While I’m working on the formatting of So Absurd It Must Be True, Book 2 (yay! it’s almost here!), try to imagine this world… without time.
In Schrodinger’s famous thought experiment, he imagines a cat in a box with a flask of cyanide. The flask will be broken – and the cat poisoned – if an atom of radioactive material decays. We know that it will decay, but when is a mystery. Therefore, until the box is opened, the cat is both alive and dead. Only when opened, can we learn the truth…
Yet, this isn’t just a lesson in quantum mechanics or a dire warning against letting a physicist house sit your cats! Rather, it teaches the simple lesson: that which has happened, cannot unhappen. The arrow of time moves ever onwards. Once you’ve let the cat out of the bag, dead or alive, it cannot be put back.
But what if time did not exist?
What would the world be like?
First, what even is time? At first impression, there seem to be two aspects:
- the physical phenomenon,
- our measurement of that phenomenon.
The former is constant; the latter often changes. For instance, before the advent of the railways, towns in Britain had their own local time => Oxford was five minutes behind Greenwich, and Leeds a further six minutes back. Local time didn’t matter when it took a day to walk from one to the other. But with the railway distance shrank, and time had to be standardized.
Still, we don’t believe Leeds was somehow operating 6 minutes in the past, or that Oxford – no matter how enlightened its professors – was five minutes in the future. They were in the same frame of time.
Before clocks, we relied on the movement of the heavens. There were no lie-ins or snooze buttons. You went to bed with the sun and arose with it. It was called midnight for a reason. But imagine you were floating in the void of space, without the sun or moon. Like movement, time needs a reference point (in fact, the two are linked). We know how long it has passed only by the action of something else: the sun or a clock, or how long your partner spends in the bathroom… 😂
Indeed, our perception of time can differ quite dramatically. People who spend long periods in a cave, see their sense of time go haywire. While older people routinely report time moving faster, as they’ve experienced more time by which to measure each moment. Proportionally, a week isn’t very long to a seventy-year-old, but it feels like an age to a thumb-sucking toddler.
As you see, it can be quite a struggle to separate the phenomenon from the perception.
Time has no independent existence apart from the order of events by which we measure it. Einstein
If we turn this around, without time, there is no going from A to B. Time is the name we give to the movement of objects. Without time, nothing moves. And if nothing moves, we have nothing by which to measure time. As Tennessee Williams put it, “Time is the longest distance between two places.” Or, to quote another great thinker of the Western canon, Oprah Winfrey, “You can have it all. Just not all at once.”
Next post – Saggitarius A*
Hey, I’m productive in the “library!” 😂😂
The best place 👍📚 working on something special, or …?
Thinking. Always thinking 🙂
…this is how it all starts… 📚📚📚📚
Imagine a world without Ray? (shudders)
Hahaha 😂 🤣
Thank you 👍☀️☕️ made my day
This is very intriguing Victoria, I will have to think about this more, if I can find the time.
😂😂👏👏👏 so true haha
You cannot have time without space. If you have space, you must have time. If you have french fries, you must have ketchup (or mayonnaise, if you are from Europe)…
Why mayonnaise in Europe? Never heard about it :/ I’m leaving in the wrong place 😂😂 we have ketchup as well
I extrapolated from France and Germany. If you are a ketchup girl, I apologize…
😀 I’m “very” ketchup girl…
Time doesn’t pass. We pass.
Great thought 💭🙃😃
I can imagine it only on holiday when I take my watch off.
Holidays r the best & made just for that – to exist in a world without time 😀👋☀️☕️
Exactly.
Time happens to us and it doesn’t give a fig if we’re ready for it or not. So yanno . . we should ride the wave.
Great, thought provoking piece, RNB.
Thx! 🕺Ride the wave with time or against it? 😀💫💨
Ah well, that’s up to ask. 🙂
A super essay on time, VR. When do you get your PhD?
first – i had a special faculty (course) at uni (longer, with extra years) & then I studied & studied… never ending. I worked too, of coz. In diff places, but latest – gymnasium (or high school), teacher of literature
I love your smarts. (I said you were a genius remember)
👍😆 yes I remember… 🎈💚
🏆
and thank you 😀☀️👋
👍🥃
A wonderful breakdown. Schrodinger’s cat teaches us about paradox, and there are so many in writing. Private yet public, expressive yet reaching always for the unsayable, the inexpressible. And yes, physical yet intangible. It’s an illusion. Like time.
Well said! Writing & time = an illusion… it often feels so, when I’m working on the new story
Time is non-linear outside of the mind, which means that time only exists in our minds. No mind , no time. That’s all I know.
No mind, no time… no problems 😂 but also no novels 😱
I’m just thinking it’s time for a snack. 🙂 A great and thought provoking post, Victoria.
Haha 😂 best time ever ☕️☕️👌
I just made a ham sandwich a part of the past. 🙂
Your observations of British time anomalies made me smile, you’re absolutely spot on, we changed our clocks travelling Oxford to Penzance, incredible.
Research & help from British peeps 😉👋😂
& yep, very fun fact!
Time too stop trying to attach the ‘sun dial’ to my wrist!
🎈💚
Oh you can get me going here…. I think time was invented by the universe, our perception of it is very fuzzy without external measures and we’re able to perceive it more accurately this way. Don’t they state it as the 4th dimension? If time is the 4thdimesions it’s no wonder we don’t have a clue about the 5th 🙂
Lol it’s a lot of cool ideas in this comment – for the book 🙂 🕺📚
I think without us – there’s no time tho, at least not as we imagine…
Maybe it’s meaningless without us?
Have you seen the YouTube on the time lapse old the universe? The timescales in it are beyond mind boggling
Yep, meaningless…
No haven’t seen, but I’m going to check now, when you mentioned 😂
Yeah it’s great… Mesmerising. If you struggle to find it let me know.
Ok 👍
https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA
Love this summary on time! And yes, I spend a lot of it waiting for my spouse.🙄 It truly is a relative thing. Different to different people in different situations.
“Time is what we want most,but what we use worst.” William Penn
“Time goes by so slowly for those who wait.” Madonna
great quotes… even if i’m late with my comment, they are still ‘timeless’