Antique chiming Chinese clock from Kinnebrw collection

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Preface

I like to think, and this is the reason I focus on time. I especially like to think about time just before falling asleep. Sometimes it keeps me awake for quite some time and in the dark, I reach over for my iPhone to write myself a note for the morning. The bright light of the phone plays hell with my circadian rhythms.

It started one day when wondering if there was a present. The more I thought about “it” (that being time itself) the clearer “it” became. The present was an utter impossibility, it was a full stop, but that is not what actually happens, or so we think. Actually, nothing stops but that’s for later, another time.

Having pushed the future immediately into the past, one moment morphs into another. Oh, and there are many times ahead with many also behind. On another sleep deprived night, reverse seemed the only way “it” could be. There could be no such thing as past and future, there is/was only the present, my first contradiction and the timeless conundrum regarding time.

The big question is how do you go about substantiating an idea about such a fundamental concept? Is it too obvious, easy, simple, or irrelevant? Seems the first step was to acknowledge time is a human concept. The second might be to ask: can you see time? Then warp it, weave it, eat it, broker it, wrap it around a tree and so on?

There is nothing to suggest the cosmos needs or has any awareness of time. This is like asking, “Does the cosmos, which comprises all galaxies, need God?” That too is a good place to start because where does one go to ask and to whom, and as long as you’re at it what do you ask about time’s awareness? Is time aware? This is to say nothing about what kind of answer you get. If you want to limit this to exclusively human perception, then stop reading right now. What I am trying to do is go beyond myself, perhaps wondering about wondering itself. As an artist maybe that is what is causing me this mental dust up, we (artists) are curious about such things.

Wondering what it would be like with no time is rough stuff. It is like being in the middle of a pyrotechnic, the moment it bursts. Well, more than that really because at or in the aerial burst, when it happens and explodes in all directions it is more like being out at the furthest end of each individual burn object or better described as an event and then following it back to the source. Ground. Entropy seems lost here, reversed, lost once having hit the ground at a dead stop. Stopped entropy is a contradiction in terms raising another idea… is entropy time?

No time at all. We only have the present (time), nothing else matters so what was time for anyway? Human’s measure and I have a quirk about measuring things. It’s been a secret for most of my life. I can tell you within days when I will most likely need a new bar of soap or tube of toothpaste, I have measured such things and make notes. Plenty of science relies on measuring, so does cooking, your computer, and our daily schedule. Who really invented time?

Sundials were used around 3500 B.C., basically a stick in the ground and a moving shadow. In 1908 Canadians were the first to use Daylight Savings Time. Darkness is more of an issue the further north you go. This said it is not known who invented time, apparently it just came upon us as a reality, an awareness (whatever that is and written in an upcoming book). Other than those investigating human consciousness I do not know anybody who has suggested we debate this idea, but I am.

Is there a relationship between the reality of time showing up for and by popular demand for AI? Maybe.

Was time there all along just waiting to be discovered or acknowledged, maybe used like perspective and shadow was in art? Perhaps but I don’t think so. I think mankind needed to memorialize things and combine that with their craving for immortality. Just as they invented deities, they invented time to keep track and throw markers on the field. Humans liked to measure but it certainly took them a long time to get the idea of time into the picture. Clocks, the timekeeping escapement, or mechanical device, it was invented by the polymath Su Sung about 1000 AD. Prior to that, there were somewhat unreliable water clocks but suffice it to say time was well established far earlier than 1000 AD. There was that Greek Antikythera about 2100 years before. 

Back to existence without time. Physics says time started with the BB or Big Bang. For the moment I leave what happened before that alone (I have written about that in “Before the Sun”). For now, I borrow from John Rennie, the Editor and Chief of Scientific American.

The problem is that as we calculate back towards the Big Bang the metric gets larger and larger, and at the moment of the Big Bang it becomes infinite. You can’t do arithmetic with infinity. It might be fun to speculate what ∞ times 0 is, but when this sort of expression crops up in physics it means we have to admit we can’t calculate what’s going on. This is why you’ll often hear it said that time started at the Big Bang. It’s because we can’t calculate backwards in time from that point. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean there was no time before the Big Bang, it just means we have no way of calculating it from General Relativity. If you believe Loop Quantum Cosmology, this predicts that there was a bounce at the Big Bang, so we can follow geodesics back through the Big Bang and into an earlier universe. However, this is highly speculative.

My comment: it just means we have no way of calculating it from General Relativity. Now here is a troublesome point. The history of science is a tale of constantly changing one’s mind…more info = more changes. Very few things have remained constant throughout the history of science so this reliance on the “Theory of General Relativity” is very questionable business… problem is, what else have we got for the present…please re-read the last part of the previous sentence… “what else have we got for the present” and drill in on that word PRESENT!

This is science talking not about the cosmos because for obvious reasons, like no matter what, and we via SETI are listening, “they” tell you about chatting with God, still nobody has yet talked to the cosmos. We are, so far, on our own with this one. If we are alone and nobody’s feelings are getting hurt, it seems fair game to pull the rug out from under the paradigm. I’m again no physicist, but that doesn’t prohibit me from committing heresy. Back to “no” time.

No past, present or future. We just are, or “is.” I call this the “it.” It is just “it.” No time, no more worries about being early or late, no more thinking when you arrived, or your time is up. You are just no longer “it” or “is,” you transitioned to “were.” That is if you believe in the past. That explains a lot of what people have been thinking about forever. This idea of no time has some appeal for perfectly good reasons. Spring just happens, daffodils just happen. After the yaddaa new child just happens.

It is time for no time.

“Me thinks I am like a man, who having struck on many shoals, and having narrowly escap’d shipwreck in passing a small frith has yet the temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weather-beaten vessel, and even carries his ambition so far as to think of compassing the globe under these disadvantageous circumstances.”

            -David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40)

The International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) has termed our age the Holocene Epoch, it began after the last major ice age 11,700 years ago. More recently some have suggested we rename our time Anthropocene. (We might do this except most cannot spell it correctly) Geologists describe this term as the impact humans had on planet Earth.

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