. It had been written over half a century before, and Dr Claire Weekes had been dead for almost 25 years.
This is an edited extract from The Woman Who Cracked the Anxiety Code: the Extraordinary Life of Dr Claire Weekes by Judith Hoare (Scribe, $40), out October 1.
Showing posts with label time. Show all posts
Showing posts with label time. Show all posts
Sunday, October 6, 2019
Tuesday, September 17, 2019
Why Can’t You Remember Your Future? Physicist Paul Davies on the Puzzlement of Why We Experience Time as Linear
via brainpickings
“If our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail,” French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote in his 1932 meditation on our paradoxical experience of time, “we would see that every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer.” Nowhere is this duality of time more disorienting than in the constant mental time travel we perform between what has been and what will be in order to anchor ourselves to what is. As our lives tick on, gradually robbing the future of potential and robbing the past of relevance, we trudge along the arrow of time dragging with us this elusive curiosity we call a self — an ever-shifting packet of personal identity, mystifying in how it links us to our childhood selves and misleading in how it maps out our future selves.
That puzzlement is what Australian theoretical physicist Paul Davies explores in a wonderfully mind-bending passage from his altogether terrific 1995 book About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution (public library), which embodies my three criteria for what makes a great science book.
Davies writes:
"When I was a child, I often used to lie awake at night, in fearful anticipation of some unpleasant event the following day, such as a visit to the dentist, and wish I could press some sort of button that would have the effect of instantly transporting me twenty-four hours into the future. The following night, I would wonder whether that magic button was in fact real, and that the trick had indeed worked. After all, it was twenty-four hours later, and though I could remember the visit to the dentist, it was, at the that time, only a memory of an experience, not an experience.
Another button would also send me backwards in time, of course. This button would restore my brain state and memory to what they were at that earlier date. One press, and I could be back at my early childhood, experiencing once again, for the first time, my fourth birthday…"
Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman addressed this perplexity in his model of the experiencing self and the remembering self, but for Davies the more interesting question deals not with the pure psychology of the experience but with how the accepted physics of time, seeded by Einstein’s relativity theory, gives shape to that psychological experience. He returns to the larger questions arising from his childhood thought experiments:
"With these buttons, gone would be the orderly procession of events that apparently constitutes my life. I could simply jump hither and thither at random, back and forth in time, rapidly moving on from any unpleasant episodes, frequently repeating the good times, always avoiding death, of course , and continuing ad infinitum. I would have no subjective impression of randomness, because at each stage the state of my brain would encode a consistent sequence of events.
[…]
The striking thing about [such] “thought experiments” is, how would my life seem any different if this button-pushing business really was going on? What does it even mean to say that I am experiencing my life in a jumpy, random sort of manner? Each instant of my experience is the experience, whatever its temporal relation to other experiences. So long as the memories are consistent, what meaning can be attached to the claim that my life happens in a jumbled sequence?"
In the remainder of the thoroughly satisfying About Time, Davies goes on to probe the answer to this question by examining how the history of human thought, from St. Augustine to Einstein, has left us with a model of time that simply doesn’t reflect the nature of experience, and what we can expect from the evolution of science as we reach for more complete models of this timelessly puzzling dimension of reality.
Complement it with T.S. Eliot’s beautiful ode to the nature of time and Virginia Woolf on the elasticity of time, then revisit the historic debate that shaped our modern understanding of time.
“If our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail,” French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote in his 1932 meditation on our paradoxical experience of time, “we would see that every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer.” Nowhere is this duality of time more disorienting than in the constant mental time travel we perform between what has been and what will be in order to anchor ourselves to what is. As our lives tick on, gradually robbing the future of potential and robbing the past of relevance, we trudge along the arrow of time dragging with us this elusive curiosity we call a self — an ever-shifting packet of personal identity, mystifying in how it links us to our childhood selves and misleading in how it maps out our future selves.
That puzzlement is what Australian theoretical physicist Paul Davies explores in a wonderfully mind-bending passage from his altogether terrific 1995 book About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution (public library), which embodies my three criteria for what makes a great science book.
Davies writes:
"When I was a child, I often used to lie awake at night, in fearful anticipation of some unpleasant event the following day, such as a visit to the dentist, and wish I could press some sort of button that would have the effect of instantly transporting me twenty-four hours into the future. The following night, I would wonder whether that magic button was in fact real, and that the trick had indeed worked. After all, it was twenty-four hours later, and though I could remember the visit to the dentist, it was, at the that time, only a memory of an experience, not an experience.
Another button would also send me backwards in time, of course. This button would restore my brain state and memory to what they were at that earlier date. One press, and I could be back at my early childhood, experiencing once again, for the first time, my fourth birthday…"
Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman addressed this perplexity in his model of the experiencing self and the remembering self, but for Davies the more interesting question deals not with the pure psychology of the experience but with how the accepted physics of time, seeded by Einstein’s relativity theory, gives shape to that psychological experience. He returns to the larger questions arising from his childhood thought experiments:
"With these buttons, gone would be the orderly procession of events that apparently constitutes my life. I could simply jump hither and thither at random, back and forth in time, rapidly moving on from any unpleasant episodes, frequently repeating the good times, always avoiding death, of course , and continuing ad infinitum. I would have no subjective impression of randomness, because at each stage the state of my brain would encode a consistent sequence of events.
[…]
The striking thing about [such] “thought experiments” is, how would my life seem any different if this button-pushing business really was going on? What does it even mean to say that I am experiencing my life in a jumpy, random sort of manner? Each instant of my experience is the experience, whatever its temporal relation to other experiences. So long as the memories are consistent, what meaning can be attached to the claim that my life happens in a jumbled sequence?"
In the remainder of the thoroughly satisfying About Time, Davies goes on to probe the answer to this question by examining how the history of human thought, from St. Augustine to Einstein, has left us with a model of time that simply doesn’t reflect the nature of experience, and what we can expect from the evolution of science as we reach for more complete models of this timelessly puzzling dimension of reality.
Complement it with T.S. Eliot’s beautiful ode to the nature of time and Virginia Woolf on the elasticity of time, then revisit the historic debate that shaped our modern understanding of time.
Sunday, October 2, 2016
Time Might Only Exist in Your Head. And Everyone Else’s
via Wired:
Past. Present. Future.
In physics, they are all the same thing. But to you, me, and everyone else, time moves in one direction: from expectation, through experience, and into memory. This linearity is called the arrow of time, and some physicists believe it only progresses that way because humans, and other beings with similar neurological wiring, exist to observe its passing.
The question of time’s arrow is an old one. And to be clear, it’s not whether time exists, but what direction it moves. Many physicists believe it emerges when enough tiny particles—individually governed by the weird rules of quantum mechanics— interact, and start displaying behavior that can be explained using classical physics. But two scientists argue, in a paper published today in Annalen der physik—the same journal that published Einstein’s seminal articles on special and general relativity—that gravity isn’t strong enough to force every object in the universe to follow the same past»present»future direction. Instead, time’s arrow emerges from observers.
This all goes back to one of the biggest problems in physics, knitting together quantum and classical mechanics. In quantum mechanics, particles can have superposition. That is, one electron might exist in either of two places, and nobody can say for sure which until it is observed. Where that electron might be is represented by probability. Experimentally, this checks out.
However, the rules change when electrons start interacting with many objects—like a bunch of air molecules—or decohere into things like dust particles, airplanes, and baseballs. Classical mechanics take over, and gravity becomes important. “The position of electron, each atom, is governed by a probability,” says Yasunori Nomura, a physicist at UC Berkeley. But once they interact with larger objects, or become things like baseballs, those individual probabilities combine, and the odds of all those collective electrons having superposition decreases. That’s why you never see a baseball simultaneously disappear into the left fielder’s mitt while also soaring into the upper deck.
That moment when particle physics merge with classical mechanics is called decoherence. In terms of physics, it is when time’s direction becomes mathematically important. And so, most physicists believe time’s arrow emerges from decoherence.
The most prominent theory explaining decoherence is the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. It dates to 1965, when a physicist named John Wheeler had a layover at an airport in North Carolina. To pass the time, he asked his colleague Bryce DeWitt to meet him. They did what physicists do: talk theory and play with numbers. The two came up with an equation that, to Wheeler, erased the seams between quantum and classical mechanics (DeWitt was more ambivalent).
The theory isn’t perfect. But it is important, and most physicists agree that it is an important tool for understanding the weirdness underlying decoherence and so-called quantum gravity.
Here’s where it gets a bit weirder. Although the equation doesn’t include a variable for time (which isn’t all that weird. Time is something that can’t be measured in terms of itself, in physics it is measured as correlations between an object’s location … over time … anyway, it’s weird). But, it provides a framework for knitting the universe together.
However, the two scientists who penned this recent paper say that, in the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, gravity’s effects kick in too slowly to account for a universal arrow of time. “If you look at examples and do the math, the equation doesn’t explain how time’s direction emerges,” says Robert Lanza, a biologist, polymath, and co-author of the paper. (Lanza is the founder of biocentrism, a theory that space and time are constructs of biological sensory limitations.) In other words, those nimble quantum particles ought to be able to keep their property of superposition before gravity grabs hold. And if, say, gravity is too weak to hold an interaction between to molecules as they decohere into something larger, then there’s no way it can force them to move in the same direction, time-wise.
If that math doesn’t check out, that leaves the observer: Us. Time moves as it does because humans are biologically, neurologically, philosophically hardwired to experience it that way. It’s like a macro-scale version of Schrödinger’s cat. A faraway corner of the universe might be moving future to past. But the moment humans point a telescope in that direction, time conforms to the past-future flow. “”In his papers on relativity, Einstein showed that time was relative to the observer,” says Lanza. “Our paper takes this one step further, arguing that the observer actually creates it.”
