What is time? What is this entity consisting of mere movement without anything that moves?
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 2
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.
William Shakespeare, Richard II
And it’s time, time, time
And it’s time, time, time that you love
And it’s time, time, time.
Tom Waits, Time
What’s the time?
I think it’s time we spoke about time.
I confess as I sit to write these few paltry words that I have little or no sense of what I shall be writing or where I shall be going. Once more, I shall ask you, dear reader, to bear with me. If whatever is to follow does not work, we need not refer to it ever having happened at all. We shall shake the dust of these words from our sandals and leave town without looking back. I’ll be Orpheus and you can be Eurydice.
So, time then. Or should that be, Time? As a young Director growing up when the world was very much presented in black and white, I was often fascinated by the notion of time. To this very day (see what I did there?) I haven’t fathomed what it is. But I think I’m in fairly good company because nobody else has either. Which is not to say that there haven’t been many people who’ve given it a go, over the years.
If you ask most folk, ‘How did it all begin?’ these days, you’ll invariably get the answer, ‘with the Big Bang’. Fair enough. I‘m aware at the periphery of my understanding that the Big Bang is perhaps not the current favourite for explaining how it all began but let’s stick with it for now. If nothing else, it has alliteration going for it.
Some of my favourite laws are the laws of thermodynamics. As far as I can recall, it was a widespread interest in the possibility of perpetual motion machines which led scientists to eventually come along and put a stop to all the tomfoolery by slapping down the First Law of Thermodynamics, namely that energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be converted from one form to another. This, and a growing sense of the contingency of existence led to nineteenth-century physics’ formulation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics or the concept of Entropy. Now when it comes to my understanding of entropy, I am reminded of the old joke which is something along the lines of, “I’m not sure what entropy is, but I know it ain’t what it used to be.” So, to put it simply, for that is the best I can do, The Second Law states that entropy/disorder always increases because heat always flows spontaneously from hotter to colder regions of matter. Whilst we’re here we may as well mention what The Third Law says, which is, that you can never reach absolute zero.
Now, my favourite of the Thermodynamical Laws is the second one. The Second Law portrays the universe as moving spontaneously and irreversibly from order to disorder toward a final condition of maximum entropy or “heat death”. No wonder those Modernists had something of a gloomy outlook.
Now what’s that got to do with time? Or Time? Well, think of all those cinematic tricks where our hero is able to reverse the so-called ‘flow’ of Time. I can’t think it would be much of a blockbuster but in those scenes, an image of time flowing backwards would indeed feature something like the teacher’s mug flying up off the floor reassembling itself as it went, until it resided once more whole and complete, in our teacher’s heroic grasp.
Entropy is related in a fundamental sense to the flow of time. Although the simple laws of mechanics are completely reversible as far as time is concerned, we know that the real world just isn’t like that.
In the case of the falling mug, an orderly form of motion (all the atoms and molecules falling in the same direction) is turned into a disordered form of motion (all the atoms and molecules jostling against one another energetically but randomly). If you put disordered heat energy into the teacher’s mug it cannot use that energy to create an orderly movement of all the molecules in the mug so that they jump upward together.
At this point I probably should mention poor Ludwig Boltzmann. His reading gives the Second Law a probabilistic, rather than an absolute, truth. So we observe entropy because it is overwhelmingly more likely than the alternative. A smashed teacher’s mug in the Staff Room does not remake itself, but there is no absolute law preventing it from putting itself back together, it is just very very very unlikely to happen.
So entropy increasing, while very probable indeed, cannot be taken as an absolute certainty. This has interesting implications in cosmology, the study of the whole universe, which deals with great big stretches of time and space. The bigger the region we deal with, the more scope there is for unlikely things to happen someplace. The staff room is big, and indeed there are plans afoot for an upgrade, but it’s not the whole universe. Nevertheless, statistical mechanics tells us that it is absolutely possible for systems to violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I don’t know about you, but I think it’s fun that laws of physics can be broken. There’s still hope for Doctor Who and Father Christmas.
But I digress. Back to Time. So Time started at some point…in time…probably and it ‘moves’ in a certain direction, hence the notion of Time’s Arrow. And the Second Law means that everything is moving from an ordered state of affairs to a more disordered state of affairs. High entropy to low entropy, if you will. But at some point (in time) the universe will start contracting rather than expanding. And here’s the question for you: when the universe starts running itself ‘backwards’, will that also mean that time will run ‘backwards’ too? Stephen Hawkings in his lovely book, A Brief History of Time, seems to suggest that the arrow of time would indeed be running backwards. Apparently he changed his mind later about that but it’s still an interesting question. Another one might be, how you get apparently ordered structures like stars and galaxies, not to mention you too, dear reader, when everything is supposed to be moving to higher and higher entropy/disorder? I think the answer has got something to do with gravity and stuff but that’s for another time (see what I did there?) It’s a good question nonetheless.
I was enlightened by my reading this week about something I had long found poetically interesting, namely the business of time slowing down and eventually ‘stopping’ from the point of view of an object accelerating until it reaches the speed of light. It was an idea which entertained me for many years. Turns out I was mistaken. I read that if you apply Einstein’s special theory of relativity to the frame of reference of a photon then yes, from the point of view of the photon, time does ‘collapse’. But as it turns out, photons don’t have perspectives. As I say, I’d like to talk to you a little more about that, but we just don’t have the time. No matter how fast I type time just won’t slow down. Its winged chariot is always at my back.
So where shall we leave it? Perhaps with these final thoughts.
Where Time is concerned, I think we have a natural tendency to want to ‘freeze’ it: to be a photon with perspective. We want to have and hold the moment. But as Blake and Goethe reminded us when you try to freeze the fleeing moment, you’re lost. We don’t necessarily need those wonderful physicists to tell us what we already know, which is that everything, and I mean everything, is in a process of continuous change and flow. Time does not consist of a series of fixed moments all strung together on a ‘timeline’ so to speak. It’s probably therefore the best idea to attune ourselves with that rather than trying to resist it or pretend it is not the case. As with so much else, we need to remind ourselves not to confuse the map we have made, for the thing itself.
Einstein was a right one for saying that we shouldn’t think of things as being in space but we should think of them as being spatially extended. And so I think it works too that we shouldn’t think of things in time but as whatever it is we mean by things as extended in time. You know the Director likes to get the Latin in where he can, well the word tempus from which we get words like temporal and so on is from a root which means ‘to stretch’. Language is cool like that but it can be a fickle lover. Nevertheless everything eventually gets back to language. Our problem with time is that we treat it as if it is a noun. We puzzle about what this thing is. But in fact, time is not a noun, it’s an adverb.
We got there in the end.
Until next ‘timing’, Happy Reading/languaging!
A Reader’s Tip #4
Sound Affects?
Two skins from grapefruit halves dried for 5 hours in the oven make excellent substitute coconut shells for when you haven’t got a coconut but want to make the sound of an approaching horse.