Like silly putty, the mind and its precious imagination are capable of being stretched. In fact, just this week, I caught an episode of Into The Universe with Stephen Hawking about time travel. Yes, I’m a big geek – but Hawking’s genius and creativity stretched my imagination to its limits.
Hawking explained that time travel isn’t only possible, it happens all around us – every day. Time is relative; the speed at which time unfolds is impacted by both mass and speed. Heavy things, like the Earth, make time slow down. Really heavy things, like black holes, make time even slower. Similarly, speed slows down time, too. If we had a ship that approached the speed of light, the occupants in the ship would experience time much slower than those earthlings back home.
All this talk about time travel got me thinking. I don’t need a time machine. I still don’t even fully appreciate the main course that is this present moment – the last thing I need to do is jump on a spaceship and skip to dessert.
But wait! On second thought, even if I did land a ticket to future Earth, there would still only be the ever-eternal now. My now would just be a different now than if I had stayed back home. In this way, it’s never really possible to escape the present moment and truly experience the future. There is always only this moment – skipping to dessert, to extend my misguided metaphor, isn’t really possible.
There’s a reason why you cannot escape the present moment: time isn’t real. Clocks are. We’ve come to rely on time so heavily since birth, it feels real. But I can promise you that it isn’t.
There is no past or future; there is only now.
April 28, 2010 at 9:16 am
So true DW.
The future is just time as we hope it plays out the NOW that we want to happen.
The past is just the NOW being remembered. The moment already happened, but we continue to bring it back.
We can only live in the present moment and there’s no escaping it.
Enjoy every moment, because you won’t ever get them back!
April 28, 2010 at 9:19 am
Davey, wow you really are a big geek but thats sooooo cute and whats more i get every word of it! Does that make me a big geek too?
April 28, 2010 at 9:48 am
i really like your thoughts on this subject its really insightful and deep, you are a very nice , funny , smart person.
April 28, 2010 at 9:51 am
Well everything moves through time, really all that we call ‘matter’ are tiny moving particles and the movements of these particles is what forms everything and gives those things certain properties, including us. Without time there could be no movement, and without movement would anything really exist? Would there be such a thing as ourselves or our consciousness? How long do you consider ‘now’ to be? I’d argue that time is essential if you consider it to be even a second, and if you consider a moment to be and infinitely small and unmeasurable instance (many of which strung together would give us ‘time’)than it would be impossible to live in that instance. I think time is real, and it is necessary!
April 28, 2010 at 10:05 am
Tomorrow is promised to no one
April 28, 2010 at 10:11 am
Right on, DW!!!! There is a great read on this topic……’You Are Here’ by Thich Nhat Hanh……Discovering the Magic of the Present Moment.
April 28, 2010 at 10:15 am
Now I want dessert.
April 28, 2010 at 10:38 am
Just thought i would let you know i think your amazing. Found your blog years ago and liked it then but for whatever reason forgot about it until i stumble acrossed your vlogs on youtube. You are inspiring and give me hope that one day i can connect with my deeper self one day thank you
April 28, 2010 at 10:45 am
When you hit 60 you might wish for a time machine to take your body back to that of a 25 yr old.
Of course, by that time, maybe a time machine will have been developed.
Enjoy the NOW. The future is promised to no one.
April 28, 2010 at 11:21 am
Not so fast, young man. “Now” is as illusionary as “past” or “present. A wise woman once said: Dwell not in the past, present, or future, but in the eternal.
April 28, 2010 at 11:30 am
I totally get what you are saying about our perceptions of time and reality, but please don’t say time doesn’t exist. It is part of the physical universe like mass or energy. Time travel falls into the category of “things we don’t have to worry about”. Keep blogging. Love Bob.
April 28, 2010 at 11:30 am
So true! My feelings are that when you dwell on the past too much you can have emotions of guilt or regret, and when you project too much effort into thinking about the future you can feel anxiety. To be fully present in the now is how you take control of you life and start living.
Great Blog Davey, keep it up!
April 28, 2010 at 11:54 am
LOVE that show! (yah, big geek here too)…loved how we shouldn’t want ETs to visit us since they may be nomadic and travel the planets, use their natural resources, and move on…..sounds WAY too human. ETs ought to be afraid of us!!
April 28, 2010 at 12:31 pm
Exactly. Time is made up, and many don’t get this. Whenever we look for ways to measure it more, and provide ‘accuracy’ of time, we end up losing it.
April 28, 2010 at 1:24 pm
Cool, I didn’t except for you to be into that stuff. Awesome.