This is not necessarily a new theory. Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli wrote about it in a paper published last year on ArXiv, an open physics website. Nor is it uncontroversial. Nomura says one flaw is figuring out how to measure whether this notion of “observer time” is real. “The answer depends on whether the concept of time can be defined mathematically without including observers in the system,” he says. The authors argue that there is no way to subtract the observer from any equation, since equations are by default performed and analyzed by people.
Nomura says the authors also fail to account for the fact that the entire universe exists in a medium called spacetime, “So when you talk about spacetime, you already talking about a decohered system.” He doesn’t go so far as to say the authors are wrong—physics remains an incomplete science—but he disagrees with the conclusions they draw from their math. And like time, interpretations of physics are all relative.
Past. Present. Future.
In physics, they are all the same thing. But to you, me, and everyone else, time moves in one direction: from expectation, through experience, and into memory. This linearity is called the arrow of time, and some physicists believe it only progresses that way because humans, and other beings with similar neurological wiring, exist to observe its passing.
The question of time’s arrow is an old one. And to be clear, it’s not whether time exists, but what direction it moves. Many physicists believe it emerges when enough tiny particles—individually governed by the weird rules of quantum mechanics— interact, and start displaying behavior that can be explained using classical physics. But two scientists argue, in a paper published today in Annalen der physik—the same journal that published Einstein’s seminal articles on special and general relativity—that gravity isn’t strong enough to force every object in the universe to follow the same past»present»future direction. Instead, time’s arrow emerges from observers.
This all goes back to one of the biggest problems in physics, knitting together quantum and classical mechanics. In quantum mechanics, particles can have superposition. That is, one electron might exist in either of two places, and nobody can say for sure which until it is observed. Where that electron might be is represented by probability. Experimentally, this checks out.
However, the rules change when electrons start interacting with many objects—like a bunch of air molecules—or decohere into things like dust particles, airplanes, and baseballs. Classical mechanics take over, and gravity becomes important. “The position of electron, each atom, is governed by a probability,” says Yasunori Nomura, a physicist at UC Berkeley. But once they interact with larger objects, or become things like baseballs, those individual probabilities combine, and the odds of all those collective electrons having superposition decreases. That’s why you never see a baseball simultaneously disappear into the left fielder’s mitt while also soaring into the upper deck.
That moment when particle physics merge with classical mechanics is called decoherence. In terms of physics, it is when time’s direction becomes mathematically important. And so, most physicists believe time’s arrow emerges from decoherence.
The most prominent theory explaining decoherence is the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. It dates to 1965, when a physicist named John Wheeler had a layover at an airport in North Carolina. To pass the time, he asked his colleague Bryce DeWitt to meet him. They did what physicists do: talk theory and play with numbers. The two came up with an equation that, to Wheeler, erased the seams between quantum and classical mechanics (DeWitt was more ambivalent).
The theory isn’t perfect. But it is important, and most physicists agree that it is an important tool for understanding the weirdness underlying decoherence and so-called quantum gravity.
Here’s where it gets a bit weirder. Although the equation doesn’t include a variable for time (which isn’t all that weird. Time is something that can’t be measured in terms of itself, in physics it is measured as correlations between an object’s location … over time … anyway, it’s weird). But, it provides a framework for knitting the universe together.
However, the two scientists who penned this recent paper say that, in the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, gravity’s effects kick in too slowly to account for a universal arrow of time. “If you look at examples and do the math, the equation doesn’t explain how time’s direction emerges,” says Robert Lanza, a biologist, polymath, and co-author of the paper. (Lanza is the founder of biocentrism, a theory that space and time are constructs of biological sensory limitations.) In other words, those nimble quantum particles ought to be able to keep their property of superposition before gravity grabs hold. And if, say, gravity is too weak to hold an interaction between to molecules as they decohere into something larger, then there’s no way it can force them to move in the same direction, time-wise.
If that math doesn’t check out, that leaves the observer: Us. Time moves as it does because humans are biologically, neurologically, philosophically hardwired to experience it that way. It’s like a macro-scale version of Schrödinger’s cat. A faraway corner of the universe might be moving future to past. But the moment humans point a telescope in that direction, time conforms to the past-future flow. “”In his papers on relativity, Einstein showed that time was relative to the observer,” says Lanza. “Our paper takes this one step further, arguing that the observer actually creates it.”
This is not necessarily a new theory. Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli wrote about it in a paper published last year on ArXiv, an open physics website. Nor is it uncontroversial. Nomura says one flaw is figuring out how to measure whether this notion of “observer time” is real. “The answer depends on whether the concept of time can be defined mathematically without including observers in the system,” he says. The authors argue that there is no way to subtract the observer from any equation, since equations are by default performed and analyzed by people.
Nomura says the authors also fail to account for the fact that the entire universe exists in a medium called spacetime, “So when you talk about spacetime, you already talking about a decohered system.” He doesn’t go so far as to say the authors are wrong—physics remains an incomplete science—but he disagrees with the conclusions they draw from their math. And like time, interpretations of physics are all relative.
James Gleick on How Our Cultural Fascination with Time Travel Illuminates Memory, the Nature of Time, and the Central Mystery of Human Consciousness
via Brainpickings:
“Every moment alters what came before. We reach across layers of time for the memories of our memories.”
“Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom,” Bertrand Russell in 1931 as he made his beautiful case for “a largeness of contemplation” in contemplating the nature of time. “Shard by shard we are released from the tyranny of so-called time,” Patti Smith wrote nearly a century later in her magnificent meditation on time and transformation.
As a child in Bulgaria, never having heard of either Russell or Smith, one aspect of time perplexed me to the point of obsession: In my history textbooks, dates relating to significant events or historical figures of Slavic origin were listed in pairs — each had a “new style” date and an “old style” date, always thirteen days apart. So, for instance, Hristo Botev — the great revolutionary who led Bulgaria’s liberation from a five-century Ottoman slavery — was born on January 6 of 1848 according to the new style and on Christmas Day of 1847 according to the old style.
I would later learn that this was the product of the League of Nations, formed after WWI. Its Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, headed by Henri Bergson — the great French philosopher who famously opposed Einstein in a debate that changed our modern conception of time — was tasked with eradicating the Julian calendar that many countries, including Bulgaria and Russia, still used and replacing it with the Gregorian calendar as the new global standard.
This is my earliest memory of confronting the nature of time as both an abstraction humans could make with a committee and a concrete anchor of existence mooring our births, our deaths, and our entire sense of history. But most perplexing of all was the question of what happened to the people who lived through the transition — what happened to the thirteen very real days between the two fictions of the calendars. If reading history wasn’t time-travelish enough, reading about real people forced to time-travel in their real lives by an international decree was both utterly fascinating and utterly confusing. Did the person actually exist between their old-style date of birth and the new-style one — were they alive or not-yet-born? (Even today, the Wikipedia biographies of a Slavic persons from that era list both old-style and new-style dates of birth and death.) The person, of course, most definitely did exist between the day they were born and the day they died, whatever dates posterity — our living present, their unlived future — may impose on those days, now far in the past.
That thirteen-day lacuna between being and non-being was, apparently, the price of globalization. But it was also a suddenly shrill echo of an eternal question: If time bookends our existence, and if it is so easily perturbed by a calendarical convention, is it a mere abstraction?
Time is the two-headed Baskerville hound chasing us as we run for our lives — and from our lives — driven by the twain terrors of tedium and urgency. Toward what, we dare not think. Meanwhile, our information-input timelines are called “feeds.” We feast on time as time feasts on us. Time and information, if they are to be disentwined at all, dictate our lives. Is it any wonder, then, that we would rebel by trying to subjugate them in return, whether by formalizing them with our calendars or by fleeing from them with our time travel fantasies?
How those time travel fantasies originated, what technological and cultural developments fomented this distinctly modern impulse of the collective imagination, and how it illuminates our greatest anxieties is what science historian and writer extraordinaire James Gleick explores in Time Travel: A History (public library) — a grand thought experiment, using physics and philosophy as the active agents, and literature as the catalyst. Embedded in the book is a bibliography for the Babel of time — a most exquisitely annotated compendium of the body of time literature. What emerges is an inquiry, the most elegant since Borges, into why we think about time, why its directionality troubles us so, and what asking these questions at all reveals about the deepest mysteries of human consciousness and about what Gleick so beguilingly calls “the fast-expanding tapestry of interwoven ideas and facts that we call our culture.”
Gleick, who examined the origin of our modern anxiety about time with remarkable prescience nearly two decades ago, traces the invention of the notion of time travel to H.G. Wells’s 1895 masterpiece The Time Machine. Although Wells — like Gleick, like any reputable physicist — knew that time travel was a scientific impossibility, he created an aesthetic of thought which never previously existed and which has since shaped the modern consciousness. Gleick argues that the art this aesthetic produced — an entire canon of time travel literature and film — not only permeated popular culture but even influenced some of the greatest scientific minds of the past century, including Stephen Hawking, who once cleverly hosted a party for time travelers and when no one showed up considered the impossibility of time travel proven, and John Archibald Wheeler, who popularized the term “black hole” and coined “wormhole,” both key tropes of time travel literature.
Gleick considers how a scientific impossibility can become such fertile ground for the artistic imagination:
" Why do we need time travel, when we already travel through space so far and fast? For history. For mystery. For nostalgia. For hope. To examine our potential and explore our memories. To counter regret for the life we lived, the only life, one dimension, beginning to end.
