Soul of the World
Authors: Christopher Dewdney
Unlocking The Secrets of Time
Christopher Dewdney
Pythagoras, when he was asked what time was, answered that it was the soul of this world.
—
Plutarch,
Platonic Questions
Chapter One THE ANGEL OF NOW: TIME’S NATURE
Chapter Three MONKS, STEAMBOATS AND FEMTONIANS: MEASURING TIME
Chapter Four ZENO’S HORSE: MANIPULATING TIME
Chapter Five STAR JELLY AND TIME CONES: THE SPEED OF TIME
Chapter Twelve THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME
THE ANGEL OF NOW: TIME’S NATURE
You mean
now
?—
Yogi Berra, after being asked what time it was
The night was cool—too cool to stay outside for very long—yet a slight mildness in the air pledged warmer evenings to come. In the twilight I could make out the long rectangle of my lawn and a dark strip of earth where winter flowerbeds ran along the east fence towards the silhouette of the garage with its peaked roof. Two stubborn patches of snow glowed whitely at its foot. Then something stirred, breathlessly close. Something gathered and clotted in the darkness near the top of the fence. It fluttered with an inky, soft movement made eerily precise by its silence.
A bird had alighted. I couldn’t see it at first. I searched along the top rail and there it was—I met the full intensity of its eyes before I could name it—an owl, a small one, perched on the top of a fence post less than twelve feet from where I stood. We stared at each other, both motionless, me in spellbound astonishment and the owl broadcasting its hooded, imperious and unblinking gaze. I wanted to get closer. I think I even had the naive idea that the owl might hop onto my arm if I offered it. But after I had taken a few cautious steps it rose
up as soundlessly as it had arrived, floating up into the stars above a neighbour’s house and disappearing into the night. How marvellous! This mysterious bird had blessed my yard.
That night, for one moment in time, the owl and I were aware of each other—we met in an enchanted encounter that ended too quickly for me. Something ancient bonded us. Blood and miracle and twilight had combined in a single charged alchemy, and I had, briefly, been in the presence of magnificence, of night’s own beak and talons. Out of darkness, out of the endlessly random permutations of time and place, a wonder had occurred. Time had stood still. The owl, with its moondial face, had brushed its wing over the flow of time. For those few seconds I had been completely in the moment—oblivious of future and past, my senses alive to the night, the owl, the beating of my own heart.
The next day I got out my old set of vinyl transfer letters and stuck the word “owl” in one-inch-tall letters at the top of the fence post. I wanted to fix the place where the owl had landed, and I wanted to memorialize this special moment in time. I had experienced a present so spellbinding it was if an invisible door had opened onto eternity.
Time gives and time takes away. That evening has been carried off by time, along with all the other events of that day and that week. The dust-speckled snow that lingered for few more days in the shadow of the garage, like the terminal moraine of a diminutive glacier, has disappeared, and the green tongues of crocuses have begun to poke through the surface of my garden. A new season has started. This year on March 20 at 7:34 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, spring officially began. Our timekeepers, trained over the millennia to capture the exact instant of equinoxes and solstices, announced the subtle moment of transition—the beginning of a new season and a signpost along earth’s 584-million-mile
journey around the sun. Yet the cycles of the seasons themselves roll through the calendar like cogs caught in time’s great wheel.
In my yard the incremental passage from winter to spring seems gradual, but I’m already behind the seasonal schedule. My lawn needs raking and the bricks that line the flowerbeds have buckled in the frost and need resetting. I tell myself that I can do these chores next week, though the rising greenery in my garden has an urgent timetable that will eventually force me to act. I hear spring ticking like a clock. Is time against me or is it on my side? What does it have in mind for me?
Time is more than “just one damn thing after another,” as an anonymous wit once quipped. It is more than a sequence of events. Without time there is nothing. Time is both the dance floor and the music. Everything that moves and everything that seems unmoved is choreographed by time. It is everywhere. The world we live in and the universe that surrounds it could not exist without the architecture of time. Only time, with its one-way flow, allows us to accomplish anything. Even thought depends on time—if time stopped, we would become nothing more than frozen, unconscious statues. Perhaps that is why the Greeks thought that their god of time, Cronos, presided over thought itself. Time is like an animating breath. Time, with its promise of a continual future, is also the wellspring of hope, for only within time can our imaginings be realized.