April 28, 2010 at 1:47 pm
Time is a formula we set our lives to. There is accurate measurments that equal fractions of time (i.e. second, minute, hour.) However, the one thing not taken into account is individual perception. A minute is 60 seconds but how does one sense those seconds? We can actually control time. When we want, we can savour every second. In a tense and stressful time we can just zip through time. I dunno. It’s all in our minds.
April 28, 2010 at 3:17 pm
I can recall the past, but I have a hard time remembering the future
April 28, 2010 at 3:44 pm
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
April 28, 2010 at 5:26 pm
Wow, so true. I never thought of time not existing. I was always confused on that principal, but now, all is clear. Time isn’t real, time is our way of viewing the now. Thanks D.W. you’ve made my day!
April 28, 2010 at 6:51 pm
Time is most definitely real.
It is what allows us to place the occurrence of events in perspective (which happened first, second, third, etc. – because everything sure did not happen at once). Even if you subscribe to the philosophy that there is only now, one certainly has to acknowledge that there was a period before now (let’s call it the past) and there is likely to be some period after now (let’s call it the future). In order for you to be the person that you ARE right now, a series of events / experiences had to happen to allow you to experience this moment (aka now). Those experiences did not occur simultaneously just as you did not spontaneously appear where you are now. In order for anything to exist (including the universe itself) there must be more than a now. If there is more than a now, then time must be real in order for there to be non-simultaneous events.
April 28, 2010 at 8:34 pm
I really hate to disagree with the Newton Chair at Oxford, we are all traveling through time in a forward motion even if it is relative so that a person in motion will experience a slight slow down, so small it is not detectable at human speeds, but to actually go backward in time that has lapsed… I don’t think so, as anything approaches the speed of light time seems to pass normally for you, but when you return to this world you find more time has passed for those that stayed at home, the problem is that just getting to half the speed of light requires immense energy and the closer to light speed you go the more it takes. You never could actually get to the speed of light because the level of energy required would be infinite.
It might be theoretically possible as a mental exercise, but our science is not complete and once we have a better idea of the forces that bind everything we will see that it is not possible to ”time travel,” at least in reverse.
Math is not my favorite subject but I still have at least philosophical proof this is true, if it ever became possible for man to travel back in lapsed time then they would at some point in the next few billion years actually do it, and if they did they would be here in what we would think of as the past, they would be here now, because there is an infinite future time for us to figure it out if it could be done then it ”has” been done at some point ”upstream” at some point in the future. What would be the point of ”inventing” a time machine if you were not going to use it to travel back to the dawn of the information age as we are now in? Or, is it that they can only go back as far as say 2100 so we just don’t know about them for another 87 years? That would be silly.
In an infinite time line there would be NO limit to when you travel either from or to, so over the course of infinite time all past time would be visited, unless one assumes there re vast gaps in the past that are just not interesting enough to visit no matter how many trillions of future years they have to fill up with their travels.
I do have another theory I am trying to form up though, it is crude now and all I have ever spoken to about it have laughed it off, but what if what we call time is simply a psychological construct of a linear forward moving series of events that if you were not bound to your notion of time, from ”God’s” point of view if you will, there simply is no such thing, we just make up the construct because at this point in our development our minds can’t accept that all ”instances” are actually one. We have to put it in a linear cause and effect ABCXYZ divided ”time” because otherwise everything anyone ever experienced would seem to happen all at once forever. I actually though of this when I was a kid and my imagination was freer to think like this.
Under this theory there are no violations of physics law because there is no time, one can move forward or back as easily as one remembers a childhood birthday, or imagines winning the Powerball next Wednesday. Sometimes I see Alzheimer’s patients and think that they are no so much sick as just learned the first few steps in this ability to travel in “time.”
April 28, 2010 at 8:52 pm
I’ve always thought time was strange. It doesn’t really exist or have value unless we believe it does.
I wish I could fast forward my age to 22 and press pause though
April 28, 2010 at 9:15 pm
Nothing in the universe has meaning or value unless people believe it does. Perception is everything. Good on you for noticing it at such a young age.
April 28, 2010 at 10:53 pm
“There’s no future… there’s no past… I live this moment as my last. There’s only us, there’s only this… Forget regret, or life is yours to miss. No other road, no other way, no day but today.” (Jonathan Larson, Rent)
“Carpe diem!” (Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society)
April 29, 2010 at 6:48 am
Yes
April 29, 2010 at 8:55 am
A form of time travel is possible, it is called living.
April 29, 2010 at 12:25 pm
My Mom told me this simple proverb when I was a pre teen. “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” So Stephen take your time machine and shove it.