Wells’s Time Machine revealed a turning in the road, an alteration in the human relationship with time. New technologies and ideas reinforced one another: the electric telegraph, the steam railroad, the earth science of Lyell and the life science of Darwin, the rise of archeology out of antiquarianism, and the perfection of clocks. When the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth, scientists and philosophers were primed to understand time in a new way. And so were we all. Time travel bloomed in the culture, its loops and twists and paradoxes."
Wells imagined time travel in an era where so much of what we take for granted was either a disorienting novelty or yet to be invented — bicycles, elevators, and balloons were new, and even the earliest visions of anything resembling the internet were half a century away. Gleick considers the direction of Wells’s imagination:
"The object of Wells’s interest, bordering on obsession, was the future — that shadowy, inaccessible place. “So with a kind of madness growing upon me, I flung myself into futurity,” says the Time Traveller. Most people, Wells wrote — “the predominant type, the type of the majority of living people” — never think about the future. Or, if they do, they regard it “as a sort of blank non-existence upon which the advancing present will presently write events.” … The more modern sort of person — “the creative, organizing, or masterful type” — sees the future as our very reason for being: “Things have been, says the legal mind, and so we are here. The creative mind says we are here because things have yet to be.”
Wells wrote his masterpiece shortly before the rise of relativity remodeled our notions of time. There was Einstein, of course. And Kurt Gödel. And Hermann Minkowski, Einstein’s teacher, whose model used four numbers (x, y, z, and t) to denote a “world point” — what we now call spacetime. Gleick writes of his legacy:
"“Mere shadows,” Minkowski said. That was not mere poetry. He meant it almost literally. Our perceived reality is a projection, like the shadows projected by the fire in Plato’s cave. If the world — the absolute world — is a four-dimensional continuum, then all that we perceive at any instant is a slice of the whole. Our sense of time: an illusion. Nothing passes; nothing changes. The universe — the real universe, hidden from our blinkered sight — comprises the totality of these timeless, eternal world lines."
But if we were able to conceive of this timeless totality — to integrate it into our conscious experience — the fantasy of time travel wouldn’t scintillate us so. A centerpiece of our temporal dissonance is one particular phenomenon of consciousness, a very palpable human experience: memory. “Perhaps memory is the time traveler’s subject,” Gleick observes. With an eye to Virginia Woolf’s memorable mediation on memory in Orlando, that supreme masterwork of time travel, he writes:
"What is memory, for a time traveler? A conundrum. We say that memory “takes us back.” Virginia Woolf called memory a seamstress “and a capricious one at that.” … “I can’t remember things before they happen,” says Alice, and the Queen retorts, “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.” Memory both is and is not our past. It is not recorded, as we sometimes imagine; it is made, and continually remade. If the time traveler meets herself, who remembers what, and when?
The question of memory, of course, is inseparable from the question of identity, for if we live in “permanent present tense,” we are incapable of stringing together the narrative out of which our sense of self arises. This continuity of selfhood, after all, is what makes you and your childhood self the “same” person despite a lifetime of physical and psychological change. Time travel presents some serious paradoxes for memory and therefore for the self. “A person’s identity,” Amin Maalouf wrote of the genes of the soul, “is like a pattern drawn on a tightly stretched parchment. Touch just one part of it, just one allegiance, and the whole person will react, the whole drum will sound.” If we could travel back to our own past and alter even a tiny speck of the pattern, we’d be changing the entire drum — our identity would have a wholly different sound. Gleick writes:
"What is the self? A question for the twentieth century to ponder, from Freud to Hofstadter and Dennett with detours through Lacan, and time travel provides some of the more profound variations on the theme. We have split personalities and alter egos galore. We have learned to doubt whether we are our younger selves, whether we will be the same person when we next look. The literature of time travel … begins to offer a way into questions that might otherwise belong to philosophers. It looks at them viscerally and naïvely — as it were, nakedly.
And so we arrive, at page 99 and no sooner, at the problem of free will. Gleick writes:
" Free will cannot be easily dismissed, because we experience it directly. We make choices. No philosopher has yet sat down in a restaurant and told the waiter, “Just bring me whatever the universe has preordained.” Then again, Einstein said that he could “will” himself to light his pipe without feeling particularly free. He liked to quote Schopenhauer… Man can do what he will, but he cannot will what he wills.
The free will problem was a sleeping giant and, without particularly meaning to, Einstein and Minkowski had prodded it awake. How literally were their followers to take the space-time continuum — the “block universe,” fixed for eternity, with our blinkered three-dimensional consciousnesses moving through it?
A century later, the question has hardly budged. And yet we live our lives with such urgency and pointedness of intent — perhaps precisely because we are unwilling to relinquish the illusion of free will. Gleick observes:
"Everywhere we look, people are pressing elevator buttons, turning doorknobs, hailing taxicabs, lifting sustenance to their lips, and begging their lovers’ favor. We act as though the future is, if not in our control, not yet settled… We would suffer illusions of free will, because, by happenstance, we tend to know less about the future than about the past.
Happenstance? Memory, self, free will — this Venn diagram of consciousness is indeed encircled by the lines we draw, often artificially, between causality and chance. (“No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone… The accidents happen,” wrote Adrienne Rich.) Gleick writes:
" All the paradoxes are time loops. They all force us to think about causality. Can an effect precede its cause? Of course not. Obviously. By definition.
[…]
But we’re not very good at understanding causes. The first person on record as trying to analyze cause and effect by power of ratiocination was Aristotle, who created layers of complexity that have caused confusion ever after. He distinguished four distinct types of causes, which can be named (making allowances for the impossibility of transmillennial translation) the efficient, the formal, the material, and the final. Some of these are hard for us to recognize as causes. The efficient cause of a sculpture is the sculptor, but the material cause is the marble. Both are needed before the sculpture can exist. The final cause is the purpose for which it is made — its beauty, let’s say… We do well to remember that nothing, when we look closely, has a single unambiguous incontrovertible cause.
Gleick reality-checks the logicians’ causal models of reality:
" If X, then Y means one thing in logic. In the physical world, it means something trickier and always (we should know by now) subject to doubt. In logic, it is rigid. In physics, there is slippage. Chance has a part to play. Accidents can happen. Uncertainty is a principle. The world is more complex than any model.
[…]
The physical laws are a construct, a convenience. They are not coextensive with the universe.
Mistaking the model for what Virginia Woolf called “the thing itself” seems to be a perennial problem of science, and one particularly integral to the perplexity of time:
" William Faulkner said, “The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed.” Scientists do that, too, and sometimes they forget they are using artificial means.
[…]
You can say the equations of physics make no distinction between past and future, between forward and backward in time. But if you do, you are averting your gaze from the phenomena dearest to our hearts. You leave for another day or another department the puzzles of evolution, memory, consciousness, life itself. Elementary processes may be reversible; complex processes are not. In the world of things, time’s arrow is always flying.
With an eye to Borges’s ideas about time, Gleick returns to the puzzlement of memory, equally not coextensive with the physics of time:
"We create memories or our memories create themselves. Consulting a memory converts it into a memory of a memory. The memories of memories, the thoughts of thoughts, blend into one another until we cannot tease them apart. Memory is recursive and self-referential. Mirrors. Mazes.
The formation of memory as a function of consciousness invites the chief religious opposition to science — a theological avoidance of the free will problem, the intellectually fragile contradictions of which Gleick captures elegantly in discussing the ideas in Isaac Asimov’s novel The End of Eternity:
" Time is a feature of creation, and the creator remains apart from it, transcendent over it. Does that mean that all our mortal time and history is, for God, a mere instant — complete and entire? For God outside of time, God in eternity, time does not pass; events do not occur step by step; cause and effect are meaningless. He is not one-thing-after-another, but all-at-once. His “now” encompasses all time. Creation is a tapestry, or an Einsteinian block universe. Either way, one might believe that God sees it entire. For Him, the story does not have a beginning, middle, and end.
But if you believe in an interventionist god, what does that leave for him to do? A changeless being is hard for us mortals to imagine. Does he act? Does he even think? Without sequential time, thought — a process — is hard to imagine. Consciousness requires time, it seems. It requires being in time. When we think, we seem to think consecutively, one thought leading to another, in timely fashion, forming memories all the while. A god outside of time would not have memories. Omniscience doesn’t require them.
But whatever pitfalls, paradoxes, and perplexities might bedevil our individual memory, they are rendered into even sharper relief in our collective memory — nowhere more so than in the curious human obsession with time capsules, the grandest of which is the Golden Record that sailed into space aboard the Voyager in 1977, a civilizational labor of love dreamt up and rendered real by Carl Sagan and Annie Druyan that was also the record of their own love story.
Gleick considers what this strange millennia-old practice, this “prosthetic memory,” reveals about human nature:
" When people make time capsules, they disregard a vital fact of human history. Over the millennia — slowly at first and then with gathering speed — we have evolved a collective methodology for saving information about our lives and times and transmitting that information into the future. We call it, for short, culture.
First came songs, clay pots, drawings on cave walls. Then tablets and scrolls, paintings and books. Knots in alpaca threads, recording Incan calendar data and tax receipts. These are external memory, extensions of our biological selves. Mental prostheses. Then came repositories for the preservation of these items: libraries, monasteries, museums; also theater troupes and orchestras. They may consider their mission to be entertainment or spiritual practice or the celebration of beauty, but meanwhile they transmit our symbolic memory across the generations. We can recognize these institutions of culture as distributed storage and retrieval systems. The machinery is unreliable — disorganized and discontinuous, prone to failures and omissions. They use code. They require deciphering. Then again, whether made of stone, paper, or silicon, the technology of culture has a durability that the biological originals can only dream of. This is how we tell our descendants who we were. By contrast, the recent smattering of time capsules is an oddball sideshow.