Often it feels as though time gushes, that it pushes me up and I hover like a ball floating on top of a fountain or a geyser. I can feel the tremendous energy of it, and of life also. The past few afternoons have been bright and warm beneath a hazy blue sky. Yesterday I saw the first butterfly of the season, sunning itself on the back of my house beneath the kitchen window. It had just emerged from hibernation and it basked, sensuously opening and closing its purple and gold wings as if inhaling
the warmth. Its internal clock, and the warmth, had awakened it. Does time flow more quickly for the butterfly? Do the windows of its compound eyes open onto the same temporal world as my own? Does a sunny spring afternoon stretch for years? Even to me, it seems that time slows down in the spring, as the days grow longer. Time bends and stretches. We imagine that time speeds straight as an arrow, yet sometimes it seems to circle back on itself like watchwork gears. In my garden its toothed wheels mesh with toothed wheels in the heart of the crocuses blooming gold and purple above the muck.
T
IME
P
RESENT
In the flow of time the owl, a symbol of wisdom and memory, is now itself a memory. The point of our rendezvous is past, long past, growing more distant each day. The only thing that hasn’t changed is my small monument to our encounter, the three letters on the fence post. But memory also weathers the rush of time and keeps me company, though not such close company as the present. The present, with its corner in the future, is always opening onto something new. The American nineteenth-century poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote,
The Present, the Present is all thou hast
For thy sure possessing;
Like the patriarch’s angel hold it fast
Till it gives its blessing.
He was referring to the passage from the Old Testament where the patriarch Jacob struggled with an angel at night. For me the owl was like Jacob’s angel, and although it would be a stretch to say I wrestled
with it in the darkness, our encounter did bestow something wonderful: the knowledge that there are extraordinary beings out there, wild and exotic, making their way in the world, and that my neighbourhood, unremarkable as it may appear, is home to some of them.
But the owl’s visit gave me something else as well: an experience of a unique “now,” a single bell-note of coincidence that retuned my relationship to the present. And Whittier’s quote is essentially about seizing the moment, the only time we
really
have. The payoff of our wrestling match with time is the promise of greater productivity and awareness, the opposite of “wasting time.” Whittier’s admonishment is a familiar one, though we are such procrastinators and dreamers that living in the present seems almost impossible, a feat for Zen monks and meditating gurus rather than people with careers, children and homes. As Samuel Johnson lamented in
Rasselas,
“No mind is much employed upon the present; recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments.”
Given that most of us aren’t Zen monks, how
do
we embrace, and let ourselves be embraced by, the present? It takes different tacks. Sometimes it arises from boredom—we’re often never so much in the present as when we’re impatient or bored. Sometimes it ambushes us in the middle of making love…we exist nowhere else but in that moment—calm, alert, fully aware.
La petite mort,
as the French call the timeless bliss that comes with orgasm. But this experience is quixotic. And how can we describe “now”? Is it the space between “then” and “next,” a tablecloth deftly pulled from beneath the cutlery? Does the present last for an instant, or a millisecond? Or is it only what we make it out to be when we sit still and concentrate on it?
It is a moonless city evening. The sounds of neighbours arriving home from work have faded, and darkness has settled. Overhead, a fast-moving,
high layer of ribbed cirrus clouds, lit from beneath by the city, looks like phosphorescent X-rays of fossil fish slipping through the stars. The window ledge inside my study is still warm from the afternoon sun, but the sun itself is long gone. Why does the present vanish so quickly? How can there be a seemingly endless series of present moments? It might appear self-evident at first, but “now” isn’t what it seems.
T
HE
S
HAPE OF
“N
OW
”
As I write, it is a cool, overcast, late March afternoon in Toronto. Through my study window the featureless sky is pewter grey, and the branches of the leafless trees look like dark coral. What shadows there are appear more like faint stains than black silhouettes. A week ago today was the first official day of spring, and yesterday I saw a couple of robins stalking my slowly greening lawn. But today looks decidedly unspringlike.
