Soul of the World (9 page)

The term “real time” was readily adopted and assigned to all sorts of things—for instance, the stock market crawlers that tick away at the bottom of your screen, or the “real-time four-wheel-drive” feature of some sport/utility vehicles (SUVs), which automatically switches from two- to four-wheel drive when you go off-road. Real time means that we are moving so fast we have caught up to the present—which waits for no one, save the fastest.

So “real time” is a commodity, something you can buy if you have enough money, unlike those who are marooned in what must be “unreal time,” where computers aren’t fast enough and cars don’t have automatic asymmetrical 4WD. (In one sense, “real time” is reminiscent of “quality time,” those hours that busy people snatch between appointments and jobs to be with their children.) On the other hand, television’s version of “real time” is trickier, particularly in live broadcasts. Sometimes people do or say things that networks would prefer they didn’t, and so broadcasts have a built-in time delay of several seconds that allows producers to hit a “dump” button and delete the offending sequence. We don’t notice a built-in time lag the way we notice the delay of an audio feed on a live television report from halfway around the world, where reporters blankly wait for the anchor’s next question. Yet there are other built-in time lags—one military and the other biological—that are almost completely invisible.

In the command-and-control situation room of modern battleships, a wall-mounted screen shows real-time positions of enemy boats, planes and missiles. During the Falkland Islands war in 1982, H.M.S.
Sheffield’s
radar defence shield was down temporarily while a satellite phone call was made back to Fleet Headquarters in England. When the radar screen came back online, it showed two enemy planes,
thirty-three kilometres away—much too close for comfort, and, as it turned out, too late for response. Exocet guided missiles were already skimming towards H.M.S.
Sheffield
, just above the waves, at the speed of sound. There was not enough time to launch electronic countermeasures. All the officers could do was helplessly watch as the incoming blips tracked closer and closer.

But there was a further wrinkle. Because missiles and jets move quickly, most situation screens for both land and naval battle zones have built into them a computerized time delay of slightly more than 0.2 seconds. This delay counteracts the minimum human reaction time. The delay had been built into the command-and-control screen of
Sheffield
, which meant that—like a sinister video game—the officers saw the missile hit the target on the screen a moment before the ship itself exploded into flame.

Our 0.2-second reaction time is itself affected by a deeper neurological phenomenon, one that some neurologists believe is proof of an immaterial soul. A few decades ago, a neurophysiologist by the name of Benjamin Libet discovered a perplexing paradox about the nervous system and the brain. During brain operations, when patients were conscious and parts of their cortex were exposed, Libet conducted experiments on how long it took for a pain impulse to reach the cortex, and then how long it took for the patient to report the pain. With the patient’s consent he would prick the skin and measure when the incoming impulses hit the part of the brain that represented that area.

A pain impulse takes only 15/1,000 of a second to reach the cortex, but the brain takes half a second to translate that signal into conscious awareness. You can see the spikes on an oscillograph wired directly into the brain; it’s hard science. Yet all patients reported the sensation after only 0.2 seconds had passed. Libet was stumped. How could you be consciously aware of something before your brain had delivered the
information to you? He hypothesized that there must be some sort of perceptual mechanism that antedated the signal
in time.
But what
was
this “perceptual mechanism”? The question became a famous bone of contention among neurologists, and continues to be so up to the present day. How is it possible for the brain to “jump time”?

The famous neurologist John C. Eccles said he had the answer. He believed that Libet’s “perceptual mechanism” was evidence of an immaterial, self-conscious mind, one that scanned active modules in the brain, getting the jump on the slower processing of the cortex. Other brain processes, he noted, indicated the presence of something that wasn’t the product of neurons and electrical-chemical impulses. So in his opinion, the evidence for an immaterial mind was just too overwhelming. In a conversation he had with the philosopher Karl Popper in 1974, he said that he was “constrained to believe there is what we might call a supernatural origin of my unique self-conscious mind.” The mind time-travels. Continuously, every moment we are alive, our consciousness is time-lapsed by a tiny, mysterious, 0.2-second journey back in time. Our ability to be in the present moment is more—much more—than it seems to be.