Building on the ideas he examined in his indispensable biography of information, Gleick adds:
" As for knowledge itself, that is our stock in trade. When the Library of Alexandria burned, it was one of a kind. Now there are hundreds of thousands, and they are crammed to overflowing. We have developed a species memory. We leave our marks everywhere.
[…]
When people fill time capsules they are trying to stop the clock — take stock, freeze the now, arrest the incessant head-over-heels stampede into the future. The past appears fixed, but memory, the fact of it, or the process, is always in motion. That applies to our prosthetic global memory as well as the biological version. When the Library of Congress promises to archive every tweet, does it create a Borgesian paradox in real time or a giant burial chamber in progress?
Because time has this unsilenceable undertone reminding us of our morality, we grasp onto it — onto this intangible abstraction — the way we grasp onto material possessions, commodities, and all the other tangibilia by which we sustain our illusions of permanence in a universe dominated by impermanence and constant flux. From this angle, Gleick revisits the tenet that all paradoxes are time-loops:
" Once we conceive of time as a quantity, we can store it up, apparently. We save it, spend it, accumulate it, and bank it. We do all this quite obsessively nowadays, but the notion is at least four hundred years old. Francis Bacon, 1612: “To choose Time, is to save Time.” The corollary of saving time is wasting it.
[…]
We go back and forth between being time’s master and its victim. Time is ours to use, and then we are at its mercy. I wasted time, and now doth time waste me, says Richard II; For now hath time made me his numbering clock. If you say that an activity wastes time, implying a substance in finite supply, and then you say that it fills time, implying a sort of container, have you contradicted yourself? Are you confused? Are you committing a failure of logic? None of those. On the contrary, you are a clever creature, when it comes to time, and you can keep more than one idea in your head. Language is imperfect; poetry, perfectly imperfect. We can occupy the time and pass the time in the same breath. We can devour time or languish in its slow-chapp’d power.
Still, memory remains. The key to understanding time, Gleick suggests, lies in understanding memory — understanding the dialogue, often dissonant, between the experiencing self and the remembering self. He writes:
" The universe does what it does. We perceive change, perceive motion, and try to make sense of the teeming, blooming confusion. The hard problem, in other words, is consciousness. We’re back where we started, with Wells’s Time Traveller, insisting that the only difference between time and space is that “our consciousness moves along it,” just before Einstein and Minkowski said the same. Physicists have developed a love-hate relationship with the problem of the self. On the one hand it’s none of their business — leave it to the (mere) psychologists. On the other hand, trying to extricate the observer — the measurer, the accumulator of information — from the cool description of nature has turned out to be impossible. Our consciousness is not some magical onlooker; it is a part of the universe it tries to contemplate.
The mind is what we experience most immediately and what does the experiencing. It is subject to the arrow of time. It creates memories as it goes. It models the world and continually compares these models with their predecessors. Whatever consciousness will turn out to be, it’s not a moving flashlight illuminating successive slices of the four-dimensional space-time continuum. It is a dynamical system, occurring in time, evolving in time, able to absorb bits of information from the past and process them, and able as well to create anticipation for the future.
[…]
What is time? Things change, and time is how we keep track.
This act of keeping track, which is largely a matter of telling the present from the past, is what Gleick considers the key question of consciousness and the pillar of our very sense of self:
"How do we construct the self? Can there be memory without consciousness? Obviously not. Or obviously. It depends what you mean by memory. A rat learns to run a maze — does it remember the maze? If memory is the perpetuation of information, then the least conscious of organisms possess it. So do computers, whose memory we measure in bytes. So does a gravestone. But if memory is the action of recollection, the act of remembrance, then it implies an ability to hold in the mind two constructs, one representing the present and another representing the past, and to compare them, one against the other. How did we learn to distinguish memory from experience? When something misfires and we experience the present as if it were a memory, we call that déjà vu. Considering déjà vu — an illusion or pathology — we might marvel at the ordinary business of remembering.
This dizzying tour of science, philosophy, and their interaction with literature is leading me to wonder: When a machine hums, does it hear or notice the hum? Could it be that time is the hum of consciousness?
Perhaps time is so troublesome because it foists upon us our perennial fear of missing out. Time travel, Gleick argues, is such an alluring fantasy precisely because it bridges the infinite possibility of life with the realm of the probable — by traveling in time, we get to live the myriad unlived lives which we are doomed to never experience under the physical laws of this one and only life we’ve been allotted. He captures this with uncompromising precision:
"If we have only the one universe — if the universe is all there is — then time murders possibility. It erases the lives we might have had.
Time travel, then, is a thought experiment performed in the petri dish of existence itself, catalyzing its most elemental and disquieting questions. In a reframing of the central idea of the Butterfly Effect — a term Gleick himself wrested from the esoteric lexicon of meteorology and embedded in the popular imagination in 1987 with his groundbreaking first book, Chaos, which created an aesthetic for the history of science much like Wells created an aesthetic for time travel literature — he considers the logical loops of changing any one element of history, which ripples across all of being:
" We have to ask these questions, don’t we? Is the world we have the only world possible? Could everything have turned out differently? What if you could not only kill Hitler and see what happens, but you could go back again and again, making improvements, tweaking the timeline, like the weatherman Phil (Bill Murray) in one of the greatest of all time-travel movies, reliving Groundhog Day until finally he gets it right.
Is this the best of all possible worlds? If you had a time machine, would you kill Hitler?
And so we arrive at the answer to the central question:
" Why do we need time travel? All the answers come down to one. To elude death.
Time is a killer. Everyone knows that. Time will bury us. I wasted time, and now doth time waste me. Time makes dust of all things. Time’s winged chariot isn’t taking us anywhere good.
How aptly named, the time beyond death: the Hereafter.
But even death is strewn with the temporal asymmetry of our anxieties, which Montaigne articulated brilliantly half a millennium ago as he contemplated death and the art of living: “To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.” And yet we do dread death with infinitely greater intensity than we dread, if that’s even the appropriate term, not having lived before our birth. If the arrow of time is one-directional, so is the arrow of time-anxiety. But Gleick subverts Montaigne and delivers a sublime summation of the paradoxical impulse at the heart of our time travel yearnings:
" You lived; you will always have lived. Death does not erase your life. It is mere punctuation. If only time could be seen whole, then you could see the past remaining intact, instead of vanishing in the rearview mirror. There is your immortality. Frozen in amber.
For me the price of denying death in this way is denying life.
Barring denial, our only recourse is to surrender our memory, our consciousness, our very selves to the flow of time. To borrow Sarah Manguso’s piercing observation, “time punishes us by taking everything, but it also saves us — by taking everything.” Gleick writes:
" When the future vanishes into the past so quickly, what remains is a kind of atemporality, a present tense in which temporal order feels as arbitrary as alphabetical order. We say that the present is real—yet it flows through our fingers like quicksilver.
[…]
It might be fair to say that all we perceive is change — that any sense of stasis is a constructed illusion. Every moment alters what came before. We reach across layers of time for the memories of our memories.
“Every moment alters what came before. We reach across layers of time for the memories of our memories.”
“Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom,” Bertrand Russell in 1931 as he made his beautiful case for “a largeness of contemplation” in contemplating the nature of time. “Shard by shard we are released from the tyranny of so-called time,” Patti Smith wrote nearly a century later in her magnificent meditation on time and transformation.
As a child in Bulgaria, never having heard of either Russell or Smith, one aspect of time perplexed me to the point of obsession: In my history textbooks, dates relating to significant events or historical figures of Slavic origin were listed in pairs — each had a “new style” date and an “old style” date, always thirteen days apart. So, for instance, Hristo Botev — the great revolutionary who led Bulgaria’s liberation from a five-century Ottoman slavery — was born on January 6 of 1848 according to the new style and on Christmas Day of 1847 according to the old style.
I would later learn that this was the product of the League of Nations, formed after WWI. Its Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, headed by Henri Bergson — the great French philosopher who famously opposed Einstein in a debate that changed our modern conception of time — was tasked with eradicating the Julian calendar that many countries, including Bulgaria and Russia, still used and replacing it with the Gregorian calendar as the new global standard.
This is my earliest memory of confronting the nature of time as both an abstraction humans could make with a committee and a concrete anchor of existence mooring our births, our deaths, and our entire sense of history. But most perplexing of all was the question of what happened to the people who lived through the transition — what happened to the thirteen very real days between the two fictions of the calendars. If reading history wasn’t time-travelish enough, reading about real people forced to time-travel in their real lives by an international decree was both utterly fascinating and utterly confusing. Did the person actually exist between their old-style date of birth and the new-style one — were they alive or not-yet-born? (Even today, the Wikipedia biographies of a Slavic persons from that era list both old-style and new-style dates of birth and death.) The person, of course, most definitely did exist between the day they were born and the day they died, whatever dates posterity — our living present, their unlived future — may impose on those days, now far in the past.
That thirteen-day lacuna between being and non-being was, apparently, the price of globalization. But it was also a suddenly shrill echo of an eternal question: If time bookends our existence, and if it is so easily perturbed by a calendarical convention, is it a mere abstraction?
Time is the two-headed Baskerville hound chasing us as we run for our lives — and from our lives — driven by the twain terrors of tedium and urgency. Toward what, we dare not think. Meanwhile, our information-input timelines are called “feeds.” We feast on time as time feasts on us. Time and information, if they are to be disentwined at all, dictate our lives. Is it any wonder, then, that we would rebel by trying to subjugate them in return, whether by formalizing them with our calendars or by fleeing from them with our time travel fantasies?
