Original post: Son of mr. gordo
Zen Master Seung Sahn elaborated on this topic in his excellent book The Compass of Zen (p. 143):
"Everyone thinks that this is extremely difficult teaching, something beyond their reach or experience. How can things appear and disappear, and yet there is, originally, even in this constantly moving world, no appearing and disappearing? A student once asked me, 'The Mahaparinirvana-sutra seems very confusing. Everything is always moving. And yet everything is not moving? I don't understand this Buddhism . . .' But there is a very easy way to understand this: Sometime you go to a movie. You see an action movie about a good man and a bad man--lots of fighting, cars moving very fast, and explosions all over the place. Everything is always moving very quickly. Our daily lives have this quality: everything is constantly moving, coming and going, nonstop. It seems like there is no stillness-place. But this movie is really only a very long strip of film. In one second, there are something like fourteen frames. Each frame is a separate piece of action. But in each frame, nothing is moving. Everything is completely still. Each frame, one by one, is a complete picture. In each frame, nothing ever comes or goes, or appears or disappears. Each frame is complete stillness. The film projector moves the frames very quickly, and all of these frames run past the lens very fast, so the action on-screen seems to happen nonstop. There is no break in the movement of things. But actually when you take this strip of film and hold it up to the light with your hands, there is nothing moving at all. Each frame is complete. Each moment is completely not-moving action.
"Our minds and the whole universe are like that. This world is impermanent. Everything is always changing, changing, changing, moving, moving, moving, nonstop. Even one second of our lives seems full of so much movement and change in this world that we see. But your mind--right now--is like a lens whose shutter speed is one divided by infinite time. We call that moment-mind. If you attain that mind, then this whole world's movement stops. From moment to moment you can see this world completely stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. Like the film, you perceive every frame--this moment--which is infinitely still and complete. In the frame, nothing is moving. There is no time, and nothing appears or disappears in that box. But this movie projector--your thinking mind--is always moving, around and around and around, so you experience this world as constantly moving and you constantly experience change, which is impermanence. You lose moment-mind by following your conceptual thinking, believing that it is real."
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"This is not unchanging, yet it is not moving. It has never been void; there is no question of inside or outside, no separation of absolute and relative. Realize that this is your own original face: even if it appears as ordinary or holy, even if it divides into objective and subjective experiences, all comes and goes completely within it, all arises and vanishes herein. It is like the water of the ocean making waves; though they rise again and again, never is any water added. It is also like waves dying away; though they die out and vanish, not a drop is lost."
--Zen Master Keizan, Transmission of Light
"The life of a sentient being is a long dream. Existence only appears to be real. When one finally awakens, or attains Buddhahood, existence is seen for what it is--a sequence of illusions. Until that time, people will remain obsessed by the body, mind, and external phenomena, not realizing that they are illusory. You will live in a dream, thinking that it is reality. . . .
"Sentient beings mistakenly view their moment-to-moment illusory existence as a continuous, connected lifetime. Because they are unaware that their life is unreal, they do not attempt to wake up."
--Châ??an Master Sheng-yen, Complete Enlightenment, pp. 108-109
"If you are attached to your thinking, then everything has name and form. This is the world of opposites. But name and form are always changing, changing, changing. Because of this, everything is impermanent. Everything is like a dream, is like dew, is like a bubble or a flash of lightning. Nothing stays but is always in a process of change. Rather than being some constant, fixed reality, this whole universe constantly appears and disappears. But there is a way to experience the true nature of this constantly changing universe. Simply do not become attached to any outside world. Donâ??t become attached to names and forms. If you keep that point, then your mind is not moving. You attain that names and forms are fundamentally empty. This whole universe is completely empty. You are completely empty. Nothing ever comes or goes. Nothing ever appears or disappears. When you keep this mind, you soon attain your true self."
--Zen Master Seung Sahn, The Compass of Zen, pp. 127-129
"It is like an image reflected in a mirror, it is seen but it is not real; the One Mind is seen as a duality by the ignorant when it is reflected in the mirror constructed by their memory. . . . The existence of the entire universe is due to memory that has been accumulated since the beginningless past but wrongly interpreted."
--The Lankavatara Sutra
"Just understand that things do not originate of themselves. All of them come into existence from your own single mental impulse of imagination mistakenly clinging to appearances.
"If you know that mind and objects fundamentally do not contact each other, you will be set free on the spot. Everything is in a state of quiescence right where it is; this very place is the site of enlightenment."
--Zen Master Pai-chang
"Beginningless time and the present moment are the same. . . . You have only to understand that time has no real existence."
--Zen Master Huang Po
Son of mr. gordo
Buddhism and the Illusion of Time
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Buddhism and the Illusion of Time
Original post: Son of mr. gordo
Awakening_93 writes:
I must say that the first quote comes as a little bit of a surprise to me. I wouldnt have thought that Buddhism chops up time into the "frames" of the film, but would rather see the true experience in which time as seen as an illusion, when it is identified with the whole reel of film. I had seen the very concept of moments as transient; there is only the Way, the Path, the Experience that is there in the end. Perhaps its only my mind that sees the two ideas as contradictory?
Awakening_93 writes:
I must say that the first quote comes as a little bit of a surprise to me. I wouldnt have thought that Buddhism chops up time into the "frames" of the film, but would rather see the true experience in which time as seen as an illusion, when it is identified with the whole reel of film. I had seen the very concept of moments as transient; there is only the Way, the Path, the Experience that is there in the end. Perhaps its only my mind that sees the two ideas as contradictory?