Time is nature’s way to keep everything from happening at once.

—
John Wheeler

Last night the angels bent down to earth. There are nights when the heavens seem closer, when gravity holds you just a little less firmly. Last night was one of them. Yesterday afternoon a prairie high blew in from the west, and after a few hours I was sure I could smell yucca and sagebrush. In my garden the peonies bobbed in the gusts. Their ruffled petals fluttered like the organza of debutante dresses as they scattered their perfume on the wind. Above them the trees were restless. I could see the muscled shape of wind gusts moving through the leafy branches. Something in the air elevated my mood. I felt lighter, freer. At dusk a low bank of stratus clouds hovering just above the sunset turned neon pink against a pale turquoise sky, like a Tiepolo fresco. Then, almost as if it had been switched off, the wind died down.

Later, when darkness was firmly established, I went out into the yard again to take a look at the night sky. I was shocked. The night was stuffed with stars. I felt like the only person in an enchanted planetarium, bewitched by the demiurge of night. It was as if another order of darkness had been revealed, as if a layer had been peeled away to reveal
a truer darkness, a deeper night, that filled me with dizzy awe. I wondered if the owl I’d seen in March was nearby, sitting on a branch in the secret reaches of night, its eyes sparkling with mystery. The sky was so clear and transparent it seemed that space was somehow closer to the surface of the earth. And everywhere stars. Clusters of stars, necklaces of stars. They sang like destiny in silver notes, and I could see them for what they were—distant, atomic fires of unthinkable immensity, inconceivably remote in time.

Starlight is pure history. Perhaps our earthly time-mosaic, created by the media and architecture, is the natural state of time, like a reflection of the heavens. Perhaps all time—past, present and future—exists at once, everywhere. But the stars take the prize. The night sky contains starlight that started its journey to earth during the Roman era, during the age of dinosaurs, and even from before the earth existed. In the vastness of space, light seems to slow to a crawl, and the vacuum becomes a crystal jelly.

Above my house, Polaris, the pole star, glittered like a fire opal. The luminous gleam from Polaris—the “Pillar of Heaven,” as the Greeks called it—took three hundred and sixty years to get here. It appeared to me as it was when the Puritans had just established their first colony in North America. Looking southwest I saw a high, bright star, the fourth-brightest in the sky, Arcturus, only thirty-six light years away. Its light began its interstellar trek to earth during the late 1960s, when NASA manned lunar bases and Woodstock marked the summit of a cultural revolution.

I walked around to the front of my house so that I could see the constellation of Andromeda, below Polaris, where Andromeda’s long V just touched the northeastern horizon. Floating just above the constellation was a faint smudge, though its smallness was deceiving. This was the largest single celestial object visible to the naked eye, the galaxy
Andromeda, named after the constellation next to it. Its light began its earthbound journey more than two million years ago, when the first humans,
Homo erectus
, entered Europe from Africa. But there were stars even farther away—stars I could have seen only with the most powerful telescopes on earth—whose glow dates from the beginning of the universe itself. A time wind blows through the heavens.

The strange thing about time and the night sky is that the farther you see into it, the closer you are to the beginning of the universe itself. Because the universe is expanding, wherever we look into the night sky, we look towards a smaller universe. Right now the Hubble Space Telescope can see almost thirteen billion light years back, into a time when the universe was less than a tenth the size it is now. But there is no particular place the telescope has to point to see that far back. No matter where it is aimed, it will see back to the beginning of time. We are surrounded by our beginning—the small has swallowed the huge.

T
IME
C
ONES

Henceforth, space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.

—
Hermann Minkowski

The present is the past’s future. The past, as Herman Melville wrote, is the “Future’s slave,” but the past also shapes the present. No matter how deeply an event is embedded in the past, it opens only towards the future. The fact of its one-time existence, or of its having occurred, gives it a line of history that unfurls before it. Like the cornerstone of a building, each event in the past has a date of appearance, of completion,
and then a long tunnel to the present. What did not happen has no tunnel. But there is another dimension of time, one that includes space. All that has happened—the single leaf that fell from a tree two hundred million years ago, the momentary satisfaction of a medieval glazier after installing a pane of glass in Chartres Cathedral—has a special shape in time that was envisaged by two great mathematicians of the early twentieth century.