How those time travel fantasies originated, what technological and cultural developments fomented this distinctly modern impulse of the collective imagination, and how it illuminates our greatest anxieties is what science historian and writer extraordinaire James Gleick explores in Time Travel: A History (public library) — a grand thought experiment, using physics and philosophy as the active agents, and literature as the catalyst. Embedded in the book is a bibliography for the Babel of time — a most exquisitely annotated compendium of the body of time literature. What emerges is an inquiry, the most elegant since Borges, into why we think about time, why its directionality troubles us so, and what asking these questions at all reveals about the deepest mysteries of human consciousness and about what Gleick so beguilingly calls “the fast-expanding tapestry of interwoven ideas and facts that we call our culture.”
Gleick, who examined the origin of our modern anxiety about time with remarkable prescience nearly two decades ago, traces the invention of the notion of time travel to H.G. Wells’s 1895 masterpiece The Time Machine. Although Wells — like Gleick, like any reputable physicist — knew that time travel was a scientific impossibility, he created an aesthetic of thought which never previously existed and which has since shaped the modern consciousness. Gleick argues that the art this aesthetic produced — an entire canon of time travel literature and film — not only permeated popular culture but even influenced some of the greatest scientific minds of the past century, including Stephen Hawking, who once cleverly hosted a party for time travelers and when no one showed up considered the impossibility of time travel proven, and John Archibald Wheeler, who popularized the term “black hole” and coined “wormhole,” both key tropes of time travel literature.
Gleick considers how a scientific impossibility can become such fertile ground for the artistic imagination:
" Why do we need time travel, when we already travel through space so far and fast? For history. For mystery. For nostalgia. For hope. To examine our potential and explore our memories. To counter regret for the life we lived, the only life, one dimension, beginning to end.
Wells’s Time Machine revealed a turning in the road, an alteration in the human relationship with time. New technologies and ideas reinforced one another: the electric telegraph, the steam railroad, the earth science of Lyell and the life science of Darwin, the rise of archeology out of antiquarianism, and the perfection of clocks. When the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth, scientists and philosophers were primed to understand time in a new way. And so were we all. Time travel bloomed in the culture, its loops and twists and paradoxes."
Wells imagined time travel in an era where so much of what we take for granted was either a disorienting novelty or yet to be invented — bicycles, elevators, and balloons were new, and even the earliest visions of anything resembling the internet were half a century away. Gleick considers the direction of Wells’s imagination:
"The object of Wells’s interest, bordering on obsession, was the future — that shadowy, inaccessible place. “So with a kind of madness growing upon me, I flung myself into futurity,” says the Time Traveller. Most people, Wells wrote — “the predominant type, the type of the majority of living people” — never think about the future. Or, if they do, they regard it “as a sort of blank non-existence upon which the advancing present will presently write events.” … The more modern sort of person — “the creative, organizing, or masterful type” — sees the future as our very reason for being: “Things have been, says the legal mind, and so we are here. The creative mind says we are here because things have yet to be.”
Wells wrote his masterpiece shortly before the rise of relativity remodeled our notions of time. There was Einstein, of course. And Kurt Gödel. And Hermann Minkowski, Einstein’s teacher, whose model used four numbers (x, y, z, and t) to denote a “world point” — what we now call spacetime. Gleick writes of his legacy:
"“Mere shadows,” Minkowski said. That was not mere poetry. He meant it almost literally. Our perceived reality is a projection, like the shadows projected by the fire in Plato’s cave. If the world — the absolute world — is a four-dimensional continuum, then all that we perceive at any instant is a slice of the whole. Our sense of time: an illusion. Nothing passes; nothing changes. The universe — the real universe, hidden from our blinkered sight — comprises the totality of these timeless, eternal world lines."
But if we were able to conceive of this timeless totality — to integrate it into our conscious experience — the fantasy of time travel wouldn’t scintillate us so. A centerpiece of our temporal dissonance is one particular phenomenon of consciousness, a very palpable human experience: memory. “Perhaps memory is the time traveler’s subject,” Gleick observes. With an eye to Virginia Woolf’s memorable mediation on memory in Orlando, that supreme masterwork of time travel, he writes:
"What is memory, for a time traveler? A conundrum. We say that memory “takes us back.” Virginia Woolf called memory a seamstress “and a capricious one at that.” … “I can’t remember things before they happen,” says Alice, and the Queen retorts, “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.” Memory both is and is not our past. It is not recorded, as we sometimes imagine; it is made, and continually remade. If the time traveler meets herself, who remembers what, and when?
The question of memory, of course, is inseparable from the question of identity, for if we live in “permanent present tense,” we are incapable of stringing together the narrative out of which our sense of self arises. This continuity of selfhood, after all, is what makes you and your childhood self the “same” person despite a lifetime of physical and psychological change. Time travel presents some serious paradoxes for memory and therefore for the self. “A person’s identity,” Amin Maalouf wrote of the genes of the soul, “is like a pattern drawn on a tightly stretched parchment. Touch just one part of it, just one allegiance, and the whole person will react, the whole drum will sound.” If we could travel back to our own past and alter even a tiny speck of the pattern, we’d be changing the entire drum — our identity would have a wholly different sound. Gleick writes:
"What is the self? A question for the twentieth century to ponder, from Freud to Hofstadter and Dennett with detours through Lacan, and time travel provides some of the more profound variations on the theme. We have split personalities and alter egos galore. We have learned to doubt whether we are our younger selves, whether we will be the same person when we next look. The literature of time travel … begins to offer a way into questions that might otherwise belong to philosophers. It looks at them viscerally and naïvely — as it were, nakedly.
And so we arrive, at page 99 and no sooner, at the problem of free will. Gleick writes:
" Free will cannot be easily dismissed, because we experience it directly. We make choices. No philosopher has yet sat down in a restaurant and told the waiter, “Just bring me whatever the universe has preordained.” Then again, Einstein said that he could “will” himself to light his pipe without feeling particularly free. He liked to quote Schopenhauer… Man can do what he will, but he cannot will what he wills.
The free will problem was a sleeping giant and, without particularly meaning to, Einstein and Minkowski had prodded it awake. How literally were their followers to take the space-time continuum — the “block universe,” fixed for eternity, with our blinkered three-dimensional consciousnesses moving through it?
A century later, the question has hardly budged. And yet we live our lives with such urgency and pointedness of intent — perhaps precisely because we are unwilling to relinquish the illusion of free will. Gleick observes:
"Everywhere we look, people are pressing elevator buttons, turning doorknobs, hailing taxicabs, lifting sustenance to their lips, and begging their lovers’ favor. We act as though the future is, if not in our control, not yet settled… We would suffer illusions of free will, because, by happenstance, we tend to know less about the future than about the past.
Happenstance? Memory, self, free will — this Venn diagram of consciousness is indeed encircled by the lines we draw, often artificially, between causality and chance. (“No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone… The accidents happen,” wrote Adrienne Rich.) Gleick writes:
" All the paradoxes are time loops. They all force us to think about causality. Can an effect precede its cause? Of course not. Obviously. By definition.
[…]
But we’re not very good at understanding causes. The first person on record as trying to analyze cause and effect by power of ratiocination was Aristotle, who created layers of complexity that have caused confusion ever after. He distinguished four distinct types of causes, which can be named (making allowances for the impossibility of transmillennial translation) the efficient, the formal, the material, and the final. Some of these are hard for us to recognize as causes. The efficient cause of a sculpture is the sculptor, but the material cause is the marble. Both are needed before the sculpture can exist. The final cause is the purpose for which it is made — its beauty, let’s say… We do well to remember that nothing, when we look closely, has a single unambiguous incontrovertible cause.
Gleick reality-checks the logicians’ causal models of reality:
" If X, then Y means one thing in logic. In the physical world, it means something trickier and always (we should know by now) subject to doubt. In logic, it is rigid. In physics, there is slippage. Chance has a part to play. Accidents can happen. Uncertainty is a principle. The world is more complex than any model.
[…]
The physical laws are a construct, a convenience. They are not coextensive with the universe.
Mistaking the model for what Virginia Woolf called “the thing itself” seems to be a perennial problem of science, and one particularly integral to the perplexity of time:
" William Faulkner said, “The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed.” Scientists do that, too, and sometimes they forget they are using artificial means.
[…]
You can say the equations of physics make no distinction between past and future, between forward and backward in time. But if you do, you are averting your gaze from the phenomena dearest to our hearts. You leave for another day or another department the puzzles of evolution, memory, consciousness, life itself. Elementary processes may be reversible; complex processes are not. In the world of things, time’s arrow is always flying.
With an eye to Borges’s ideas about time, Gleick returns to the puzzlement of memory, equally not coextensive with the physics of time:
"We create memories or our memories create themselves. Consulting a memory converts it into a memory of a memory. The memories of memories, the thoughts of thoughts, blend into one another until we cannot tease them apart. Memory is recursive and self-referential. Mirrors. Mazes.
The formation of memory as a function of consciousness invites the chief religious opposition to science — a theological avoidance of the free will problem, the intellectually fragile contradictions of which Gleick captures elegantly in discussing the ideas in Isaac Asimov’s novel The End of Eternity:
" Time is a feature of creation, and the creator remains apart from it, transcendent over it. Does that mean that all our mortal time and history is, for God, a mere instant — complete and entire? For God outside of time, God in eternity, time does not pass; events do not occur step by step; cause and effect are meaningless. He is not one-thing-after-another, but all-at-once. His “now” encompasses all time. Creation is a tapestry, or an Einsteinian block universe. Either way, one might believe that God sees it entire. For Him, the story does not have a beginning, middle, and end.
But if you believe in an interventionist god, what does that leave for him to do? A changeless being is hard for us mortals to imagine. Does he act? Does he even think? Without sequential time, thought — a process — is hard to imagine. Consciousness requires time, it seems. It requires being in time. When we think, we seem to think consecutively, one thought leading to another, in timely fashion, forming memories all the while. A god outside of time would not have memories. Omniscience doesn’t require them.
