Time-A Sweet Ignorance

I retired from the service of a bank two months ago. Some days back,I received a phone call from an old friend,Kishore. He asked me a benign and simple question. How was I spending my time after retirement? It was a genuine and courteous question from a well meaning friend. But I couldn’t give him a convincing reply. While replying to him I felt something strange happening inside me. I felt lost. I was trying to understand what was I doing with time when I was in service. Our conversation ended as usual on a good note of cracking some non- vegetarian jokes and having a hearty laugh. What held me back to give answer to a straight forward question kept on lurking in my mind. The reason could be that meaning of time inside me is undergoing change or it could be that I hadn’t in the past thought over it. Whatever may the reason, time suddenly has become a strange entity for me. My thoughts on time are vague and amorphous. They are wandering  aimlessly in all direction. I decided to collect all my thoughts and make an effort to find why time has suddenly become a strange entity for me. I am not a philosopher nor a scientist to get the answer methodically to this question. I need to relook into my idea of time from the beginning. I trust my childhood experiences of knowing of time will be a good position to start with. I can’t say how and when an infant gets idea of time. I can’t also say how old I was when I noticed that day passes into night and that light of the day goes away and darkness of night falls, with regularity. I believe I got  elementary idea of time from this diurnal rhythm of night follows day and day follows night. I also noticed that diurnal rhythm broadly regulates the daily chores of our large joint family, day for working and night for sleeping. The other noticeable thing was that specific activities of the family were regulated by instruments called clocks and watches. These instruments  elders told me show time and I was taught how to read it from them. Time for me got thus objectified as continuously changing set of number shown by clocks and watches. At the age of six I was admitted to a neighbourhood school. The school was housed in a small building. There was no play ground, no laboratory and no library. But this school had wonderful teachers. I liked to go to school. I liked to chatter with class mates and make friends. Jatinder, who was admitted to the school on the same day as I was, became my best friend. We used to sit beside each other in the class room and share our tiffins and toffees. I also made my first female friend, Pinki. She was a little chubby girl with fair complexion and rosy cheeks, having thick black hair parted in the middle with two neatly done plaits resting gracefully on her shoulders. In her company my time moved faster, perhaps her’s too. I was getting feel of some other nature of time. This nature of time was particular to me, different from the time read and measured on clocks and watches. I spent my eight formative years in  this school. In these eight years teachers taught me painstakingly. They turned me, from a chattering  little boy who liked hoop rolling and spinning of top into a confident and inquisitive young adolescent. It was here, in this school I learned that earth is neither flat nor it is stationary as it appears to us. It is round in shape like a ball and revolves round the sun. It takes 365 days to complete one revolution and these many days make one year. It also rotates like a top and takes 24 hours to complete one rotation. It was a humbling experience to know what I see, feel, and perceive may not be true in reality. Diurnal rhythm is result of spinning of earth. Time we talk about and see in the watches and clocks has all to do with this rotation of earth. It was demonstrated to us in the class using globe atlas and torch light how days and nights are caused, why there is different time at different places on the earth.  It was also demonstrated to us that when we have day in Kashmir more than half the world has night. Time as I understood then was outcome of unceasing rotation of earth. Clocks and watches measure it as relative position of a place on earth vi’s a vi’s the sun. The most important and striking thing about time that we feel is that it flows in one direction only, like water flows in a river. It flows from the past to the future. A person can recollect his past and he is certain about it. But future remains unknown and uncertain to him. He can make choices that can affect the future but not the past. The past is immutable. This feature of time makes it enigmatic. But without this attribute  of time I can’t imagine that humans could have survived and advanced to the level as they have. These are my childhood reminiscences of knowing of time. 

