William Barclay's Aionios: the Greek word for Eternity

Michael Malone: The Mission's Bell Toll

Timescape: One High-Tech Second

Timescape: The Universal Moment

Steven Weinberg: A Certain Approximation

Freeman J. Dyson:Gravity Is Cool

Personal Statement #3: An Introduction to The Scientific Evidence for The AfterLife: "I'm not allowed to tell you too much about what it's like over here, because some of you might try to end your mortal lives just to get here a little faster"

Personal Statement #28: Love In The AfterLife: The Perfect Storm of Ultimate Human Suffering: Exploring Cosmic Meaning in Separation from a Soulmate Lover: Making Your Music Pure

Personal Statement #42: The Fear of Death and the Meaning of Judgment in the AfterLife: We Cannot Escape our Responsibility to Unfold the Spirit, to Evolve as a Soul, to Love Ourselves! I'm not afraid of dying, but I am afraid of losing you!

Personal Statement #46: Love In The AfterLife: Romance at the Pinnacle of Existence! The Ultimate Dualistic-Halves of Eternal Twin-Soul Love! Why Your Deepest Yearning is the Voice of the Universe Proclaiming Its Truest Cosmic Message! I will love no other! no other!

Righteous Brothers, Unchained Melody : "Oh, my love, my darling, I've hungered for your touch a long, lonely time... time goes by so slowly"

Michael Talbot, Holographic Universe: "Our brains mathematically construct objective reality by interpreting frequencies that are ultimately projections from another dimension, a deeper order of existence that is beyond time and space: The brain is a hologram enfolded in a holographic universe... What is 'out there' is a vast ocean of waves and frequencies, and reality looks concrete to us only because our brains are able to to take this holographic blur and convert it into the sticks and stones ... that make up our world... When a [china teacup] is filtered through the lens of our brain it manifests as a cup. But if we could get rid of our lenses, we'd experience is as an interference pattern... we even construct space and time."

Ralph Waldo Emerson: "A day... is a miniature eternity."

Benjamin Franklin: "Dost thou love life, then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of."

Anonymous: "Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once."

Herman Hesse: "If time is not real, then the dividing line between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion."

Albert Einstein: "Time and space are modes by which we think, not conditions in which we live."

Julian Barbour, British physicist, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics: Barbour in his book argues that time and motion do not exist but are mere illusions created by our brains. Movement is, for us, synthesized by our progression through an infinite series of instants, Nows, as Barbour calls them. He applies this to his leaping cat, Lucy: "Lucy never did leap to catch the [insect]. The fact is, there never was one cat Lucy -- there were (or rather are, since Lucy is in Platonia [Barbour's timeless universe] for eternity, as we all are) billions upon billions upon billions of Lucys. This is already true for the Lucys in one leap and descent... Because we do not and cannot look closely at these Lucys, we think they are one. And all these Lucys are themselves embedded in the vast individual Nows of the universe. Uncountable Nows in Platonia contain something we should call Lucy, all in perfect Platonic stillness. It is because we abstract and 'detach' one Lucy from her Nows that we think a cat leapt. Cats don't leap in Platonia. They just are. You might argue that even if cats do not have a permanent identity, their atoms do. But this presupposes that atoms are like billiard balls with distinguishing marks and permanent identities. They aren't. Two atoms of the same kind are indistinguishable. One cannot 'put labels on them' and recognize them individually later. Moreover, at the deeper, subatomic level the atoms themselves are in a perpetual state of flux. We think things persist in time because structures persist, and we mistake the structure for substance. But looking for enduring substance is like looking for time. It slips through your fingers. One cannot step into the same river twice. Zeno of Elea, who belonged to the same philosophical school as Parmenides, formulated a famous paradox designed to show that motion is impossible. [Ed: see "Mathematics" icon for more on Zeno] After an arrow shot at a target has got halfway there, it still has half the distance to go. When it has gone half that distance, it still has half of that way to go. This goes on for ever. The arrow can never reach the target, so motion is impossible. In normal physics, with a notion of time, Zeno's paradox is readily resolved. However, in my timeless view the paradox is resurrected, but the arrow never reaches the target for a more basic reason: the arrow in the bow is not the arrow in the target. There are two parts to my claim that time does not exist. I start from the philosophical conviction that the only true things are complete possible configurations of the universe, unchanging Nows. Unchanging things do not travel in time from Now to Now. Material things, we included, are simply parts of Nows."

Steven Weinberg: "Time is not the background to the natural world - it is a part of nature, like energy or matter."

Herman Melville, Moby Dick: "... immortality is but ubiquity in time"

Henry Van Dyke: "Time is too slow for those who wait; too swift for those who fear; too long for those who grieve; too short for those who rejoice; but for those who love, time is eternity."

C. S. Lewis: "Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time. ('How time flies! Fancy John being grown-up and married! I can hardly believe it!') In heaven's name, why? Unless, indeed, there is something in us which is not temporal."

This image, called the Hubble Deep Field (1996), has been billed as our deepest look ever into the universe, perhaps as far away and as far back in time as just 1 billion years after the Big Bang. The galaxies are so far away that some are nearly four billion times fainter than the limits of human vision. Each little blob is the combined light of 100 billion stars.

Marcus Aurelius: "Think often of the speed with which all that is, and comes to be, passes away and vanishes.... Scarcely anything is stable, even that which is close at hand. Dwell, too, on the infinite gulf of the past and the future, in which all things vanish away... Were you to live three thousand years, or even thirty thousand, remember that the sole life which a man can lose is that which he is living at the moment... For the sole thing of which any man can be deprived is the present; since this is all he owns."