But whatever pitfalls, paradoxes, and perplexities might bedevil our individual memory, they are rendered into even sharper relief in our collective memory — nowhere more so than in the curious human obsession with time capsules, the grandest of which is the Golden Record that sailed into space aboard the Voyager in 1977, a civilizational labor of love dreamt up and rendered real by Carl Sagan and Annie Druyan that was also the record of their own love story.
Gleick considers what this strange millennia-old practice, this “prosthetic memory,” reveals about human nature:
" When people make time capsules, they disregard a vital fact of human history. Over the millennia — slowly at first and then with gathering speed — we have evolved a collective methodology for saving information about our lives and times and transmitting that information into the future. We call it, for short, culture.
First came songs, clay pots, drawings on cave walls. Then tablets and scrolls, paintings and books. Knots in alpaca threads, recording Incan calendar data and tax receipts. These are external memory, extensions of our biological selves. Mental prostheses. Then came repositories for the preservation of these items: libraries, monasteries, museums; also theater troupes and orchestras. They may consider their mission to be entertainment or spiritual practice or the celebration of beauty, but meanwhile they transmit our symbolic memory across the generations. We can recognize these institutions of culture as distributed storage and retrieval systems. The machinery is unreliable — disorganized and discontinuous, prone to failures and omissions. They use code. They require deciphering. Then again, whether made of stone, paper, or silicon, the technology of culture has a durability that the biological originals can only dream of. This is how we tell our descendants who we were. By contrast, the recent smattering of time capsules is an oddball sideshow.
Building on the ideas he examined in his indispensable biography of information, Gleick adds:
" As for knowledge itself, that is our stock in trade. When the Library of Alexandria burned, it was one of a kind. Now there are hundreds of thousands, and they are crammed to overflowing. We have developed a species memory. We leave our marks everywhere.
[…]
When people fill time capsules they are trying to stop the clock — take stock, freeze the now, arrest the incessant head-over-heels stampede into the future. The past appears fixed, but memory, the fact of it, or the process, is always in motion. That applies to our prosthetic global memory as well as the biological version. When the Library of Congress promises to archive every tweet, does it create a Borgesian paradox in real time or a giant burial chamber in progress?
Because time has this unsilenceable undertone reminding us of our morality, we grasp onto it — onto this intangible abstraction — the way we grasp onto material possessions, commodities, and all the other tangibilia by which we sustain our illusions of permanence in a universe dominated by impermanence and constant flux. From this angle, Gleick revisits the tenet that all paradoxes are time-loops:
" Once we conceive of time as a quantity, we can store it up, apparently. We save it, spend it, accumulate it, and bank it. We do all this quite obsessively nowadays, but the notion is at least four hundred years old. Francis Bacon, 1612: “To choose Time, is to save Time.” The corollary of saving time is wasting it.
[…]
We go back and forth between being time’s master and its victim. Time is ours to use, and then we are at its mercy. I wasted time, and now doth time waste me, says Richard II; For now hath time made me his numbering clock. If you say that an activity wastes time, implying a substance in finite supply, and then you say that it fills time, implying a sort of container, have you contradicted yourself? Are you confused? Are you committing a failure of logic? None of those. On the contrary, you are a clever creature, when it comes to time, and you can keep more than one idea in your head. Language is imperfect; poetry, perfectly imperfect. We can occupy the time and pass the time in the same breath. We can devour time or languish in its slow-chapp’d power.
Still, memory remains. The key to understanding time, Gleick suggests, lies in understanding memory — understanding the dialogue, often dissonant, between the experiencing self and the remembering self. He writes:
" The universe does what it does. We perceive change, perceive motion, and try to make sense of the teeming, blooming confusion. The hard problem, in other words, is consciousness. We’re back where we started, with Wells’s Time Traveller, insisting that the only difference between time and space is that “our consciousness moves along it,” just before Einstein and Minkowski said the same. Physicists have developed a love-hate relationship with the problem of the self. On the one hand it’s none of their business — leave it to the (mere) psychologists. On the other hand, trying to extricate the observer — the measurer, the accumulator of information — from the cool description of nature has turned out to be impossible. Our consciousness is not some magical onlooker; it is a part of the universe it tries to contemplate.
The mind is what we experience most immediately and what does the experiencing. It is subject to the arrow of time. It creates memories as it goes. It models the world and continually compares these models with their predecessors. Whatever consciousness will turn out to be, it’s not a moving flashlight illuminating successive slices of the four-dimensional space-time continuum. It is a dynamical system, occurring in time, evolving in time, able to absorb bits of information from the past and process them, and able as well to create anticipation for the future.
[…]
What is time? Things change, and time is how we keep track.
This act of keeping track, which is largely a matter of telling the present from the past, is what Gleick considers the key question of consciousness and the pillar of our very sense of self:
"How do we construct the self? Can there be memory without consciousness? Obviously not. Or obviously. It depends what you mean by memory. A rat learns to run a maze — does it remember the maze? If memory is the perpetuation of information, then the least conscious of organisms possess it. So do computers, whose memory we measure in bytes. So does a gravestone. But if memory is the action of recollection, the act of remembrance, then it implies an ability to hold in the mind two constructs, one representing the present and another representing the past, and to compare them, one against the other. How did we learn to distinguish memory from experience? When something misfires and we experience the present as if it were a memory, we call that déjà vu. Considering déjà vu — an illusion or pathology — we might marvel at the ordinary business of remembering.
This dizzying tour of science, philosophy, and their interaction with literature is leading me to wonder: When a machine hums, does it hear or notice the hum? Could it be that time is the hum of consciousness?
Perhaps time is so troublesome because it foists upon us our perennial fear of missing out. Time travel, Gleick argues, is such an alluring fantasy precisely because it bridges the infinite possibility of life with the realm of the probable — by traveling in time, we get to live the myriad unlived lives which we are doomed to never experience under the physical laws of this one and only life we’ve been allotted. He captures this with uncompromising precision:
"If we have only the one universe — if the universe is all there is — then time murders possibility. It erases the lives we might have had.
Time travel, then, is a thought experiment performed in the petri dish of existence itself, catalyzing its most elemental and disquieting questions. In a reframing of the central idea of the Butterfly Effect — a term Gleick himself wrested from the esoteric lexicon of meteorology and embedded in the popular imagination in 1987 with his groundbreaking first book, Chaos, which created an aesthetic for the history of science much like Wells created an aesthetic for time travel literature — he considers the logical loops of changing any one element of history, which ripples across all of being:
" We have to ask these questions, don’t we? Is the world we have the only world possible? Could everything have turned out differently? What if you could not only kill Hitler and see what happens, but you could go back again and again, making improvements, tweaking the timeline, like the weatherman Phil (Bill Murray) in one of the greatest of all time-travel movies, reliving Groundhog Day until finally he gets it right.
Is this the best of all possible worlds? If you had a time machine, would you kill Hitler?
And so we arrive at the answer to the central question:
" Why do we need time travel? All the answers come down to one. To elude death.
Time is a killer. Everyone knows that. Time will bury us. I wasted time, and now doth time waste me. Time makes dust of all things. Time’s winged chariot isn’t taking us anywhere good.
How aptly named, the time beyond death: the Hereafter.
But even death is strewn with the temporal asymmetry of our anxieties, which Montaigne articulated brilliantly half a millennium ago as he contemplated death and the art of living: “To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.” And yet we do dread death with infinitely greater intensity than we dread, if that’s even the appropriate term, not having lived before our birth. If the arrow of time is one-directional, so is the arrow of time-anxiety. But Gleick subverts Montaigne and delivers a sublime summation of the paradoxical impulse at the heart of our time travel yearnings:
" You lived; you will always have lived. Death does not erase your life. It is mere punctuation. If only time could be seen whole, then you could see the past remaining intact, instead of vanishing in the rearview mirror. There is your immortality. Frozen in amber.
For me the price of denying death in this way is denying life.
Barring denial, our only recourse is to surrender our memory, our consciousness, our very selves to the flow of time. To borrow Sarah Manguso’s piercing observation, “time punishes us by taking everything, but it also saves us — by taking everything.” Gleick writes:
" When the future vanishes into the past so quickly, what remains is a kind of atemporality, a present tense in which temporal order feels as arbitrary as alphabetical order. We say that the present is real—yet it flows through our fingers like quicksilver.
[…]
It might be fair to say that all we perceive is change — that any sense of stasis is a constructed illusion. Every moment alters what came before. We reach across layers of time for the memories of our memories.
Sunday, November 22, 2015
Friday, October 16, 2015
Is Space Digital?
via Scientific American
The Nature of Space and Time...
Space may not be smooth and continuous. Instead it may be digital, composed of tiny bits. Physicists have assumed that these bits are far too small to measure with current technology.
Yet one scientist thinks that he has devised a way to detect the bitlike structure of space. His machine—at present under construction—will attempt to measure its grainy nature.
The experiment is one of the first to investigate the principle that the universe emerges from information—specifically, information that is imprinted on two-dimensional sheets.
If successful, the experiment will shift the foundations of what we know about space and time, providing a glimpse of a new physics that could supplant our existing understanding.
http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v23/n3s/full/scientificamericanuniverse0814-104.html
The Nature of Space and Time...
Space may not be smooth and continuous. Instead it may be digital, composed of tiny bits. Physicists have assumed that these bits are far too small to measure with current technology.
Yet one scientist thinks that he has devised a way to detect the bitlike structure of space. His machine—at present under construction—will attempt to measure its grainy nature.
