Thanasis Vempos

7/6/2020
 

The Finely Sliced Layers of Time

​

The world, the universe around us seems to flow smoothly and uniformly, but that’s not really the case if we change the filter of perception. In this sense, “absolute” Newtonian time is an illusion, a shared convention. It can be accelerated unimaginably and it can just as easily come to a halt…
 

In an old episode of the legendary science fiction series Star Trek, the starship Enterprise approaches the planet Scalos. When they arrive, Captain Kirk, Spock and the rest discover a city empty of people, where there are no signs of life apart from some sounds that resemble the buzzing of bees.

​

The sounds are actually the attempts of the inhabitants of Scalos to communicate with the crew of the Enterprise: having been poisoned by radiation from the planet’s core, their metabolism has accelerated unimaginably, with the result that they live in a kind of different time dimension. They move and live so extremely fast that the humans of the Enterprise cannot perceive them. Their highly accelerated speech sounds like the buzzing of bees. Kirk drinks a little Scalosian water and his metabolism speeds up, allowing him to make contact with the Scalosians.

​

In Kirk’s eyes, the crew and the systems of the Enterprise are trapped in an eternal, timeless Now: they all appear “frozen” since time flows incomparably slower for them. Kirk pulls a simple trick: he records a tape informing Spock and the others of the situation. In the end of course there’s a happy ending: Dr. McCoy finds the antidote and Kirk returns to the normal time dimension.

​

We think of time as the prevailing Newtonian physical philosophy and our daily experience have taught us:

 

Absolute, true and mathematical time, in and of itself and of its own nature, without relation to anything external, flows uniformly and is called duration. Relative, apparent and common time is some sensible and external measure of duration by motion, whether accurate or unequal, and is commonly used instead of true time.

​

Such are the measures of hours, days, months, etc., that we use in place of true time.

But is it really so? When we accept that “something” is one thing, we automatically exclude it from being “something else” as well. Yet in the infinite universe we live in, such a move is equivalent to forging the chains that keep us imprisoned.

Once, before clocks were invented, time was “coarser”: there was day and night, the succession of weeks and months, summer and winter. The clock chopped the day into 24 hours. More precise clocks chopped it into 1,440 minutes, and even more precise ones into 86,400 seconds. The stopwatch on my mobile phone can slice it into 8,640,000 hundredths of a second.

​

Time, of course, flows the same way, just as a river flows the same whether we examine it more “macroscopically” (at the level of water as a single liquid material with specific mechanical properties) or more “microscopically” (as a collection of molecules and atoms moving separately and held together by cohesive forces). Besides, linguistically, our main metaphors for time are related to water and its flow.

Everything depends on the observational scale. The concepts of “grain” and “size” in systems analysis are key to understanding certain basic ideas. Systems analysis distinguishes “observational entities” whose nature depends on grain size and extent. Likewise, there are many different levels of observation. Each such level is filled with “entities” that have a specific identity in space and a characteristic “frequency of behaviour.” The levels of observation can be ranked as higher or lower depending on the spatial or temporal scale of the empirical entities at each level.

​

This all sounds very high flown and it is. So let’s take the Star Trek episode we just mentioned as an example. By drinking the Scalosian water, Captain Kirk perceived new observational entities (the inhabitants of Scalos), who had a different frequency of behaviour from the crew of the Enterprise. His perception filter broadened so that he could observe the strange buzzing in a more “microscopic” way and realize it was their greatly accelerated speech. In other words, Kirk’s “perception filter” changed.

​

And such a filter works just like the porous paper filter we use when we make filter coffee. The filter is a physical, easily understood device. Other filters are equally common but more abstract, like the filters on an amplifier that remove the background hiss from a recording. There are even more abstract filters, such as those our brains use to “strain” information when we study a topic.

​

All of this is directly related to the question of time. Take, for example, the human eye. For the human eye, light is more important than darkness. In human vision, darkness is the absence of light, not an active state. The perception of light comes from light striking photoreceptor molecules in the retina. The delay in detecting light arises from the time it takes a receptor molecule to return to its original state. As long as the molecule is distorted, the eye treats it as if there is light. If a brief period of darkness is inserted but is followed by light again before the receptor molecule straightens, then that period of darkness goes unnoticed. This is the principle on which cinema works. The film frames change every 1/24 of a second, while the eye’s threshold for detecting darkness is about 1/15 of a second. Consequently, the image appears continuous.

​

The human eye operates with a window that detects light over a relatively long time span about 1/15 of a second. In much the same way, the crucial input stream passes through a filter (the eye) and disproportionately shapes the output, that is, our sensory experience.

This fact is staggering if we think about it in full. The world, the universe around us appears to flow smoothly and uniformly, but this is not true if we change the perception filter. In this sense, “absolute” Newtonian time is an illusion, a collective agreement.