Around noon some snow fell, a deluge of large flakes that settled so slowly it seemed as if the air had thickened into a fluid, as if my house were on the floor of some great ocean. The thumbnail-sized crystals filled the sky in a slow-motion cataclysm for a few minutes and then stopped as if they had been a hallucination, leaving only damp spots on the bricks of the pathway that winds through the yard to my garage. Now even those spots have evaporated. In an hour I’ll have to dress and leave for a wedding. The bride is an old friend of mine, and it is her second marriage. I wonder what she is thinking right now. As I imagine this, she seems to step into
my
version of “now.” But “now” is even bigger than that. It includes the whole earth. Half a world away, in the African bush where it is already night, the Serengeti jackals
are on the prowl, keeping a wary eye out for nocturnal lions. In the Antarctic, on the other side of the planet, it is late fall and the sun has stopped rising above the horizon. Knowing how frequently the moon is pelted by small meteorites, I can guess that, at this instant in time, a meteorite the size of a pea is soundlessly striking the surface of Mare Imbrium at 145,000 kilometres per hour. The heat of the impact melts some of the lunar soil into a dark, glassy pit. All this happens in the immensity of “now.”
Yet it is also true to say we know that the present moment is very brief—so brief that perhaps it is one-dimensional, maybe even less than a dimension, less than flat. St. Augustine thought so. He likened the present to a knife-edge that separates the past and the future. He said it could not be divided into smaller parts, that it had no extension in time, that “now” was non-dimensional. In other words, it has no depth, no up or down, it simply
is.
Everything in the universe moves along, relatively, at the same speed through time. You can certainly say “the road less travelled,” but not “the time less taken.” Time, in that sense, is a single path, a tunnel if you like, that we are all crammed into.
The present does seem a vanishingly small place to hold our whole life, and you could say that it really is
all
we have, but at the same time it is bigger than all of us. “Now” holds everything we see. In fact, more than we can see. The present moment is gigantic. We can get a sense of its size from the fact that “now” encompasses the entire planet; we are all joined in a simultaneous instant that spans continents, oceans and mountains. There is a proposal afoot to co-ordinate the operations of the Internet into a single twenty-four-hour day that ignores the world’s time zones. If this system is adopted, then the Internet’s “universal earth time” will be identical, second by second, to the planetary “now” that also spans the globe at the speed of light.
T
HE
S
IZE AND
S
PEED OF
“N
OW
”
Yet “now” also extends beyond our planet. It stretches almost to the moon, which is 1.3 seconds away at the speed of light. But when things get farther away—say, the ninety-three-million-mile distance to the sun—the simultaneous instant ends. How is this possible? We know that light coming from the sun takes eight minutes to get here, so common sense would tell us that that we can easily account for that difference in time, that delay, simply by compensating for it. We can imagine, for example, that the sun could be erupting with a huge solar flare at this very moment, and although it would take eight minutes for us to see the flare, we intuitively think there is a sort of God’s-eye view of simultaneity. We know the flare is happening “now”; it’s just that we won’t see it right away.
But time is not so portable. Although we have an intuitive idea that there is a single present that encompasses the whole universe, physicists and scientists since Einstein have discovered that time is “local.” There is no universal “now.” As well, in harmony with the relativity principle, time flows at different rates in different areas of the cosmos. Why does distance affect time like this? And what is it that causes time to flow at uneven rates in the various parts of the universe? What could change the tempo of time itself?
Einstein discovered that the closer to the speed of light you travel, the more time slows down. That’s why the World War II pilots who walked off the alien spaceship in Steven Spielberg’s
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
were the same age as they were when they had been abducted thirty years earlier. That’s how speed, and relativity, can affect time. But space also influences time. In the larger universe, sheer distance separates the “now” of various regions. Because of the relative motions of stars and galaxies, and the time it takes light to travel across
the universe, we are part of a kind of time medley where everyone has their own “now.” Not only that, but gravity affects time as well. Time passes more slowly near the surface of a large planet or star than it does a hundred miles above it. We will revisit this extraordinary fact later, since it turns out that the differential between surface and high-altitude time has a dramatic potential.