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Word Gems
What is a man but the sum of his thoughts?

Time

"Oh, my love, my darling, I've hungered for your touch a long, lonely time... Time goes by so slowly..."

                   Righteous Brothers, Unchained Melody

• 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

• 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."

• 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."

• 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."

"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."

                C. S. Lewis

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