I was admitted to class nine in new school. This school had five storied white building with wide facade. Unlike my old school , this school had two playgrounds, a number of laboratories , a big library, many class rooms and lot many students. It was whole new environment for me and my friends from my old school who like me were admitted in this school. We were awe stricken  by vastness of this place. We were happy from inside but some unknown fear kept us from expressing it openly. In a month’s time we got accustomed to new place and its grandeur. I was feeling proud to have become student and future alumni of a reputed school. I chose science stream for studies. I was keen to know what makes heavenly bodies move in the way they do. I was also keen to know how the things we see around us work. One day a tall handsome man with grey streaks of hair near his temples entered into our classroom and said that he was science teacher and would teach us Physics for the next two years. He started his lecture with an anecdote that  ‘Sir Isaac Newton was sitting under an apple tree in a garden and an apple fell on his head. He asked himself many questions. Why did it fall downwards? Why didn’t it go upwards towards the sky? What attracted it towards earth? He got himself fully immersed into it to get the answer. He finally came with answer that the force which attracted apple towards earth is the same force which makes earth to revolve round the sun’. It  meant  that the same set of natural laws that govern the motion of celestial bodies also govern the motion of bodies on the earth. It was a radical assertion considering the times in which it was said. Newton’s laws of motion and law of gravitation are precise and give theoretical background of motion of bodies in space and time. Newton’s equations containing the letter ‘t’ for time to deduce how things move in time. This time ‘t’ is different from the time I knew before. It is absolute , true and mathematical, assumed to run independently of things that change or things that move. Aristotle one of the greatest philosophers of all times  has said that time is measurement of change. Things change continually and we call time measurement of counting of this change. This is what I was taught in my first school.  This concept of time is  different from what Newton has proposed. It is not Newton disregarded  time as measurement of change but he added that there is another kind of time , what he called, a true time , which passes regardless, independently of things and their changes. This kind of time is not directly accessible. It is deduced through mathematical calculations and observations. Aristotle and Newton, two profound investigators of nature, world ever has seen have proposed two opposite ways of thinking about time. Newton’s laws of motions and law of gravitation satisfied my curiosity. They solved for me the mystery behind the motion of celestial bodies. His laws laid the foundation of modern physics and his equations work incredibly well in explaining the macro world around us. This concept of time which is independent of things and their movement seems to me simple and natural. This concept of time as an independent entity didn’t erase from my mind time as measurement of change. I find meaning and value in seeing time also as measurement of change. I am comfortable in carrying simultaneously two opposite concepts of time. After finishing my high school I joined college for further studies. I wanted to become a doctor and ended up a banker after doing post graduation in Physics. What is in store for future no one knows. Physics, I must admit made me admire nature and its laws that I am sure no other discipline could have done. I must also admit that it was through my profession as banker I had opportunity to work  in different parts of the country, came in contact with thousands of people, gained knowledge about the country- its people, its diverse culture , nature of its economy - which I am sure couldn’t have been possible had I joined some other profession. Under the influence of nostalgia I forgot I am trying to find answer to a question. What is time? More than two centuries after Newton’s death, another giant of a physicist Einstein, then a young man of 26 years working in a lowly position of a clerk in the patent office in Bern, came  out with a radical theory, he called it  ‘Special Theory Of Relativity’. This theory transformed the conception of light, time and mass. Time as an absolute and independent entity which Newton proposed and had become common way of understanding of time was no longer holding true. Special theory of relativity proposed that time is not absolute and independent of other things but it is a relative entity. Space and time are interwoven, and space is also a relative entity. The speed of light is constant and nothing can move faster than it. This theory inferred  that time passes slowly for a body in motion.’Twin Paradox-Einstein’s thought experiment illustrates , in the best way, this transformed  concept of time. One of the identical twins who sets off for a journey into space at high speed nearing speed of light and on his return many years after he finds his twin brother who was on the earth has grown much older than him’. Time didn’t pass uniformly for the twins. The motion made difference. Ten years later Einstein came out with another radical theory ‘General Theory Of Relativity’. The theory says that gravity is due to folds of space time. This curvature or folds of spacetime  is gravitational field by itself and conveys gravity though gravitational waves as electromagnetic fields convey force through electromagnetic waves. It inferred that time dilates in the vicinity of heavier bodies of mass. It is to say that time moves faster at mountains than near the seas. It practically means clocks will run slowly near higher gravitational fields and in high speed rockets . These theories were  treated by people then as crazy ideas irrelevant to the reality of nature. Many among the scientific community were also skeptical about these theories. All doubts and skepticism were laid to rest after it was proved experimentally that clocks slow down in the vicinity of stronger gravitational field and also when in motion. Einstein theory of relativity gave deeper insight into time and space which Newton had proposed as absolute entities. Time and space are relative, not absolute, entities. They have no special and exclusive place in the nature. Now we have three different, diverse and also contradictory concepts of time; one, as measurement of change; second, as an absolute entity independent of change of things and not accessible directly and third, as a relative entity which doesn’t pass uniformly for all. Which of the three is true? All the three seems true in their own way