April 29, 2010 at 1:36 pm
“I still don’t even fully appreciate the main course that is this present moment – the last thing I need to do is jump on a spaceship and skip to dessert”.
Now tell the truth, you wrote this to try to take your mind off the fact that you were starving for lunch, right?
Silly man…
April 29, 2010 at 4:00 pm
That thing freaked me out. i’m always wondering now if everything is relative or not. Love science, but can’t stand things that hurt my brain too much!
April 29, 2010 at 4:14 pm
my dads met stephen hawkings
April 29, 2010 at 5:07 pm
Well, the human memory is a sort of “time machine” in a man’s or a woman’s own brain! My friends insist that I have a remarkably detailed and unusually visual memory. I don’t know; not being in their heads, I cannot compare my powers of recall with their own. I do know that if I ever have been anywhere soever, I remember things, cityscapes and so forth, in great detail. So often when I see a film, if it is set in a place where I have been, even briefly, even just driving through, I remember exactly what lies out of sight, in the film, around each street corner! I wish that I could remember numbers and suchlike data as well as that!
If you want to delve into the memory of an exceedingly “well connected” gay man (to celebrities, the rich, the arts and musical scene), with a mind for detail that just boggles the imagination, read the very absorbing memoirs of Jordan Massee, one of Georgia’s gay luminaries: “Accepted Fables: an Autobiography”, by Jordan Massee, with editorial contribution of Richard Jay Hutto (Macon, Ga.: Henchard Press, 2005; ISBN 978-0-9762875-5-1). I was fortunate to know this man and I revelled in his memories, as we conversed in visits over a span or 25 years or so, of his golden childhood and youth and his memories of opera, ballet, the arts, the literary world, etc. At times, the man seemed to have known everybody “of consequence”, from his cousin, the author Carson McCullers, to William Faulkner, to Margarete Matzenauer, to Éva Gauthier, to Marilyn Monroe, and beyond. Now Jordan Massee’s memories really were a time machine and you can jump on board it by reading his book!
Yeah, who needs a time machine? I certainly would not risk being trapped by it to be stuck again in the yucky and near-fascist years of Reagan, Mulroney, Thatcher, Bush, Harper (who, alas, still is in power in Canada), and Blair (a list of sodden and corrupt “leaders” of the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.). Once was enough! I’ll play it safe by remaining in the present in real time and with my own memories (and the shared ones of others) for the past!
Pax, Jerry Parker
April 29, 2010 at 6:50 pm
Well…eternally we’re nothing, like a dust that gets blown away and eventually disappear.
Think about the development of universe, or much smaller, the solar system; humans are nothing compare to the sun, if that’s what you mena by eternal.
Of course, you can also mean heaven, but unfortunately if heaven exist, we’d have to share with million different types of alien because human race is too small to be the only intellectual life in the universe; in that case, we’re still nothing compare to everything else in heaven.
Let’s not make it complicated, think NOW.
April 29, 2010 at 6:53 pm
you got me thinking!
maybe time doesn’t exist!
all the days, months, and years are made up by humans; all it is is just Earth spinning round and around…
May 2, 2010 at 1:19 pm
That’s an interesting argument, but it has a metaphysical limit. If you jump out of a plane with no parachute, you can “believe” and “percieve” all you want that you’re floating lazily downward… but that exercise will not make you hit the ground any less hard.
May 2, 2010 at 1:22 pm
Don’t tell Stepehen Hawking to shove it, he wrote a proof showing black holes emit radiation! That’s hard!
May 2, 2010 at 6:57 pm
I have not had a chance to read this yet but I will say from what little I know about it that there is no reason why a black hole can’t emit radiation. Radiation by definition is energy and has no mass so no matter the intensity of gravity nearby it is not acted upon. Light is different because it acts as massless radiation part of the time in waves and as packets of discreet very low mass (but still some mass vanishingly small though it is) as photons.
June 8, 2010 at 11:40 pm
Jordan Massee had a precision to recall not only names and dates, but an ability to see the truth of any soul. Like Flaubert, a sense of the grotesque kept him from ever slipping into a disorderly life. He carried many of the dead of his time on earth about with him in his heart, and felt more abandoned as more and more of his friends crossed over from this life beyond.
His chief pleasure in life was learning something he did not know before. He and most everyone of his world belongs to the ages, now, but I salute him who is deathless, and you who mourn him as much as I. Happy to know someone recognizes Jordan’s ability to gravitate to all that is good, kind, truthful and beautiful in this life.
Mrs. Celeste Hampton