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Buddhism and the Illusion of Time
Original post: Son of mr. gordo
Paulo writes:
Son of mr. gordo
I must say all of the above are wonderful religious philosophy.
Every concept posted above are worth Pondering.
Paulo writes:
Son of mr. gordo
I must say all of the above are wonderful religious philosophy.
Every concept posted above are worth Pondering.
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Buddhism and the Illusion of Time
Original post: Son of mr. gordo
Here's a great exposition by Tom Huston:
Let me break that down a bit: The whole world of form (samsara) is totally full of various degrees of motion and movement, so that even its "stillness" isn't absolutely still. It's only relatively still--relative to other movements, like the "stillness" you feel now sitting on a chair, even though you're zipping through space on a planetary body at thousands of miles per hour. The world of formlessness (nirvana), on the contrary, is absolutely still and tranquil, with no relative movement or relative stillness at all. So you have the relative world of relative stillness-and-motion (samsara), on the one hand, and the absolute world of absolute Stillness (nirvana), on the other. In the realization of nondual, Mahayana Enlightenment, these two worlds (relative samsara and relative nirvana, or relative form and relative emptiness) merge into a perfect Unity of Absolute Emptiness or Absolute Nirvana, and then there is neither motion nor stillness, or you can say that there is both of them together (as I explained in the first paragraph), or you can say neither of those and give the logically precise answer: silence. The Madhyamika Shastra (XV.3) put it best:
You can picture this "Now"--which is your own Buddha Mind, your own natural Awareness--as a vast blue sky, and the world of time and change is just a little tiny cloud passing within it. The "Now" is eternal and still; it never changes or moves, since it is the infinite clearing or space in which all change and movement happens. The cloud arises, the cloud stays a bit, and the cloud goes, but the vast empty sky remains untouched by it.
This is exactly how your present experience is: you are the vast empty sky and this whole universe is a tiny cloud within you. Through the blinding power of innate ignorance, however, you have forgotten your true nature as the motionless sky and mistakenly identified yourself as the ever-changing cloud (or a small part of the cloud). A Theravadin-level enlightenment will reverse this mistake by showing you that you are really the empty sky, and a Mahayanin, nondual Enlightenment will show you that the sky and the cloud are not separate or different. The cloud arises out of, and within, the sky, and is ultimately made of "sky essence," so to speak. (It's the same as the old "mirror" analogy: your mind is perfectly clear mirror, and the world is reflected in it. You first must discover that you are the mirror and become free of the reflections; then you must discover that the reflections are not separate from the mirror. At that point you become Free as the Absolute Unity of mirror-and-reflections together.)
Now, to use the movie analogy, imagine that Awareness is a movie screen and this world of form is a projected display of light that appears on the screen. The frames appear on the screen, one at a time, in rapid succession, and the screen contains each of them as they appear. One frame of light appears on the screen, stays a fraction of a second, and disappears--and the screen only reflects one frame at a time.
Now here's where the analogy gets complicated (and where you got confused): The movie screen and filmstrip reel all occur in time; Awareness and the appearance of the world, however, are the genesis of time. There's really no "reel" or "strip" of film appearing on the screen all at once, but rather a single frame every instant, with each instantly replacing the previous one--even though its the same motionless screen they all appear on. So when you become identified with the screen (Awareness), you don't experience every single frame that ever appeared on the screen--they've all long since disappeared back into the nothingness from which they sprang. No, what you experience is the realization that this very screen is the same screen that has been reflecting frames of movie light since the beginning of the movie itself (and that the screen, naturally, also exists before and after the movie). You become identified with Awareness--which is completely beyond time--and you realize that it is eternal, that it is ever-present, that it has no beginning and no end, that it is the same "Now" in which all experiences have previously come and gone, presently come and go, and will in the future come and go, eternally so.
And then, if you break through to complete, nondual Enlightenment, you discover that the frames of movie light ARE the screen--that the two aren't separate, or even essentially different in any way--and then you see that there is only Now, only the screen-and-present-frame Unity, and so whatever frame happens to be present is the only frame there is. "Past" and "future" are revealed to be mental fantasies--present mental fantasies--and the only reality is always the present reality, with no real "frames" existing anyway before or after it. So there's no frame somewhere of a ten-year-old version of you falling out of a tree; that's only a memory now, and that's all it is. It exists nowhere but in your mind. (For this analogy we've done away with the projection booth, the projector, the reel of film, the viewer of the movie, etc.) That's what Zen Master Seung Sahn meant by his "you see the whole world stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. . . ." When there is really ONLY the present moment, the present frame, then that's all you can see. And the present frame is always completely motionless, even though the frames give an illusion of sequential continuity (and your conceptual mind superimposes an illusion of movement and change). Enlightened people don't live "'frozen' contentedly in time," as you suggested, but rather fluid and alive beyond the illusion of time altogether!
There's nothing extraordinary about this. In fact, whether you feel you're Enlightened or not, you're experiencing it right now (when else could you experience it? when else could you experience anything?). Right now, as you sit here reading these words, the whole world is completely motionless, completely new, and completely silent. Nothing is changing. Nothing is moving. Nothing is happening at all. In fact, nothing has EVER happened! Not now, and therefore not ever. The world is totally silent, and everything is at peace.