​

And we don’t need to fall back on sci-fi stories and films for examples. We’ve already seen the case of a film. For other living creatures, the world looks radically different and here the so called “flicker frequency,” that is, the limit of the visual system to detect periods of darkness, plays a crucial role. For other animals the world seems very different from how it seems to us, because their flicker frequency differs from ours. A fly in a cinema can see not only the movement of individual frames but also the effects of the alternating current powering the lights. Household current alternates at 50–60 cycles per second. Consequently, table lamps flicker at that rate. A fly watching an ordinary lamp sees it flashing on and off.

​

The idea of perception filters helps us understand the issue of continuity and discontinuity. Grain and size the two sides of information filtering play an important role in the appearance of apparent discontinuity.

The question is this: where is the discontinuity? Where exactly is the “gap” between successive instants of time? In old clocks, the gap lies between hours and minutes, or at most between seconds. In modern stopwatches the gap lies between tenths or hundredths of a second. In atomic clocks, it lies between billionths or trillionths of a second.

​

The more microscopically we examine time, the smaller the observation “windows” we open. A human heart beats a little more than once a second. Lightning flashes in a hundredth of a second. The computer I’m using to write these lines executes a software instruction every nanosecond (a billionth of a second). A camera can “freeze” time in windows of, say, 1/1000 of a second. Such windows are suitable for observing a tennis ball frozen in motion as it travels at high speed. Modern scientific imaging setups are vastly more precise, opening windows onto worlds no one even suspected existed.

​

But where is “discontinuity” then? That is a matter of perspective. Let’s not forget that the observer affects and (in a sense) creates the observed. And let’s not even get into the fleeting world of atoms. In ecology, for example, is a patch of vegetation continuous or discontinuous? Are social classes cleanly separated in sociology? Do changes between civilizations show a discontinuity from one civilization to another? Everything is a matter of perspective and of the coherence of experience.

​

Here enters what systems analysis calls an “observation protocol.” The larger the scale, the more likely we are to perceive some change big enough to deserve the name discontinuity. On the other hand, in a system of small scale, small changes that would otherwise go unnoticed may be large enough to reveal a discontinuity. Thus both small and large scales can lead to apparent discontinuity.

​

A child being born and growing up shows clear discontinuities in its development, which are not always perceived. The parents who live with the child do not easily notice these discontinuities. In the eyes of the parents, the child system evolves continuously and smoothly. But in the eyes of an aunt or uncle who sees the child once or twice a year, the discontinuity is very pronounced. In the eyes of the distant relative or family friend who has not seen the child for five years, the discontinuity is so strong it causes shock.

​

Keeping all this in mind, we can look at the phenomena around us with different eyes and realize how constraining, old fashioned and, ultimately, useless the concept of Newtonian time is. You’ve surely seen those wonderful time lapse videos where a plant appears to go through its entire life cycle from sprouting to ripening and death within a few seconds.

Think about it: the plant is, par excellence, a “motionless” living being, yet this is only a matter of observation filter and of how we define discontinuity. By artificially speeding up time, we open a new window and see the plant as it really is: a living creature that is born, lives and dies…

​

Wouldn’t it be unspeakably overwhelming if the same technique were applied to a human being? Perhaps that’s why it hasn’t been done yet…

You may have seen the film Koyaanisqatsi, which made extensive use of this filming technique but applied to human crowds, weather phenomena and city traffic. It is astonishing what new information patterns this new window created. The entire city becomes a living organism, pulsing with life and movement new patterns emerge from the increased observation frequency a radically new reality seems to surface. Like Captain Kirk, we have drunk the Scalosian water that transported us to a new dimension of perception.

​

But who said all phenomena are not continuous? All organized systems are born, evolve and die, following the same basic laws. It would be extremely interesting if we could see the whole Solar System through the eyes of a creature whose lifespan lasted a few trillion years. In the eyes of such a being, the entire Galaxy would be a rapidly spinning disk, lit up by countless flashes of stars turning into novae and supernovae, by the birth and death of stars and planetary systems the entire Galaxy would take on a new identity, becoming a truly living creature.

​

And couldn’t the whole Universe also be seen as a living entity from the explosive birth of the Big Bang to its final collapse (according to some cosmological models), and perhaps to its rebirth in a similar way?

​

 

“Could it be then,” Isaac Asimov once wondered, “that everything we see around us is the unimaginably slow cycle of the breath tens of billions of years of inhalation and tens of billions of years of exhalation of a black hole the size of the universe itself? And could there exist, separately from our universe in a way we cannot grasp, many other black holes of different sizes, perhaps an infinite number of them, each expanding and contracting at its own rhythm?”

​

There is neither a positive nor a negative answer to this question. Because the universe is big enough to contain everything even things that contradict each other. Only arrogant humans think there are Final Answers and Final Theories. The real universe lies beyond every answer, every theory…