Owen Edwards: "Sand flows through the neck of an hourglass at a constant rate, but creates the opposite illusion. When the top is full, it is as if nothing is changing. Then as the sand passes the halfway point, the rate of change appears to accelerate, until, at the point when the top chamber empties, the pace seems frantically fast. This, of course, is exactly how time passes in life. When we're young, years unfold at such a leisurely pace that we constantly hurry them along, unable to wait until we're seventh graders, or 16, or finally in college, or at the legal drinking age. At some point, perhaps when we're 30 or 40 (or even 50 for the reality challenged), we realize the top glass is half empty, and the falling sand is picking up speed. From this point on, acceleration rules. By the time we're old, the grains are so few we feel we can count them - if only they'd hold still. The last pinch of sand races down so fast that no one could have warned as how precious those few grains would become. For monks, princes, poets, and anyone else who could watch an hourglass, a fundamental irony of time stood revealed: It is a constant that always varies."

One of the highest resolution space-images ever produced, the resulting picture reveals astonishing detail. More than 8,000 light-years away , the star Eta Carinae has a mass of approximately 150 times that of the sun, and is about 4 million times brighter than our local star. It is highly unstable, and prone to violent outbursts. The last of these occurred in 1841 when, despite its distance, it became the 2nd brightest star in the sky. The red outer glow is composed of the fastest moving of the material, ejected during the last century's outburst. This material, much of which is moving at more than two million miles per hour, is largely composed of nitrogen and other elements formed in the interior of the massive star.

Pico Iyer: "Time seems to be speeding up and shrinking all at once. The bombardment of the instant crowds our sense of time; our minutes are so packed we cannot grasp the hours. Yesterday is two centuries ago: Who thinks of Mikhail Gorbachev now? And Princess Diana's life already feels to me like ancient history. Our moments flash by as quickly as the rapid-fire images on the latest music videos."

Professor Timothy Ferris, Univ. of CA: "...studies indicate that the universe is between 10 billion and 20 billion years old, that the sun and the earth are 4.65 billion years old, and that life on earth got started early - at least 3.5 billion years ago, the age of the oldest fossils yet identified and probably much sooner than that. The fossil record offers no evidence to support the popular supposition that evolution worked progressively, building 'lower' creatures into 'higher' ones like as. Instead, it reveals extremely long periods of stasis punctuated by sudden bursts of creativity. For 3 billion years, terrestrial life remained stabilized, primarily in the form of matlike colonies of bacteria and algae. Then the Cambrian explosion came along, and most of the body types found on the planet today suddenly appeared. To illustrate this odd evolutionary dynamic for an upcoming PBS documentary titled Life Beyond Earth (scheduled to air in 1999), I spent four days last summer driving a racing-prepped Porsche coupe up and down 4.65 kilometers of two-lane blacktop at the Bonneville Salt Flats. We'd painted the road with big yellow numbers to designate events in the long history of life on earth, at a scale of 1 kilometer for each I billion years. The idea was to help viewers gain a better sense of the enormity of the past. It worked unsettlingly well. Driving this 'highway through time,' as we styled it, at 150 mph - the equivalent of 66 million years per second - it took just over one minute to cover the entire time from the formation of the earth to the present. Of this, only 13 seconds were required to get from the origin of the earth to the appearance of the earliest known fossils. But getting from there to the Cambrian consumed most of the rest of the drive time - fully 53 seconds. Only thereafter did one encounter virtually everything that we customarily regard as ancient. The dinosaurs, for instance, didn't show up until the last three and a half seconds of the drive - and they were gone two seconds later. Humanity flashed by literally too quickly to be noticed: The entire human story, from the origin of speech and the control of fire, took up only the last half meter of highway, and all recorded history, from the building of the pyramids to the moon landings, was confined to the final few millimeters. I found the experience rather frightening, not because of the speed of the car, but because of the sheer immensity of the past and the galling incidentality of our status in it. I was reminded of Marcus Aurelius' remark that to 'look at the yawning void of the future, and at that other limitless space, the past.' is to deem not life a thing of consequence."

Stephen Jay Gould: "But I like John McPhee's metaphor best of all... If we represent the history of the earth [4.5 billion years] by the old measure of the English yard - namely, the distance between the king's nose and his outstretched hand - then one stroke of a nail file on the third finger removes human history."

Albert Einstein: "When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute, and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity."

Dr. Mortimer Adler, Truth in Religion: "The general public has been misled by contemporary physicists into thinking that they have the right answer to the question of the beginning of the universe, and of time also, with the Big Bang. The physicists confuse themselves as well as others by converting what is not measurable by them into being nonexistent in reality. Whatever banged at the beginning of measurable time - the time measurable by physicists - preexisted that momentous event in a period of time not accessible to physical measurement. Moreover, if the creation of the cosmos is identical with its exnihilation, the physicists' Big Bang cannot qualify as creation. It is not the beginning of anything except physically measurable time. Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time was mistitled; it should have been A Brief History of Measurable Time."

Star Trek Generations, the movie: "Time is the fire in which we all burn."

Albert Einstein: "... the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

Lord Birkett, Observer, 1960: "I do not object to people looking at their watches when I am speaking. But I strongly object when they start shaking them to make certain they are still going."

Victor Zammit: "After nearly twenty years of doing consistent afterlife research, I came across information which tries to explain TIME in the afterlife dimension. We are informed we cannot superimpose our own knowledge from earth on to afterlife conditions. We ourselves get our linear time from our solar system - the time the earth rotates around the sun etc... But it appears that time in the afterlife is the 'omnipresent' - where past, present and future are all in one. Very gifted pre-cognitive mediums sometimes are able to access future events - which in theory have already happened! This is a huge subject and it will take more research to get a more accurate in formation about time in the afterlife."