And yet--how can this be? It seems absurd, doesn't it? You can move your hands and arms around, perhaps you can crank up some loud rock music to drown out the supposed "silence," and it all seems perfectly obvious that things are happening, things are changing. But look a little closer. Hold your hand in front of you. Now clench your hand into a fist. Now release the fist and move your fingers around. It certainly appeared as though the hand were moving, didn't it? But we're not interested in appearances, here; we want the reality. And the reality of your hand-moving experiment is that it was a completely different hand every instant, even when "you" weren't moving it!
On the surface, maybe this seems obvious: electrons in the hand were spinning at the speed of light; blood was flowing through the veins and capillaries; neurotransmitters were zipping instructions across the synapses, thereby engaging muscles to move. Lots of things about your supposedly static "hand" were changing. Of course, people can brush this off and say, "Yeah, okay, but it's still the same hand, even if it changes constantly." But take it even further: Were electrons really spinning, causing that subtle change in your "hand" every fraction of a nanosecond? Weren't the electrons themselves also changing, with quarks spinning and such, so that, going all the way down, to the level of universal gravitational influences or quantum nonlocality, everything even remotely related to your hand was changing? This leads to a rather shaky image of your outwardly static "hand," but perhaps we can solidify it somewhat if we analyze exactly what we mean by "change."
Basically, change means a transformation of some kind, of a single phenomenon transforming into a different arrangement of that same phenomenon. But are there any single phenomena? Didn't we just show, with the example of the quantum hand, that everything is interconnected, somehow affecting everything else in some manner, no matter how subtly? And, even if there are distinct and separate phenomena, do any of them actually change?
Take that same hand, for example. If we didn't have the mental concept "hand," how would we describe it? If we could see that the phenomenon is actually completely new and distinct every instant, with no static mental symbol (to say nothing of memories) to hold the distinct appearances together, would we perceive these new and distinct appearances as a changing phenomenon? With no concepts and no memories superimposed on the world, does anything really change? Are there even any separate "things" that could change? Isn't it all really just one seamless display--like, say, a movie frame--of a completely new and distinct universe, arising and disappearing in an infinitely rapid succession? (With a shutter speed of "one divided by infinite time," as Zen Master Seung Sahn says.)
"A man cannot step in the same river twice," said the Greek mystic Heraclitus, and the secret of life, the universe, and everything is contained in that simple statement.
Son of mr. gordo
I must say that the first quote comes as a little bit of a surprise to me. I wouldnt have thought that Buddhism chops up time into the "frames" of the film, but would rather see the true experience in which time as seen as an illusion, when it is identified with the whole reel of film. I had seen the very concept of moments as transient; there is only the Way, the Path, the Experience that is there in the end. Perhaps its only my mind that sees the two ideas as contradictory?
Here's a great exposition by Tom Huston:
Let me break that down a bit: The whole world of form (samsara) is totally full of various degrees of motion and movement, so that even its "stillness" isn't absolutely still. It's only relatively still--relative to other movements, like the "stillness" you feel now sitting on a chair, even though you're zipping through space on a planetary body at thousands of miles per hour. The world of formlessness (nirvana), on the contrary, is absolutely still and tranquil, with no relative movement or relative stillness at all. So you have the relative world of relative stillness-and-motion (samsara), on the one hand, and the absolute world of absolute Stillness (nirvana), on the other. In the realization of nondual, Mahayana Enlightenment, these two worlds (relative samsara and relative nirvana, or relative form and relative emptiness) merge into a perfect Unity of Absolute Emptiness or Absolute Nirvana, and then there is neither motion nor stillness, or you can say that there is both of them together (as I explained in the first paragraph), or you can say neither of those and give the logically precise answer: silence. The Madhyamika Shastra (XV.3) put it best:
"It cannot be called void or not void,
Or both or neither;
But in order to point it out,
It is called â??the Void.â?? "
As for the filmstrip analogy . . . Yes, you do experience the whole of your life as "played at once," but all that really means is that your life only happens right now, always in this single, eternal context called Now (which is really just another name for the Absolute or Buddha Mind). The "now" when the Big Bang happened, the "now" when Gautama Buddha died, the "now" when you were born into this life, and the "now" when you'll be reading these words--these are one and the same moment, the same motionless Now.You can picture this "Now"--which is your own Buddha Mind, your own natural Awareness--as a vast blue sky, and the world of time and change is just a little tiny cloud passing within it. The "Now" is eternal and still; it never changes or moves, since it is the infinite clearing or space in which all change and movement happens. The cloud arises, the cloud stays a bit, and the cloud goes, but the vast empty sky remains untouched by it.
This is exactly how your present experience is: you are the vast empty sky and this whole universe is a tiny cloud within you. Through the blinding power of innate ignorance, however, you have forgotten your true nature as the motionless sky and mistakenly identified yourself as the ever-changing cloud (or a small part of the cloud). A Theravadin-level enlightenment will reverse this mistake by showing you that you are really the empty sky, and a Mahayanin, nondual Enlightenment will show you that the sky and the cloud are not separate or different. The cloud arises out of, and within, the sky, and is ultimately made of "sky essence," so to speak. (It's the same as the old "mirror" analogy: your mind is perfectly clear mirror, and the world is reflected in it. You first must discover that you are the mirror and become free of the reflections; then you must discover that the reflections are not separate from the mirror. At that point you become Free as the Absolute Unity of mirror-and-reflections together.)