Whether or not the idea of time as the fourth dimension originated in H. G. Wells’ novel
The Time Machine
, it was the Russian mathematician Hermann Minkowski who first put the concept into practice, at the beginning of the twentieth century. He developed a geometry that included time as the fourth dimension, and he was the first person to use the term “space-time,” referring to the unified continuum of all four dimensions. We take space-time for granted now, but when it first occurred to Minkowski it was a revolutionary idea. Minkowski realized that everything is moving through time. All things, even things that seem to be unmoving—a pebble sitting on the shore of a lake, an apartment building—are nevertheless in motion. He referred to the line that an object traces through time as a “world line.” When two world lines overlap, a meeting in space-time takes place, as when your world line overlaps that of the pebble, should you pick it up from the beach. You plucked it from its unseen path. Seen from this perspective, all things, including ourselves, trail invisible world lines.

A pebble and an apartment building create relatively straight world lines on a four-dimensional graph, but anything moving leaves wiggly lines. What is the shape of a coincidence? In Minkowski’s view of space-time, a coincidence would mark a statistically unlikely convergence of world lines—lines crossing great distances of space-time to meet each other. But an uncanny event would be represented by an entirely improbable, extraordinary convergence of world lines. An example of
an uncanny event is the case of the Second World War paratrooper whose parachute failed to deploy over enemy territory. He was saved when he miraculously hit the top of a spruce tree at exactly the right point to ensure that each successively larger branch decelerated and cushioned his fall. By the time he hit the bottom branch, he merely slid off it and landed upright, with barely a bruise, in deep snow. That moment changed his life. And he was beyond lucky, as the convergence of world lines that brought about his miracle could statistically never happen again.

Minkowski’s theories proved critical for Albert Einstein, whose general theory of relativity hinged on Minkowski’s concept of four-dimensional space. Using Minkowskian world lines as a starting point, Einstein came up with an elegant, graphic way to visualize the relationship between time and the speed of light. He knew that light spreads out in a circle from its source, like the ripples from a pebble dropped in a pond. The surface of the pond is the present moment, and each successive moment is a plane just above the first, like a stack of glass sheets. In that stack, the expanding rings, moving upwards with time, create an inverted cone through the vertical time axis. Light in the universe behaves the same way. When a supernova explodes it takes time, even at the speed of light, for the resulting flash to reach other stars and galaxies. Einstein called these expanding world lines “light cones.”

The metaphor of the light cone was a tremendous way of unifying the concept of space-time with the way light spreads through the universe. Before the light cone of a distant event arrives, we have no way of knowing what has happened within it, because, in fact, for us it
hasn’t
happened. It will only “happen” in earth time when the light reaches us. The edge of a light cone is an expanding “now,” trailing the history of the event—the exploding star, the solar flare—behind it. So you could also call them “time cones.”

Yet a star doesn’t have to explode to create a time cone; anything that happens—a flower opening, a cheque being cashed—produces a virtual time cone, even if the fact isn’t relayed at the speed of light. This is because all events and objects affect the things around them. So every world line is nested inside a time cone, and the two of them are tethered together at their beginning. We go on our way through time, creating our world lines, but information about us also spreads over the same period, creating time cones.

All these cones and world lines are oriented in one direction: towards the future. It seems that there
is
a grain, a direction, to time. Time combs through everything, all the world lines, and aligns them towards the future. In that sense history is like hair or fur: it is composed of many individual strands or world lines, and it stands up on end, the way cat fur does when you put a comb charged with static electricity near it, only in this case the static charge is the future. Everything that happened in the past aims towards a future from whose perspective all those things were inevitable, no matter how random or coincidental they were at the time they occurred. Once they happened, they became part of the absolute past, they
did
happen, and the future contains them all. But this knowledge is not like ours, unique and partial; it is the sum total of
all
that came before. All that has ever happened was necessary to make the present what it is. Our present is the past’s future, and the future will eventually contain all presents as pasts when all the time cones finally merge at the end of the universe.

