The Punchlines

Tuesday 5 June 2012

ABOUT TIME

Time.

I have recently had this conversation with one of my good friends about Time and what it is. My friend said that they were having a bit of trouble with the concept, so I attempted to explain time within the frame of my theory of Chaos.

I'm sure many of us are familiar with the idea that time is an illusion, it is relative (thank you, Prof. Einstein!); I hold that belief as well. Time is an illusion. What we perceive as the passing of time is given by a cyclical procession of events, such as the night-day cycle, or the seasons change, or we can tell “time” by the procession of wake-work/school-home.

Let's go on a small tangent and take that last example and elaborate it a little. For me at least, I have a sense of “time” only along this series of events, between waking up, going to work and returning home. Once I get off work, “time” ceases to exist for me. Whether I go out with my friends, or go home and enjoy some Internet browsing, there is a marked lack of time, in the sense that I seem disengaged from the perception of it. Sure, you'll say that lack of perception does not equate lack of existence... but then again, is that really so? On a quantum level, scientists continue to be baffled by the fact that subatomic particles seem to do a lot of logic-defying things, like being in two places at the same time, and as soon as someone “observes” them, they behave in the way that the observer expects them to behave.

Here is what I mean by that, explained much better than I could:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfPeprQ7oGc

So yeah, thinking outside the box, maybe our perception of “reality” actually does shape said reality.

Back on the topic of time, let's look at Time in the context of my theory of Chaos. Chaos is a collection of vibrating strings, which represent both events and individual beings. Ok, maybe that isn't quite very clearly portrayed... Let's put it like this. Events are knots that tie more chaos-strings together, while individual beings are knots tied into only one chaos-string.

Chaos is the All-rule, containing the vibrating strings of Every Possibility Simultaneously. That is to say, anything that could happen, does happen at the same “time”, but we only perceive one version, one “timeline” of that event, one “vibration” of only one “string”.

But because of the multitude of possibilities and their respective timelines, to say that Time exists in an objective way is silly. It is a subjective perception, and not even a linear one. How many times have we reminisced about something from the “past”? How many times have we just had a “feeling” that we should slow our car down only to have an eighteen-wheeler rush by in front of us? It would have hit if we hadn't slowed down when we did. Our perception is not linear, and Time, being a subjective construct, is non-linear, not only because of that but also for the fact that at any given “moment” there are endless parallel possibilities that diverge out of that point.

So, from what I can tell, Time is a multilaterally- divergent illusion. Try to shift your perception out of it; what do you See?

P.S. Chaos is also the Null-rule, pertaining to nothingness. According to all that we've said about this so far, it means that everything exists and does not exist at the same time... Schroedinger's Cat anyone? :D

EXTRA

I have something to add. A few years ago, I was pondering about the relativity of time from the average Joe's perspective. I was out in the park at night with a highschool friend, and we were looking up at the stars. I couldn't help but notice, there were only a few and far between stars out, although it was late enough that any available star could be viewed.

Sure, the rational explanation for it is pretty simple. I live in a big city, a very polluted one. Pollution + street lamps make you see fewer stars than when you're at the seaside or the country side where the air is clean and there aren't so many street lamps illuminating everything in an almost maniacal fashion.

But you know what? Screw conventional rationalism. I had an idea back then, which has everything to do with time and its relativity and nothing to do with pollution.

I am an avid sky watcher, you see. I love looking up at it, at day and especially at night. It's simply charming. When I go to the country side, I can spend an entire night star gazing, because from there, where the air is clear and the night is unhindered by man-made illumination, you can actually see the myriads and myriads of stars that make up just a tentacle of our Milky Way galaxy. For a born and bred city dweller who loves nature such as myself, this is an amazing sight to behold. The sheer multitude of little lights, the understanding that I am actually seeing something I only hear about in an abstract fashion on the Discovery Channel, it is an exhilarating experience!

Back in the city, I still look up at the stars whenever I can, glad that I get to see even a few shy flickers anymore. It wasn't always so barren, the night sky. When I was a kid, I could still see more than this.

So as I nostalgically pondered on this that one night, I remembered that a lot of the “stars” we see are actually light from stars that might be long gone, but their light just now reached us. So basically we are looking up at the past, in a way.

I went on to reason that if we compare city stars to country side stars, and considering that the light we are seeing is a delayed luminous expression of a long dead star, then I wondered... what if time in the city and time in the country side are different (thus meaning that Time itself is not uniform and linear)? What if in a village, time flows slower? And if so why?

On that, I elaborated. Maybe Time itself is nothing but an accumulation of the people's perception of it. And the more people you have in an area, the “faster” it goes, thus explaining how time seems to go faster in a city than in a village.

I'm sure you know what I mean. In a large city everyone is on the run, hurrying, always feeling that there isn't enough time... If you've ever been in a village, you might have noticed that life there is pretty chill, the pace is slow and people generally tackle the day step by step, without hurrying like city-dwellers do.

So there you have it for my little alternative theory of time. Hope you enjoyed!

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