Now, to use the movie analogy, imagine that Awareness is a movie screen and this world of form is a projected display of light that appears on the screen. The frames appear on the screen, one at a time, in rapid succession, and the screen contains each of them as they appear. One frame of light appears on the screen, stays a fraction of a second, and disappears--and the screen only reflects one frame at a time.
Now here's where the analogy gets complicated (and where you got confused): The movie screen and filmstrip reel all occur in time; Awareness and the appearance of the world, however, are the genesis of time. There's really no "reel" or "strip" of film appearing on the screen all at once, but rather a single frame every instant, with each instantly replacing the previous one--even though its the same motionless screen they all appear on. So when you become identified with the screen (Awareness), you don't experience every single frame that ever appeared on the screen--they've all long since disappeared back into the nothingness from which they sprang. No, what you experience is the realization that this very screen is the same screen that has been reflecting frames of movie light since the beginning of the movie itself (and that the screen, naturally, also exists before and after the movie). You become identified with Awareness--which is completely beyond time--and you realize that it is eternal, that it is ever-present, that it has no beginning and no end, that it is the same "Now" in which all experiences have previously come and gone, presently come and go, and will in the future come and go, eternally so.
And then, if you break through to complete, nondual Enlightenment, you discover that the frames of movie light ARE the screen--that the two aren't separate, or even essentially different in any way--and then you see that there is only Now, only the screen-and-present-frame Unity, and so whatever frame happens to be present is the only frame there is. "Past" and "future" are revealed to be mental fantasies--present mental fantasies--and the only reality is always the present reality, with no real "frames" existing anyway before or after it. So there's no frame somewhere of a ten-year-old version of you falling out of a tree; that's only a memory now, and that's all it is. It exists nowhere but in your mind. (For this analogy we've done away with the projection booth, the projector, the reel of film, the viewer of the movie, etc.) That's what Zen Master Seung Sahn meant by his "you see the whole world stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. . . ." When there is really ONLY the present moment, the present frame, then that's all you can see. And the present frame is always completely motionless, even though the frames give an illusion of sequential continuity (and your conceptual mind superimposes an illusion of movement and change). Enlightened people don't live "'frozen' contentedly in time," as you suggested, but rather fluid and alive beyond the illusion of time altogether!
There's nothing extraordinary about this. In fact, whether you feel you're Enlightened or not, you're experiencing it right now (when else could you experience it? when else could you experience anything?). Right now, as you sit here reading these words, the whole world is completely motionless, completely new, and completely silent. Nothing is changing. Nothing is moving. Nothing is happening at all. In fact, nothing has EVER happened! Not now, and therefore not ever. The world is totally silent, and everything is at peace.
And yet--how can this be? It seems absurd, doesn't it? You can move your hands and arms around, perhaps you can crank up some loud rock music to drown out the supposed "silence," and it all seems perfectly obvious that things are happening, things are changing. But look a little closer. Hold your hand in front of you. Now clench your hand into a fist. Now release the fist and move your fingers around. It certainly appeared as though the hand were moving, didn't it? But we're not interested in appearances, here; we want the reality. And the reality of your hand-moving experiment is that it was a completely different hand every instant, even when "you" weren't moving it!
On the surface, maybe this seems obvious: electrons in the hand were spinning at the speed of light; blood was flowing through the veins and capillaries; neurotransmitters were zipping instructions across the synapses, thereby engaging muscles to move. Lots of things about your supposedly static "hand" were changing. Of course, people can brush this off and say, "Yeah, okay, but it's still the same hand, even if it changes constantly." But take it even further: Were electrons really spinning, causing that subtle change in your "hand" every fraction of a nanosecond? Weren't the electrons themselves also changing, with quarks spinning and such, so that, going all the way down, to the level of universal gravitational influences or quantum nonlocality, everything even remotely related to your hand was changing? This leads to a rather shaky image of your outwardly static "hand," but perhaps we can solidify it somewhat if we analyze exactly what we mean by "change."
Basically, change means a transformation of some kind, of a single phenomenon transforming into a different arrangement of that same phenomenon. But are there any single phenomena? Didn't we just show, with the example of the quantum hand, that everything is interconnected, somehow affecting everything else in some manner, no matter how subtly? And, even if there are distinct and separate phenomena, do any of them actually change?
Take that same hand, for example. If we didn't have the mental concept "hand," how would we describe it? If we could see that the phenomenon is actually completely new and distinct every instant, with no static mental symbol (to say nothing of memories) to hold the distinct appearances together, would we perceive these new and distinct appearances as a changing phenomenon? With no concepts and no memories superimposed on the world, does anything really change? Are there even any separate "things" that could change? Isn't it all really just one seamless display--like, say, a movie frame--of a completely new and distinct universe, arising and disappearing in an infinitely rapid succession? (With a shutter speed of "one divided by infinite time," as Zen Master Seung Sahn says.)
"A man cannot step in the same river twice," said the Greek mystic Heraclitus, and the secret of life, the universe, and everything is contained in that simple statement.
