Tag Archives: time

Achievements, happiness and the passage of time

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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about time as ‘a giant wheel rotating through cycles of creation and destruction leading, over aeons, to the birth and death of entire worlds’ [see ‘Aeonian cycles of creation and destruction’ on October 18th, 2023].  I had written previously about Aristotle’s view of time as the measurement of change and how Newton believed that time passes even when nothing changes [see ‘We inhabit time as fish live in water’ on July 24th, 2019].  I recently read ‘The Wall’, a beautiful and thought-provoking, post-apocalyptic novel by Marlen Haushofer, in which the narrator states ‘Time only seemed to be passing quickly.  I think time stands quite still and I move around in it, sometimes slowly and sometimes at a furious rate.’  This aligns with the fish-in-water concept of time rather than the giant revolving wheel.  I recently had a conversation with a colleague about our perception of time as we looked back on our lives which made us feel that time has sped past whereas at the time it appeared to be passing slowly.  Perhaps our familiarity with the past, a landscape through which we have travelled, foreshortens it or is that I might have less than a thousand weeks left [see ‘One just raced past and I have only about 1000 left’ on September 8th, 2021] .  Haushofer’s narrator also says, ‘I had achieved little that I had wanted, and everything I had achieved I had ceased to want’.  In my working life, I have some empathy with this statement, particularly the second part.  I have moved through time at a furious rate, striving towards accomplishments; but now that I have most of them, they seem relatively unimportant.  They are certainly not the key to happiness which can be found anywhere through supporting and valuing others [see ‘A view from the middle’ on March 22nd, 2023] as well as in concentration so intense, for instance though reading or writing, that you lose your sense of time leading to a deep sense of happiness and well-being [see ‘You can only go there in your head’ on May 11th, 2022].  I wrote this post on a Sunday afternoon after spending a couple of hours sitting in the warm October sunshine on the campus of the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign reading ‘Mr President’ by Miguel Angel Asturias – both the reading and writing have left me in a happy state of mind.

Source:

Marlen Haushofer, The Wall, Vintage Classics/Penguin Random House, 2022.

Aeonian cycles of creation and destruction

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Many years ago I read Stephen Hawking’s book, A Brief History of Time.  I remember being captivated by the idea that the universe might be oscillating between phases of expansion and contraction.  The current expansion from the Big Bang might have been preceded, and could be followed, by a contraction to a Big Bang or Crunch.  A contracting universe would be governed by a different set of laws of physics; for example, the second law of thermodynamics would be reversed with every natural process leading to a reduction in entropy.  This idea might seem fanciful; however, it is not original because I recently discovered that the Sanskrit epic, Makabharata describes time as a giant wheel rotating through cycles of creation and destruction leading, over aeons, to the birth and death of entire worlds.

Sources:

Nilanjana Rana, Our time-poor lives, lived against a ticking clock, FT Weekend, May 26th 2023.

Stephen Hawking, A brief history of time, London: Random House, 1998.

The Earth is only about 20 years old

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Recently I have been writing a research proposal with two collaborators who live in two different time zones which has made arranging on-line meetings challenging.  There was a brief period last month when the USA had shifted to summer time or daylight saving time a couple of weeks ahead of the UK which made life even more complicated.  Our time zones are based on the sun crossing the local meridian at noon, or in summer moving an hour of daylight from the morning to the evening (a meridian is a great circle joining the celestial poles).  Actually, our whole time system is heliocentric with one day being the period of time between instants when the sun passes over the local meridian and an Earth year being the period of orbit of the Earth around the sun.  A galactic year is the time period the sun takes to orbit the black hole at the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way, which is 230 million Earth years.  On this basis, the Earth is only about 20 years old, that’s galactic years and based on current estimates of the age of the Earth as 4.5 billion Earth years. In Swahili culture, time has two dimensions, Sasa and Zamini.  Zamini might be measured in galactic years because it refers to the far and immeasurable past whereas Sasa describes the present and recent past.  Sasa is about the period that people can remember so when someone dies they remain in Sasa until the last person who can remember them also dies and then they move to Zamini.  Just as the Western concept of time is experienced differently by individuals [see ‘We inhabit time as fish live in water‘ on July 24th, 2019 and ‘Slowing down to think (about strain energy)‘ on March 8th, 2017], so are Sasa and Zamini since in my perception my paternal grandmother is in Sasa time but for my children, who never met her, she is in Zamini time.

Sources:

Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: A world in the making, London: Allen Lane, 2022.

Enuma Okoro, Ways of seeing, ways of knowing, FT Weekend, Saturday 11 March/Sunday 12 March 2023.

A conversation about a virtual world and global extinction

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Photograph of an octopusI went for a haircut a week or so ago and my barber asked me about the books I had been reading recently.  He always has a book on the shelf next to him and sometimes I find him reading when I arrive and the shop is quiet.  So it is not unusual for us to talk about our current books.  I told him about ‘Reality+: virtual worlds and the problems of philosophy’ by David Chalmers which led into a conversation about the possibility that we are in a simulation.  My posts on this topic [see ‘Are we in a simulation’ on September 28th 2022 and ‘Virtual digitalism’ on December 7th, 2022] have provoked a number of negative reactions.  People either think I have written nonsense or would rather not consider the prospect of us being part of a giant simulation.  Fortunately, my barber was happy to accept the possibility that we were part of a simulation which led to a discussion about whether our creator was the equivalent of a teenager playing on a computer in their bedroom or a scientist interested in the evolution of society; and, in either case, why they would have decided to give us hair on our heads that grows steadily throughout our life – perhaps as a personal indication of the passage of time or, simply to provide a living for barbers.  The development of human society and the use of probability to reason that a more advanced society might have created a virtual world in which we are living also led us to talk about the probability that a more advanced society finding us on Earth would annihilate us without pausing to learn about us in the same way that we are destroying all other forms of intelligent life on the planet.  For example, populations of vertebrates living in freshwater ecosystems have declined by 83% on average since 1970 [see World Wide Fund for Nature Living Planet Report 2022].  Maybe it would be preferable for someone to switch off the simulation rather than to suffer the type of invasion mounted by the Martians in the War of the Worlds by HG Wells.

Regular readers with good memories might recall a post entitled ‘Conversations about engineering over dinner and a haircut’ on February 16th, 2022 which featured the same barber who I visit more frequently than these two posts might imply.

The image shows Ollie the Octopus at the Ocean Lab, (Ceridwen CC BY-SA 2.0) for more on the intelligence of an octopus see ‘Intelligent aliens?‘ on January 16th, 2019.