The experiment is one of the first to investigate the principle that the universe emerges from information—specifically, information that is imprinted on two-dimensional sheets.
If successful, the experiment will shift the foundations of what we know about space and time, providing a glimpse of a new physics that could supplant our existing understanding.
http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v23/n3s/full/scientificamericanuniverse0814-104.html
Thursday, October 15, 2015
Could all really come from nothing?
via NPR
The origin of the universe is one of the most difficult realities we ponder.
It bends our logic, straining the words we have to describe it. If one is to say the universe started at the Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago, the immediate reaction is: "But what came before that? What caused the Big Bang?"
This is the issue of the "first cause" — the cause at the beginning of the causal chain that caused all else but was itself not caused — that has plagued and inspired philosophers for millennia.
Before philosophy, religions across the globe dealt with the same issue by positing the existence of deities that are beyond the laws of cause and effect. By existing beyond space and time, deities are, by definition, immune to the shortcomings of being human. They can be the first cause.
Scientists tend to prefer other kinds of explanation about the world, including those that deal with issues of origins. But when it comes to the Big Bang, our theories hit a hard wall. Readers may enjoy this video featured in Aeon magazine, where philosopher Tim Maudlin from New York University addresses some of the difficulties.
Despite what physicists like Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss say, we are far from understanding the physics of the Big Bang. In fact, it isn't even clear that we can provide a complete scientific explanation of the origin of the universe.
Every scientific theory is built upon a set of concepts. For example, we use what we call the laws of nature, which are statements of regularities that we find in the behavior of physical systems, such as the conservation of momentum and energy. It's hard to imagine how to construct a theory of the origin of everything that doesn't make use of such laws. Yet, a theory describing the origin of the universe should, as a matter of principle, also explain the origin of the laws of nature.
Can we conceive of a science capable of doing that? There is no a priori reason we can't. However, current ideas about there being a multiverse, a collection of universes of which ours is one, will not help on this front. They still use a conceptual structure derivative of present-day physics.
What seems to be needed is a new way of depicting the laws of nature not as static truths about the world but as emerging behaviors that unfold and take hold as time elapses. Physicist Lee Smolin and philosopher Mangabeira Unger hint at this in their book, but don't offer a working approach. (Who can blame them?)
Still, any explanation needs to start from something. How can we explain everything without appealing to something? Why the universe? It may be one of those questions that will keep tying us in knots for a very long time.
The origin of the universe is one of the most difficult realities we ponder.
It bends our logic, straining the words we have to describe it. If one is to say the universe started at the Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago, the immediate reaction is: "But what came before that? What caused the Big Bang?"
This is the issue of the "first cause" — the cause at the beginning of the causal chain that caused all else but was itself not caused — that has plagued and inspired philosophers for millennia.
Before philosophy, religions across the globe dealt with the same issue by positing the existence of deities that are beyond the laws of cause and effect. By existing beyond space and time, deities are, by definition, immune to the shortcomings of being human. They can be the first cause.
Scientists tend to prefer other kinds of explanation about the world, including those that deal with issues of origins. But when it comes to the Big Bang, our theories hit a hard wall. Readers may enjoy this video featured in Aeon magazine, where philosopher Tim Maudlin from New York University addresses some of the difficulties.
Despite what physicists like Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss say, we are far from understanding the physics of the Big Bang. In fact, it isn't even clear that we can provide a complete scientific explanation of the origin of the universe.
Every scientific theory is built upon a set of concepts. For example, we use what we call the laws of nature, which are statements of regularities that we find in the behavior of physical systems, such as the conservation of momentum and energy. It's hard to imagine how to construct a theory of the origin of everything that doesn't make use of such laws. Yet, a theory describing the origin of the universe should, as a matter of principle, also explain the origin of the laws of nature.
Can we conceive of a science capable of doing that? There is no a priori reason we can't. However, current ideas about there being a multiverse, a collection of universes of which ours is one, will not help on this front. They still use a conceptual structure derivative of present-day physics.
What seems to be needed is a new way of depicting the laws of nature not as static truths about the world but as emerging behaviors that unfold and take hold as time elapses. Physicist Lee Smolin and philosopher Mangabeira Unger hint at this in their book, but don't offer a working approach. (Who can blame them?)
Still, any explanation needs to start from something. How can we explain everything without appealing to something? Why the universe? It may be one of those questions that will keep tying us in knots for a very long time.
Tuesday, June 9, 2015
The future running backward...
Physicists Demonstrate How Time Can Seem To Run Backward, and the Future Can Affect the Past
by Jay Kuo
We all agree, past events can affect the present. And present events can affect the future. But few would credibly argue that future events can affect the past.
That might all change soon. Welcome to the world of quantum physics.
To the average person, the observable, classical world of Newtonian physics feels like common sense. Time moves forward; things exist in only one place at a time; if a tree falls in the woods but no one sees it, we assume it still fell. But a team of physicists at Australia National University are saying, “Not so fast.” Enter quantum physics. And it’s really weird.
A new study published in Nature Physics appears to show that time in fact may move backward, things may exist in multiple states, and whether a tree fell in the woods not only may depend on whether anyone ultimately saw it, but also on whether something somehow knew it would be seen. “It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,” said Associate Professor Andrew Truscott from the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering.
This absurd-sounding conclusion derives from two experiments, one of which has been around for some time, and one of which was just successfully performed only a few weeks ago.
First, the older experiment. Scientists have long observed the strange behavior of light particles, photons, in something called the Double Slit Experiment. Here’s how that worked: When light was shone at a screen with two narrow slots in it, the photon particles acted rather schizophrenically. One the one hand, the photons acted like particles, casting a direct glow on the wall behind the slits. But they also acted like waves, generating an “interference pattern” like waves of water might, creating a mysterious second pattern beyond two simple strips of light.
This principle lies at the heart of quantum physics. A particle like a photon acts as if it has indefinite, suspended states. It lacks any physical properties, and is defined instead as a set of “probabilities” that exists in any one particular state. (These “probabilities” aren’t just some laboratory or academic theory. They underlie all of our modern notion of chemistry, and they make microprocessors and nuclear reactions possible. Our modern world would not exist without these bizarre properties of particles.)
If you’re lost, this video explains the Double Slit experiment and the probability wave in quantum mechanics:
But then there’s the second weird thing. When scientists try to observe a photon in the experiment, the very act of watching it “collapses” into a definite state–either a particle or a wave. No matter what they do, whenever they go to observe, it is as if the photon “decides” what state it is in. The act of observation is said to pull that photon into a definite reality. (This is at the heart of the Schrödinger’s Cat parable, where a hypothetical cat inside a box is neither alive nor dead until you open the box and look inside.)
This second weird notion–that observation defines reality–has been around a long time, along with an experiment famously proposed by John Wheeler back in 1978, and thought to be impossible to carry out. It was called the “delayed choice thought experiment.” It was a “thought experiment” because it was presumed it could not actually be facilitated. That experiment sought to answer the question, “So precisely when does a photon choose to act like a particle or act like a wave? When it is first fired, before it goes through the slit, or perhaps even…after?”
As explained in Digital Journal, one of Wheeler’s proposed thought experiments went something roughly like this: What if you could insert a second screen, but only after something has passed the first screen? The second screen, which would sometimes be inserted and sometimes not based on random chance, was designed to cause interference similar to the first. That way, in theory, you could observe the state of the photon when it passed through the first screen and see if it remained consistent going through the second.
The technical difficulty was that no one was able to insert that second screen in time, that is, after the item had passed through the first but before it struck the back wall. That task seemed insurmountable. But now that experiment has been tried out, and the results are rather mind-boggling.
The team in Australia turned thought experiment into lab reality by using lasers. Their subject matter was not a photon but a helium atom which, though much more massive than a photon, would also theoretically act like a photon. That is, it would also exist in an indefinite state, then act either like a particle or like a wave, once observed. The lasers they used served as a pair of grates, one before the other, with the second grate randomly dropped in.
What they found is weirder than anything seen to date: Every time the two grates were in place, the helium atom passed through, on many paths in many forms, just like a wave. But whenever the second grate was not present, the atom invariably passed through the first grate like a particle. The fascinating part was, the second grate’s very existence in the path was random. And what’s more, it hadn’t happened yet.
In other words, it was as if the helium particle “knew” whether there would be a second grate at the time it passed through the first. The possible future presence of that second grate appeared to be determining the past state of the atom as it passed through grate #1. Whether it continued as a particle or changed into a wave depended on something that might happen in the future.
But how could a future event–the insertion of the second grate–determine the past state of the helium atom? Time would have to run backward, or something would have to know in advance that the second grate was going to be in place.
“The atoms did not travel from A to B. It was only when they were measured at the end of the journey that their wavelike or particle-like behavior was brought into existence,” Truscott said. If we are to believe that the atom really did take a particular path or paths, then one has to accept that a future measurement is affecting the atom’s past, he concluded.
The notion that the future is affecting the past has profound implications beyond the rarified world of quantum physics. It calls into question, for example, the very question of free will, or whether there are multiple worlds with multiple realities. These studies and findings will no doubt be challenged and presumably replicated, but one thing is clear: This new wrinkle adds more questions than answers.
We’re going to need a bigger cat box.
by Jay Kuo
We all agree, past events can affect the present. And present events can affect the future. But few would credibly argue that future events can affect the past.
That might all change soon. Welcome to the world of quantum physics.
To the average person, the observable, classical world of Newtonian physics feels like common sense. Time moves forward; things exist in only one place at a time; if a tree falls in the woods but no one sees it, we assume it still fell. But a team of physicists at Australia National University are saying, “Not so fast.” Enter quantum physics. And it’s really weird.