Son of mr. gordo
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Buddhism and the Illusion of Time
Original post: Son of mr. gordo
Published: January 1, 2004
It was an unlikely place to be at 4:30 a.m., since I'm not much on celebrations and take minimal notice of most every holiday. Yet, a few years back, on a rainy Dec. 31 morning, I stood in Times Square, together with a handful of other early revelers, awaiting images on a giant screen of festivities on Kiribati, the first inhabited place on earth to welcome the new year. I was, as I recognized through the fog of exhaustion and the hazy steam billowing from manhole covers, re-enacting a struggle I'd been engaged in for decades.
Time dominates experience. We live by watch and calendar. We eagerly trade megahertz for gigahertz. We spend billions of dollars to conceal time's bodily influences. We uproariously celebrate particular moments in time even as we quietly despair of its passage.
But what is time? To paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart, we know it when we see it â?? but certainly, a few years into the 21st century, our understanding of time must be deeper than that. By now, you'd think, science must have figured out why time seems to flow, why it always goes in one direction and why we are uniformly drawn from one second to the next. The fact is, though, the explanations for these basic features of time remain controversial. And the more physicists have searched for definitive answers, the more our everyday conception of time appears illusory.
According to Isaac Newton, writing in the late 17th century, "time flows equably without reference to anything external," meaning that the universe is equipped with a kind of built-in clock that ticks off seconds identically, regardless of location or epoch. This is the intuitive perspective on time, so it's no wonder that Newton's words held sway for more than 200 years.
In the early part of the 20th century, however, Albert Einstein saw through nature's Newtonian facade and revealed that the passage of time depends on circumstance and environment. He showed that the wristwatches worn by two individuals moving relative to one another, or experiencing different gravitational fields, tick off time at different rates. The passage of time, according to Einstein, is in the eye of the beholder.
Numerous terrestrial experiments and astronomical observations leave no doubt that Einstein was right. Nevertheless, because the flexibility of time's passage becomes readily apparent only at high speeds (near the maximum possible speed, that of light) or in strong gravitational fields (near a black hole), nature lulls us into believing Newton's rigid conception. And so it's not surprising that nearly 100 years after Einstein's breakthroughs, it remains a great challenge, even for physicists, to internalize his discoveries fully.
But the cost of adhering to Newton's description of time is high. Like believing the earth flat or that man was created on the sixth day, our willingness to place unjustified faith in immediate perception or received wisdom leads us to an inaccurate and starkly limited vision of reality.
For one thing, relativity lays out a blueprint for time-travel to the future. Were you to board a spaceship, head out from earth at 99.999999 percent of light speed, travel for six months and then head back home at the same speed, your motion would slow your clock, relative to those that remain stationary on earth, so that you'd be one year older upon your return â?? while everyone on earth would have aged about 7,000 years. Or, were you to venture into space again and spend a year hovering a dozen feet above the edge of a black hole, whose mass was 1,000 times that of the sun, the strong gravitational field would slow your clock so much that on your return to earth, you'd find that more than a million years had elapsed.
To be sure, executing this strategy for catapulting yourself forward in time is beyond what we can now achieve, but scientists routinely use high-energy accelerators to propel particles, like electrons and protons, to nearly the speed of light, slowing their internal clocks and thereby sending them to the future. Though unfamiliar, forward time-travel is an unavoidable feature of relativistic reality.
Relativity also upends the way we traditionally organize reality. Most of us imagine that reality consists of everything that exists right now â?? everything that would be found, say, on a hypothetical freeze-frame image of the universe at this moment. The history of reality could thus be depicted by stacking one such freeze-frame image on top of the one that came before it, creating a cosmic version of an old-time flip-book. But this intuitive conception assumes a universal now, another stubborn remnant of Newton's absolutist thinking.
Let me explain. Clocks that are in relative motion or that are subject to different gravitational fields tick off time at different rates; the more these factors come into play, the further out of synchronization the clocks will fall. Individuals carrying such clocks will therefore not agree on what happens when, and so they will not agree on what belongs on a given page of the cosmic flip-book â?? even though each flip-book provides an equally valid compendium of history.
Under these rules, what constitutes a moment in time is completely subjective. This is unfamiliar, and hence hard to accept, because we all experience the same gravitational field (the earth's), we all travel extremely slowly compared to light's speed (even the space shuttle never comes close to exceeding a ten-thousandth of light speed) and we all compare our conception of reality to beings who, by cosmic standards, are nearby. But by using our understanding to relax these measures, if only hypothetically, we learn that our experiences belie the truth.
For example, if you and I were sitting next to each other, our freeze-frame images of the present would be identical. But were you to start walking, the mathematics of relativity shows that the subsequent pages of your flip-book would rotate so that each one of your new pages would angle across many of mine; what you'd consider one moment in time â?? your new notion of the present â?? would include events I'd claim to have happened at different times, some earlier and some later.
As we pass each other in the street, this rotation is imperceptibly tiny; that's why common experience fails to reveal the discrepancy between our respective senses of past, present and future. But just as a tiny angular shift will cause a rocket to miss a distant target by a large margin, the tiny angular shift between our notions of now results in a significant time discrepancy if our separation in space is substantial. If instead of being next to me, you were 10 light years away (and moving at about 9.5 miles an hour), what you consider to have happened just now on earth would include events that I'd experienced about four seconds later or earlier (depending on whether your motion was toward or away from earth). If you were 10 billion light years away, the time discrepancy would jump to about 141 years.