I’d like to think there is a second fur, a second series of time lines that point in the same direction as that of history (as they must), extending not from history towards the present, but from the present towards the future. Because the future isn’t real yet, these lines must be virtual. And they are virtual even if, as in the case of repetitive or cyclic phenomena such as sunrises and seasons, the future is almost
100 percent certain. There will always be an element of unpredictability to the future; if the sun is destroyed by a cosmic cataclysm, it may not rise tomorrow. The predictable future, from the vantage of the past, exists solely in the imagination, not in an absolute, universal sense. Yet there it is, nevertheless. Life, consciousness, could be said to be the exception to the present limit of the one-way world lines, for anticipation also seems to create long, thin world lines that extend out of an event in the future towards an individual in the past.

Right now I’m constructing my own future world line. I’m planning an excursion, a writing retreat to Cayo Largo, in July. I’ve been looking at travel brochures and scouting resorts online. Cayo Largo seems to have everything I need: a small, oceanfront hotel complex on an otherwise deserted island, lots of nature, coral reefs and an all-inclusive plan. I’ve contacted an online travel agency and arranged a fantastic discount. I’ll be able to fly down and then work and snorkel for eight days for almost the same amount of money I’d spend during a week at home.

Anticipating a departure date, or any deadline, is a measure of how we experience the passage of time. Right now, my departure is a couple of weeks in the future. It seems distant, almost abstract. Yet I know how quickly the day will come up. Five days before, I will still be calm, unhurried, but four days before, I’ll begin to pack and buy the small items I’ll need. Anticipation is about waiting. Diane Ackerman described it in
A Natural History of Love
: “The essence of waiting is wishing the future to be in the present. For a slender moment or strings of moments, time does a shadow dance, and the future is roped by the imagination and dragged into the present as if it really were here and now.” But then, abruptly, it will be the day before my departure, and all sorts of last-minute errands and untied loose ends will arise: notes to
leave for my son, light timers and alarms to set. My anti-time cone will become a bullhorn, barking orders from the future.

Today I bought a small handbook of Spanish phrases. I looked up the Spanish word for “time,”
tiempo.
It rang a bell. I’ve seen it somewhere else recently. On a hunch I went online and revisited a map of Cayo Largo. I scanned the names of beaches and points, and there it was, on the island’s southwest tip: Punta mal Tiempo, “Point of Bad Times.” The English translation sounded more ominous than the Spanish, which had a more rhythmic, romantic assonance. I wondered what Punta mal Tiempo would look like.

S
PEAKING OF
T
IME

Whoever said we have “all the time in the world” wasn’t doing last-minute packing while an airport limousine waited outside. What had been “only a matter of time”—my departure date—had arrived “in no time at all.” There is no confusing a timeline for one of Minkowski’s world lines. My personal timetable was now reduced, I hoped, to being “in the nick of time.” As I was throwing a few last items into my suitcase, I realized that these different metaphorical ways of characterizing time represented time’s complex and intricate effect on every aspect of our lives.

We often refer to time as if it were a substance, and almost always as a quantity. When we have more than enough, we say that we have “time to spare” or that we have “oodles” of time. For slightly smaller durations we refer to “chunks” of time, as if it were a solid. But we also look at time as having length. If we have a “stretch of time” before us, or a “span,” then we can “take our time.” Strangely, our relationship to a surplus of time becomes almost predatory. We “kill time” or “waste” it or simply “while it away” But when time begins to “slip away,” to “run out” like a fluid, we
refer to it as a resource: “time is scarce,” there’s only a “bit of time,” it is “limited.” Finally, when we are really “pressed” for time, like grapes in a wine press, or when our time is “up,” then it seems that time rises. We say how “time flies” like a bird or an arrow, while an approaching deadline indicates it is “high time.”