A Question of Time

The funny thing about time is that it seems to pass.

Seems to, you say? What kind of crazy talk is this?

From our perspective, time flows continuously from past to present. Even when we very, very badly want time to slow down or go backwards, this never seems to happen.

We have no control over this flow, at least besides how long something seems to take to us (I hope this article seems to go by in the blink of an eye!). This one sounds like a bit of a no-brainer: time is real, and everyone can immediately tell that. Everyone knows this intuitively, and it’s right up there with the idea that gravity is a thing.

However, there’s one thing about this that might give us pause, especially if we’ve had enough coffee to think critically. It’s the observation that no matter how we experience the universe, we’re experiencing it through the lens that is us.

Clearly, we interpret what we observe through a process that makes sense to us. We write down what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch, and we compare our notes with other people. But what if our interpretation is just plain wrong, at least insofar as how things work?

Quantum mechanics offers a few different ways to reconcile these ways we seem to misunderstand reality due to the way we are wired to perceive things.

At the human scale of meters (or feet and inches, if you prefer), we have a great working sense of how everything works. Things move in a predictable, gradual manner from one place to another at some fixed velocity. When gravity pulls downward, things fall toward the center of the planet, and so on.

In the quantum realm, things are… different.

Things are here, then there, and there’s no time at all that passes in between these two events. Two things can be in the same place at once, and the crushing force of gravity at our scale is nearly trivial at the quantum scale.

If you’re thinking that this isn’t really the way things are, you’re in very good company. Einstein was famously skeptical of the implications of things like spooky action at a distance, and other imminent physicists have similarly pushed back… and yet, there it is, the most accurate theory ever created in physics.

It’s practical, too. Without our understanding of quantum mechanics, there would be no smartphones, lasers, or MRI machines. No, deep down, this is much closer to how things really are than how we perceive them to be.

Our minds tend to summarize what we see in a way that is useful to us. In other words, we’re wired to run away from big animals and to reproduce, but not to grasp things like quantum superposition. That means we have to stretch quite a bit in order to get closer to grasping reality as it is.

If our minds put together a picture of reality that makes sense to us, is it so inconceivable that it could also create the sense of time that we have? There’s an awful lot to unpack here, and I really want to make sure this piece passes the time quickly, so I’ll do my best to summarize things.

There’s this idea in both physics and philosophy that events are all that really matters. In other words, nothing ever really happens if a system doesn’t change in some meaningful way.

Mathematically speaking, time is just distance traveled divided by velocity. Take how fast something is going and how far it has gone, and you will know how much time has passed.

Back over to Einstein, who actually did more to propagate the ideas of quantum mechanics than nearly anyone, in spite of his resistance to some of the more controversial ideas: Einstein proved once and for all that time is not absolute, but the speed of light is.

Time isn’t necessarily a substance that flows incessantly, then, but more like a construct dependent on speed and distance. As an editor’s aside, I feel obligated to state that this excuse is unlikely to work on an employer if you happen to arrive late for the day.

I did warn you: I’m going through this stuff very quickly.

Now, let’s put it all together in a way that makes sense to our primitive jellybag intellects. Our minds tell us literally everything we know or learn about the world, and there’s just no way to take this lens off. In order to make sense of the world—so that we can reproduce and not be eaten by big animals and so forth—our minds have built the world we perceive for us, kind of like Plato’s shadows on a wall.

We create a flip-book of sorts, like the ones I’d make as a kid, where you make a little animation based on a series of events:

The flipbook places the images in an order, so that things make sense when you allow the pages to flip past your thumb at a rapid clip, but the pages themselves are just discrete moments. The flow we see when we do the flipping is just an illusion based on the order we put the pages.

Is it possible that our minds also do this, but with all of those events that happen? Do we have a series of events that we have experienced, then connected together to form memories? Perhaps putting things in a particular order to retell the story of our past is useful to us in some evolutionary sense.

There is a great deal more to say about time, but I’ve run out of it for today’s piece. Even though it’s possible that time is a construct, I have not yet figured out how to bend its rules to my will!

Have you bent your brain around these concepts about time? Are there other made-up constructs we take for granted out there, things that seem one way in our everyday experience, but which are completely different at the foundational level?

Depeche Mode fans may have raised an eyebrow at the title of this piece, which mirrors the title of this excellent DM song:

If you’ve got the time to do a little extra reading, here’s a little ditty I wrote about me seeing Depeche Mode live last year (and there’s a little bit of video too!):