In this latter case, your subsequent flip-book pages, your notion of the present â?? a notion that agreed with mine until you started walking â?? would include Abraham Lincoln on the day the Emancipation Proclamation took effect (if you walked away from me), or the victor of the hotly contested presidential election of 2144 preparing for his inaugural (if you walked toward me). That's not to say that you could save Lincoln's life or analyze mid-22nd century American presidential politics; at such enormous distances it takes signals, even traveling at light speed, a long time to make the trip. But the point is that even ordinary motion, when considered over vast distances, results in a marked change in our conception of reality, revealing how thoroughly subjective the temporal categories of past, present and future actually are.
In a very specific way, then, this realization shatters our comfortable sense that the past is gone, the future is yet to be and the present is what truly exists. Einstein was not hardened to the difficulty of absorbing such a profound change in perspective. Rudolf Carnap, the philosopher, recounts Einstein's telling him that "the experience of the now means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future, but this important difference does not and cannot occur within physics." And later, in a condolence letter to the widow of Michele Besso, his longtime friend and fellow physicist, Einstein wrote: "In quitting this strange world he has once again preceded me by just a little. That doesn't mean anything. For we convinced physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent."
Some physicists and historians see these as declarations laced with poignant hyperbole. Perhaps they are. It's hard to know whether Einstein was "convinced" to such a deep level that he had remolded his emotional sense of time to reflect his understanding of relativistic reality. But regardless of whether Einstein had succeeded, his remarks articulated the challenge â?? to allow carefully reasoned and experimentally verified investigations of the universe, however discomfiting their conclusions, to inform our lives with the same force as experience.
When quantum mechanics, the tremendously successful theory of atoms and subatomic particles, is taken into account, the challenge becomes greater still. Quantum mechanics has, at its core, the uncertainty principle, which establishes a limit on how precisely particular features of the microworld can be simultaneously measured. The more precise the measurement of one feature (a particle's position for example), the more wildly uncertain a complementary feature (its velocity) becomes. Quantum uncertainty thus ensures that the finer the examination of the microworld, the more frantically its physical features fluctuate, and the more turbulent it appears to be.
For subatomic particles, these fluctuations are well understood mathematically and have been precisely documented experimentally. But when it comes to time and space, the fluctuations speak to the very limits of these familiar concepts. On extremely short time intervals (about a tenth of a millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second) and distance scales (about a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a centimeter), quantum fluctuations so mangle space and time that the conventional ideas of left/right, backward/forward, up/down, and before/after become meaningless.
Scientists are still struggling to understand these implications, but many agree that just as the percentages in political polls are average, approximate measures that become meaningful only when a large respondent pool is canvassed, so conventional notions of time and space are also average, approximate concepts that become meaningful only when considered over sufficiently large scales. Whereas relativity established the subjectivity of time's passage, quantum mechanics challenges the conceptual primacy of time itself.
Today's scientists seeking to combine quantum mechanics with Einstein's theory of gravity (the general theory of relativity) are convinced that we are on the verge of another major upheaval, one that will pinpoint the more elemental concepts from which time and space emerge. Many believe this will involve a radically new formulation of natural law in which scientists will be compelled to trade the space-time matrix within which they have worked for centuries for a more basic "realm" that is itself devoid of time and space.
This is such a perplexing idea that grasping it poses a substantial challenge, even for leading researchers. Broadly speaking, scientists envision that there will be no mention of time and space in the basic equations of the sought-for framework. And yet â?? just as clear, liquid water emerges from particular combinations of an enormous number of H20 molecules â?? time and space as we know them would emerge from particular combinations of some more basic, though still unidentified, entities. Time and space themselves, though, would be rendered secondary, derivative features, that emerge only in suitable conditions (in the aftermath of the Big Bang, for example). As outrageous as it sounds, to many researchers, including me, such a departure of time and space from the ultimate laws of the universe seems inevitable.
A hundred years ago today, the discovery of special relativity was still 18 months away, and science still embraced the Newtonian description of time. Now, however, modern physics' notion of time is clearly at odds with the one most of us have internalized. Einstein greeted the failure of science to confirm the familiar experience of time with "painful but inevitable resignation." The developments since his era have only widened the disparity between common experience and scientific knowledge. Most physicists cope with this disparity by compartmentalizing: there's time as understood scientifically, and then there's time as experienced intuitively. For decades, I've struggled to bring my experience closer to my understanding. In my everyday routines, I delight in what I know is the individual's power, however imperceptible, to affect time's passage. In my mind's eye, I often conjure a kaleidoscopic image of time in which, with every step, I further fracture Newton's pristine and uniform conception. And in moments of loss I've taken comfort from the knowledge that all events exist eternally in the expanse of space and time, with the partition into past, present and future being a useful but subjective organization.
Yet my presence in Times Square that rainy morning â?? losing sleep to mark an arbitrary moment in the passage of what I truly believe to be a derivative concept â?? attests to the power of convention and experience. Regardless of our scientific insights, we will still mourn the evanescence of life and be able to thrill to the arrival of each newly delivered moment. The choice, however, of whether to be fully seduced by the face nature reveals directly to our senses, or to also recognize the reality that exists beyond perception, is ours.
Brian Greene, a professor of mathematics and physics at Columbia, is author of "The Elegant Universe" and the forthcoming "The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality."