A new study published in Nature Physics appears to show that time in fact may move backward, things may exist in multiple states, and whether a tree fell in the woods not only may depend on whether anyone ultimately saw it, but also on whether something somehow knew it would be seen. “It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,” said Associate Professor Andrew Truscott from the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering.
This absurd-sounding conclusion derives from two experiments, one of which has been around for some time, and one of which was just successfully performed only a few weeks ago.
First, the older experiment. Scientists have long observed the strange behavior of light particles, photons, in something called the Double Slit Experiment. Here’s how that worked: When light was shone at a screen with two narrow slots in it, the photon particles acted rather schizophrenically. One the one hand, the photons acted like particles, casting a direct glow on the wall behind the slits. But they also acted like waves, generating an “interference pattern” like waves of water might, creating a mysterious second pattern beyond two simple strips of light.
This principle lies at the heart of quantum physics. A particle like a photon acts as if it has indefinite, suspended states. It lacks any physical properties, and is defined instead as a set of “probabilities” that exists in any one particular state. (These “probabilities” aren’t just some laboratory or academic theory. They underlie all of our modern notion of chemistry, and they make microprocessors and nuclear reactions possible. Our modern world would not exist without these bizarre properties of particles.)
If you’re lost, this video explains the Double Slit experiment and the probability wave in quantum mechanics:
But then there’s the second weird thing. When scientists try to observe a photon in the experiment, the very act of watching it “collapses” into a definite state–either a particle or a wave. No matter what they do, whenever they go to observe, it is as if the photon “decides” what state it is in. The act of observation is said to pull that photon into a definite reality. (This is at the heart of the Schrödinger’s Cat parable, where a hypothetical cat inside a box is neither alive nor dead until you open the box and look inside.)
This second weird notion–that observation defines reality–has been around a long time, along with an experiment famously proposed by John Wheeler back in 1978, and thought to be impossible to carry out. It was called the “delayed choice thought experiment.” It was a “thought experiment” because it was presumed it could not actually be facilitated. That experiment sought to answer the question, “So precisely when does a photon choose to act like a particle or act like a wave? When it is first fired, before it goes through the slit, or perhaps even…after?”
As explained in Digital Journal, one of Wheeler’s proposed thought experiments went something roughly like this: What if you could insert a second screen, but only after something has passed the first screen? The second screen, which would sometimes be inserted and sometimes not based on random chance, was designed to cause interference similar to the first. That way, in theory, you could observe the state of the photon when it passed through the first screen and see if it remained consistent going through the second.
The technical difficulty was that no one was able to insert that second screen in time, that is, after the item had passed through the first but before it struck the back wall. That task seemed insurmountable. But now that experiment has been tried out, and the results are rather mind-boggling.
The team in Australia turned thought experiment into lab reality by using lasers. Their subject matter was not a photon but a helium atom which, though much more massive than a photon, would also theoretically act like a photon. That is, it would also exist in an indefinite state, then act either like a particle or like a wave, once observed. The lasers they used served as a pair of grates, one before the other, with the second grate randomly dropped in.
What they found is weirder than anything seen to date: Every time the two grates were in place, the helium atom passed through, on many paths in many forms, just like a wave. But whenever the second grate was not present, the atom invariably passed through the first grate like a particle. The fascinating part was, the second grate’s very existence in the path was random. And what’s more, it hadn’t happened yet.
In other words, it was as if the helium particle “knew” whether there would be a second grate at the time it passed through the first. The possible future presence of that second grate appeared to be determining the past state of the atom as it passed through grate #1. Whether it continued as a particle or changed into a wave depended on something that might happen in the future.
But how could a future event–the insertion of the second grate–determine the past state of the helium atom? Time would have to run backward, or something would have to know in advance that the second grate was going to be in place.
“The atoms did not travel from A to B. It was only when they were measured at the end of the journey that their wavelike or particle-like behavior was brought into existence,” Truscott said. If we are to believe that the atom really did take a particular path or paths, then one has to accept that a future measurement is affecting the atom’s past, he concluded.
The notion that the future is affecting the past has profound implications beyond the rarified world of quantum physics. It calls into question, for example, the very question of free will, or whether there are multiple worlds with multiple realities. These studies and findings will no doubt be challenged and presumably replicated, but one thing is clear: This new wrinkle adds more questions than answers.
We’re going to need a bigger cat box.
Monday, February 23, 2015
The Unreality of Time
Philosophy and physics may seem like polar opposites, but they regularly address quite similar questions. Recently, physicists have revisited a topic with modern philosophical origins dating over a century ago: the unreality of time. What if the passage of time were merely an illusion? Can a world without time make sense?
While a world without the familiar passage of time may seem far-fetched, big names in physics, such as string theory pioneer Ed Witten and theorist Brian Greene, have recently embraced such an idea. A timeless reality may help reconcile differences between quantum mechanics and relativity, but how can we make sense of such a world? If physics does indeed suggest that the flow of time is illusory, then philosophy may be able to shed light on such a strange notion.
British philosopher J.M.E McTaggart advanced this idea in 1908 in his paper titled, “The Unreality of Time.” Philosophers widely consider his paper to be one of the most influential, early examinations of this possibility. Looking through McTaggart’s philosophical lens, a reality without time becomes a little more intuitive and, in principle, possible.
A Tale of Two Times
McTaggart’s argument against the reality of time has a number of interpretations, but his argument starts with a distinction about ordering events in time. The “A” series and “B” series of time form an integral part of McTaggart’s argument, and I’ll unravel this distinction with an example historical event.
On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 became the first manned spacecraft to land on the moon. For argument’s sake, consider this event to represent an event during the present. Several days in the past (July 16), then, Apollo 11 lifted off the ground. Additionally, several days in the future all of the mission astronauts will land back on earth, safe and sound. Classifying an event as “several days past,” or “several days future,” falls under the “A” series. For the moon landing, some events (e.g. Lincoln’s assassination) are in the distant past; some events are in the distant future (e.g. the inauguration of President Obama); and other events fall somewhere in between.
Under the “A” series, events flow from one classification (i.e. past, present and future) to another. On July 16th, the moon landing would have the property of being in the future. The instant the Apollo 11 landed on the moon, that event would be present. After this moment, its classification changes to the past.
The “B” series, however, doesn’t classify events on this scale ranging from the distant past to the distant future. Instead, the “B” series orders events based on their relationship to other events. Under this ordering, Lincoln’s assassination occurs before the moon landing, and Obama’s inauguration occurs after the moon landing. This relational ordering seems to capture a different way of looking at time.
Two Times, One Contradiction
With this distinction in place, McTaggart additionally argues that a fundamental series of time requires a change to take place. Under the “B” series, the way these events are ordered never change. Obama’s inauguration, for instance, will never change properties and occur before the moon landing and vice versa. These relational properties simply don’t change.
But the A series does embody the change that we might expect from the flow of time. Events first have the property of being in the future, then they become present events. Afterward, they drift into the past. Under the A series, time does have an objective flow, and true change does happen. In McTaggart’s mind (and perhaps the mind of many others), this change is a necessary aspect of time.
But herein lies the contradiction. If these events do change in this sense, they will have contradictory properties. McTaggart argues that an event can’t be in the past, in the present, and in the future. All of these properties are incompatible, so the A series leads to a contradiction. Consequently, time, which requires change, does not truly exist. Welcome to the timeless reality.
Wait a Minute…
Certainly, many philosophers and physicists still believe in the reality of time and have objected to McTaggart’s argument. There are a number of fascinating caveats and counterexamples that you can read about elsewhere. Nonetheless, McTaggart’s work has influenced a number of philosophers’ approach to time, and his work has inspired many philosophers to incorporate physics into their arguments.
For instance, when Albert Einstein introduced special relativity, he seriously disrupted our “folk” conception of the flow of time. In special relativity, there is no absolute simultaneity of events. In one reference frame, two events may appear to happen at the same time. An observer on a speeding rocket ship, however, may observe one event happening before the other. Neither observer is “right” in this situation: This is simply the weirdness that special relativity entails.
Consequently, many philosophers have used special relativity as evidence against a theory supporting the A series of time. If absolute simultaneity doesn’t exist, it doesn’t make sense to say that one event is “in the present.” There’s no absolute present that pervades the universe under special relativity.
But McTaggart’s entire argument may help us better understand strange physics at the intersection of quantum mechanics and general relativity. In an attempt to reconcile these two theories, some well-known physicists have developed theories of quantum gravity that imply the world lacks time in a fundamental way.
Brad Monton, a philosopher of physics at the University of Colorado Boulder, recently published a paper comparing McTaggart’s philosophy with prominent theories in physics, including quantum gravity. During an interview, I asked him how some of the “timeless” ideas in quantum gravity compared to McTaggart.
“They’re on par with the radicalness,” he said. “There’s a lot of radicalness.”
Monton cautioned, however, that quantum gravity does not imply the same lack of time that McTaggart may have had in mind. Physicist John Wheeler, as Monton notes, has postulated that time may not be a fundamental aspect of reality, but this only happens on extremely small distance scales.
Some of these ideas in quantum gravity may be radical, but several respected names in physics are seriously considering a reality without time at its core. If a quantum gravity theory emerges that requires a radical conception of time, McTaggart may help us prepare.
As Monton writes in his paper: “As long as McTaggart’s metaphysics is viable, then the answer to the physicists’ queries is “no” – they are free, from a philosophical perspective at least, to explore theories where time is unreal.”
Many quantum gravity theories remain speculative, but there’s a chance that timelessness may become a prominent feature in physics. If that’s the case, then hopefully philosophers of science will help us wrap our heads around the implications.
From Physics Central
Sunday, February 15, 2015
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