All  these concepts have not said anything on order of time. Order of time is held sacred, true and real by all of us. It is pivotal to our sense of existence and consciousness. What exactly is that which flows? The basic laws of physics do not distinguish between the past and the future. Is it an illusion, then?  It can’t be. It is too evident to ignore. I can’t say who I am without having a past. I felt uncomfortable that basic laws of physics in which I have rested complete faith can’t make difference between the past and the future. I was relieved when I found that order of time is not an illusion. It is real in particular perspective which is scientifically validated. The flow of heat explains scientifically the flow of time. All of us have experienced that heat passes only from hot bodies to cold bodies and never the other way round. This unique property of heat is foundation of Law of Entropy which says that in an isolated system things move from order to disorder and the change is irreversible. A broken egg can’t be made whole again from the pieces of its shell, white and yoke however hard one may try. It is an irreversible change. We have two distinctly  distinguishable states of the egg, a whole egg -an ordered state and pieces  of its shell scattered around  and its  contents spread in a bowl - a disordered state. Ordered state of the egg was its past and disordered state is its present. My tryst with time didn’t end here. The quantum theory has something more and profound to say about it. In Quantum Mechanics nothing is concrete. Everything in quantum world of sub-atomic particles melts into cloud of probability. Particles don’t always exist. They exist only when someone watches them. It is a world of happenings and interactions, not of objects and things. It a world generated by a swarm of quantum events, where time and space do not exist. Reality thus gets reduced to an interaction. Quantum mechanics tells us that world is continuous and restless interaction of events creating and annihilating ephemeral entities. It is like, what is symbolised  in Hindu philosophy by ‘Nataraja’ - Shiva’s cosmic dance of creation and destruction. All this sounds like a mystical story.  But it is not. Quantum theory is experimentally validated. So, ‘Time’ doesn’t exist in reality. Did I get answer to the question Kishore had asked ? Yes, I have got it. Should I now tell Kishore, with all seriousness it demands that time doesn’t exist at fundamental level, therefore, his question what I am doing with time after my retirement and what I was doing with it before that, is meaningless. No, I can’t say  that to him. I am not certain that time we feel is an illusion. It is established beyond doubt that time is a non-existent entity for interactions and events that happen in the universe at the elemental level. But I haven’t read or heard from any source that founding fathers of quantum mechanics have  said that the time, as we know it, has become irrelevant for the world in which we operate. There is principle of causality which has both philosophical and scientific significance in our world. But at the elemental  level this principle also loses its relevance as time does. Can we ignore principle of causality in our daily lives? Obliviously not. Someone has rightly said that at elementary level there are no cats either, but we do not for this reason cease to bother with cats. We have come to a situation where we find that time has relevance for us but it is irrelevant for the working of the world at the elementary level. This sounds paradoxical. But it is not so. Quantum theory says that universe at the elementary is statistical in nature. All possible states of an happening co-exist simultaneously. But all these states on interaction can’t get manifested to an observer. Human brain is big but not big enough to see through the universe in its all states. A particular state getting manifested  on interaction is governed by rules of probability. Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty says that nature has placed restrictions on itself to reveal all its facets in an interaction. Therefore, what we  get from the interactions that physical system has with the rest of the world is a particular perspective of a thing and we remain  blissfully oblivious of its all other perspectives.  Flow of time is one such particular perspective we get on our interactions with the physical system. It is our blurring that makes sense for us in our interactions with physical world. Flow of time, exists and is real in that particular perspective. I may say that it is our sweet ignorance that makes time real for us. What we do with time is thus a relevant question? I need to give a cogent answer to this question to Kishore. At this stage I can  tell him that I am not wasting it. 

Books referred 

1. The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli

2. Origin Story-A big history Of Everything by David Christian 

   Acknowledgement

   Got the idea from a Facebook post of Dr.Sushil Fotedar