Son of mr. gordo
The Time We Thought We Knew
By BRIAN GREENE
Published: January 1, 2004
It was an unlikely place to be at 4:30 a.m., since I'm not much on celebrations and take minimal notice of most every holiday. Yet, a few years back, on a rainy Dec. 31 morning, I stood in Times Square, together with a handful of other early revelers, awaiting images on a giant screen of festivities on Kiribati, the first inhabited place on earth to welcome the new year. I was, as I recognized through the fog of exhaustion and the hazy steam billowing from manhole covers, re-enacting a struggle I'd been engaged in for decades.
Time dominates experience. We live by watch and calendar. We eagerly trade megahertz for gigahertz. We spend billions of dollars to conceal time's bodily influences. We uproariously celebrate particular moments in time even as we quietly despair of its passage.
But what is time? To paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart, we know it when we see it â?? but certainly, a few years into the 21st century, our understanding of time must be deeper than that. By now, you'd think, science must have figured out why time seems to flow, why it always goes in one direction and why we are uniformly drawn from one second to the next. The fact is, though, the explanations for these basic features of time remain controversial. And the more physicists have searched for definitive answers, the more our everyday conception of time appears illusory.
According to Isaac Newton, writing in the late 17th century, "time flows equably without reference to anything external," meaning that the universe is equipped with a kind of built-in clock that ticks off seconds identically, regardless of location or epoch. This is the intuitive perspective on time, so it's no wonder that Newton's words held sway for more than 200 years.
In the early part of the 20th century, however, Albert Einstein saw through nature's Newtonian facade and revealed that the passage of time depends on circumstance and environment. He showed that the wristwatches worn by two individuals moving relative to one another, or experiencing different gravitational fields, tick off time at different rates. The passage of time, according to Einstein, is in the eye of the beholder.
Numerous terrestrial experiments and astronomical observations leave no doubt that Einstein was right. Nevertheless, because the flexibility of time's passage becomes readily apparent only at high speeds (near the maximum possible speed, that of light) or in strong gravitational fields (near a black hole), nature lulls us into believing Newton's rigid conception. And so it's not surprising that nearly 100 years after Einstein's breakthroughs, it remains a great challenge, even for physicists, to internalize his discoveries fully.
But the cost of adhering to Newton's description of time is high. Like believing the earth flat or that man was created on the sixth day, our willingness to place unjustified faith in immediate perception or received wisdom leads us to an inaccurate and starkly limited vision of reality.
For one thing, relativity lays out a blueprint for time-travel to the future. Were you to board a spaceship, head out from earth at 99.999999 percent of light speed, travel for six months and then head back home at the same speed, your motion would slow your clock, relative to those that remain stationary on earth, so that you'd be one year older upon your return â?? while everyone on earth would have aged about 7,000 years. Or, were you to venture into space again and spend a year hovering a dozen feet above the edge of a black hole, whose mass was 1,000 times that of the sun, the strong gravitational field would slow your clock so much that on your return to earth, you'd find that more than a million years had elapsed.
To be sure, executing this strategy for catapulting yourself forward in time is beyond what we can now achieve, but scientists routinely use high-energy accelerators to propel particles, like electrons and protons, to nearly the speed of light, slowing their internal clocks and thereby sending them to the future. Though unfamiliar, forward time-travel is an unavoidable feature of relativistic reality.
Relativity also upends the way we traditionally organize reality. Most of us imagine that reality consists of everything that exists right now â?? everything that would be found, say, on a hypothetical freeze-frame image of the universe at this moment. The history of reality could thus be depicted by stacking one such freeze-frame image on top of the one that came before it, creating a cosmic version of an old-time flip-book. But this intuitive conception assumes a universal now, another stubborn remnant of Newton's absolutist thinking.
Let me explain. Clocks that are in relative motion or that are subject to different gravitational fields tick off time at different rates; the more these factors come into play, the further out of synchronization the clocks will fall. Individuals carrying such clocks will therefore not agree on what happens when, and so they will not agree on what belongs on a given page of the cosmic flip-book â?? even though each flip-book provides an equally valid compendium of history.
Under these rules, what constitutes a moment in time is completely subjective. This is unfamiliar, and hence hard to accept, because we all experience the same gravitational field (the earth's), we all travel extremely slowly compared to light's speed (even the space shuttle never comes close to exceeding a ten-thousandth of light speed) and we all compare our conception of reality to beings who, by cosmic standards, are nearby. But by using our understanding to relax these measures, if only hypothetically, we learn that our experiences belie the truth.
For example, if you and I were sitting next to each other, our freeze-frame images of the present would be identical. But were you to start walking, the mathematics of relativity shows that the subsequent pages of your flip-book would rotate so that each one of your new pages would angle across many of mine; what you'd consider one moment in time â?? your new notion of the present â?? would include events I'd claim to have happened at different times, some earlier and some later.
As we pass each other in the street, this rotation is imperceptibly tiny; that's why common experience fails to reveal the discrepancy between our respective senses of past, present and future. But just as a tiny angular shift will cause a rocket to miss a distant target by a large margin, the tiny angular shift between our notions of now results in a significant time discrepancy if our separation in space is substantial. If instead of being next to me, you were 10 light years away (and moving at about 9.5 miles an hour), what you consider to have happened just now on earth would include events that I'd experienced about four seconds later or earlier (depending on whether your motion was toward or away from earth). If you were 10 billion light years away, the time discrepancy would jump to about 141 years.
In this latter case, your subsequent flip-book pages, your notion of the present â?? a notion that agreed with mine until you started walking â?? would include Abraham Lincoln on the day the Emancipation Proclamation took effect (if you walked away from me), or the victor of the hotly contested presidential election of 2144 preparing for his inaugural (if you walked toward me). That's not to say that you could save Lincoln's life or analyze mid-22nd century American presidential politics; at such enormous distances it takes signals, even traveling at light speed, a long time to make the trip. But the point is that even ordinary motion, when considered over vast distances, results in a marked change in our conception of reality, revealing how thoroughly subjective the temporal categories of past, present and future actually are.
In a very specific way, then, this realization shatters our comfortable sense that the past is gone, the future is yet to be and the present is what truly exists. Einstein was not hardened to the difficulty of absorbing such a profound change in perspective. Rudolf Carnap, the philosopher, recounts Einstein's telling him that "the experience of the now means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future, but this important difference does not and cannot occur within physics." And later, in a condolence letter to the widow of Michele Besso, his longtime friend and fellow physicist, Einstein wrote: "In quitting this strange world he has once again preceded me by just a little. That doesn't mean anything. For we convinced physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent."
Some physicists and historians see these as declarations laced with poignant hyperbole. Perhaps they are. It's hard to know whether Einstein was "convinced" to such a deep level that he had remolded his emotional sense of time to reflect his understanding of relativistic reality. But regardless of whether Einstein had succeeded, his remarks articulated the challenge â?? to allow carefully reasoned and experimentally verified investigations of the universe, however discomfiting their conclusions, to inform our lives with the same force as experience.
When quantum mechanics, the tremendously successful theory of atoms and subatomic particles, is taken into account, the challenge becomes greater still. Quantum mechanics has, at its core, the uncertainty principle, which establishes a limit on how precisely particular features of the microworld can be simultaneously measured. The more precise the measurement of one feature (a particle's position for example), the more wildly uncertain a complementary feature (its velocity) becomes. Quantum uncertainty thus ensures that the finer the examination of the microworld, the more frantically its physical features fluctuate, and the more turbulent it appears to be.
For subatomic particles, these fluctuations are well understood mathematically and have been precisely documented experimentally. But when it comes to time and space, the fluctuations speak to the very limits of these familiar concepts. On extremely short time intervals (about a tenth of a millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second) and distance scales (about a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a centimeter), quantum fluctuations so mangle space and time that the conventional ideas of left/right, backward/forward, up/down, and before/after become meaningless.
Scientists are still struggling to understand these implications, but many agree that just as the percentages in political polls are average, approximate measures that become meaningful only when a large respondent pool is canvassed, so conventional notions of time and space are also average, approximate concepts that become meaningful only when considered over sufficiently large scales. Whereas relativity established the subjectivity of time's passage, quantum mechanics challenges the conceptual primacy of time itself.
Today's scientists seeking to combine quantum mechanics with Einstein's theory of gravity (the general theory of relativity) are convinced that we are on the verge of another major upheaval, one that will pinpoint the more elemental concepts from which time and space emerge. Many believe this will involve a radically new formulation of natural law in which scientists will be compelled to trade the space-time matrix within which they have worked for centuries for a more basic "realm" that is itself devoid of time and space.
This is such a perplexing idea that grasping it poses a substantial challenge, even for leading researchers. Broadly speaking, scientists envision that there will be no mention of time and space in the basic equations of the sought-for framework. And yet â?? just as clear, liquid water emerges from particular combinations of an enormous number of H20 molecules â?? time and space as we know them would emerge from particular combinations of some more basic, though still unidentified, entities. Time and space themselves, though, would be rendered secondary, derivative features, that emerge only in suitable conditions (in the aftermath of the Big Bang, for example). As outrageous as it sounds, to many researchers, including me, such a departure of time and space from the ultimate laws of the universe seems inevitable.
A hundred years ago today, the discovery of special relativity was still 18 months away, and science still embraced the Newtonian description of time. Now, however, modern physics' notion of time is clearly at odds with the one most of us have internalized. Einstein greeted the failure of science to confirm the familiar experience of time with "painful but inevitable resignation." The developments since his era have only widened the disparity between common experience and scientific knowledge. Most physicists cope with this disparity by compartmentalizing: there's time as understood scientifically, and then there's time as experienced intuitively. For decades, I've struggled to bring my experience closer to my understanding. In my everyday routines, I delight in what I know is the individual's power, however imperceptible, to affect time's passage. In my mind's eye, I often conjure a kaleidoscopic image of time in which, with every step, I further fracture Newton's pristine and uniform conception. And in moments of loss I've taken comfort from the knowledge that all events exist eternally in the expanse of space and time, with the partition into past, present and future being a useful but subjective organization.
Yet my presence in Times Square that rainy morning â?? losing sleep to mark an arbitrary moment in the passage of what I truly believe to be a derivative concept â?? attests to the power of convention and experience. Regardless of our scientific insights, we will still mourn the evanescence of life and be able to thrill to the arrival of each newly delivered moment. The choice, however, of whether to be fully seduced by the face nature reveals directly to our senses, or to also recognize the reality that exists beyond perception, is ours.
Brian Greene, a professor of mathematics and physics at Columbia, is author of "The Elegant Universe" and the forthcoming "The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality."
Son of mr. gordo