TIME
HAS NO POWER OVER LOVE
Remnants of Summer, once
green, flying now in a brown flock of leaves,
Smelling, in that breath
of Autumn air, a hint of Winter’s coming frost,
I am reminded of the long,
lonely days that like an awful gang of thieves,
Robbed us of the love we
knew and left us crying for what we had lost.
But I hear: “True Love
never dies”, echoing like a love song’s sweet refrain,
Though dark clouds may hide
the skies, and bitter tears may fill our eyes,
When Spring brings healing
sun and rain, all that was comes back again.
Can time dim the love
shining in our eyes? No, Love, true Love never dies!
God’s Love fills all time
and space, each second, and in every place. Amen!
WHAT
IS TIME?
It is time to take a deeper, more detailed look at
time. Why? Because time is definitely NOT what most of us, including mainstream
scientists, think it is; and yet we allow erroneous beliefs about time to rule
our lives. This is a bad mistake that produces mostly negative effects and ultimately
disastrous end results. I have written about time many times before. My
interest in the subject goes all the way back to my earliest memories. The
first time I wrote about time was in a series of poems that I wrote when I was
about ten years old. However, the first time anything I wrote about time was
published was when I was a first-year university student and a member of an
English Department sponsored creative writing club called Scribblers and
Scrawlers.
I touched on some of the mysteries of time in my
first book, The Book of Atma, published in 1977, and I discussed the three-dimensional
nature of time in considerable detail in my second book, Infinite Continuity,
devoting more than thirty pages to the subject. Unfortunately, that book,
published in 1990, is currently out of print. But most of the discussion about the
nature of time presented in that Infinite Continuity has been repeated and
expanded in more detail in several published papers and books since then. But it
is time to think about time again because, thanks to the current world crises,
people have a lot of time on their hands, and the results of that have been
disastrous.
It is not my intention to repeat mathematical
proofs, scientific detail, and experimental data supporting the TDVP view of
time in this post. That has been covered fairly well in references found listed
at the end of my October 24, 2021 blogpost entitled “Dimensions of Space, Time,
and Consciousness”. In today’s post, I want to discuss the importance of trying
to know what time actually is, and perhaps even more importantly, what time is
not.
Is
Time Something?
Late-night talk show host and comedian David
Letterman had a routine a few years ago, called “Is this something?”, in which
he presented a weird act, object, or concept, asking “Is this something, or is
it nothing?” It turns out that time is not a ‘thing’ in the sense that an
object like a table or a chair is, but it also is not ‘nothing’. If time is not
something, but also not nothing, then what is it? This is not a trivial
question because it has significant implications in understanding the nature of
reality, if we can find an answer to it.
Could it be one of those Gödel
questions that cannot be answered in the logical system within which it is
asked, like the three questions discussed in the previous blogpost, “The
Answer”, posted November 7, 2021? Yes, that’s exactly what it is. The logical
system within which we ask this question is a model based on the common human
experiences of reality brought into our consciousness through the physical
senses. But you might ask: Isn’t that all we have? No, we have developed tools
to expand our knowledge of the nature of reality and its major features of
space, time, matter, and energy, beyond the limits of physical perception. Through
technological advances like the microscope, electron microscope, telescope, and
radio-telescope, and the use of inductive and deductive reasoning, we have
learned about relativistic and quantum phenomena, things that exist at the
upper and lower ends of the scale of measurable reality. We have only begun to
explore things not directly available to us through our physical senses.
Some parts of this post
may prove to be challenging for anyone not familiar with the basic concepts and
terminology of quantum physics and the Neppe-Close paradigm, the Triadic
Dimensional Vortical Paradigm (TDVP). But the ideas presented are included to provide
a logical pathway to understanding the nature of time.
No less a deep thinker than Albert Einstein said that
time, like space - or spacetime, if you like - “has no existence of its
own.” He concluded that time and space are simply structural features of the
field of reality, and by “the field”, he meant the four-dimensional physical domain
shaped by the distribution of the substance of reality. Einstein suggested that time is
not a thing in and of itself, and that it may be an artifact of observation, created
by the functioning of consciousness. He said: “Time and space are modes by which
we think and not conditions in which we live.”
Because time has no substance, scientists have assumed
that it is infinitely divisible and that we can measure it using arbitrarily chosen
linear units. However, if the units we choose to measure time are not
commensurate with the units we use measure mass and energy, then the logical
process of developing a conceptual model can lead to absurdities, like mathematical
singularities (dimensionless points) in space or time, things that do not
actually exist in the physical world. This is why it was necessity to develop a
functional quantum calculus, the calculus of dimensional distinctions described
in previous publications. In this post, however, I will focus on the question
of what time is and is not, not on the mathematical details of the quantum
calculus.
Is Time Nothing?
Albert Einstein once wrote that those who believe in
physics “know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly
persistent illusion”.
Some people have interpreted this as saying that time is an illusion, i.e.,
that time doesn’t actually exist. I agree with Einstein’s statement, but not with
the interpretation. Based on personal OBEs and TDVP research, I believe
that the way we think of time, as consisting of a single
“timeline” connecting past, present, and future, is an illusion, but
that does not mean that time does not exist. The common conception of time as a
one-way linear flow of events, which, along with 3-D space, provides a universal
background, within which all objective things exist and evolve, actually is an
illusion. But it is an illusion based on incomplete knowledge. This is quite a different
thing from saying that time does not exist.
Science and the Nature
of Time
With the help of a brilliant research partner, Dr.
Vernon Neppe, MD, PhD of Pacific Neuropsychiatric Institute, and the
encouragement of some very special people, like my late wife Jacqui, Dr. David
Stewart, PhD, ND, Dr. Gary Schwartz, of AAPS, Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove, of New
Thinking Allowed, Erin J. Morgart, Writer, Agent, Model, Grig Oprea, founder of
Academia Ars Morendi in Romania, and a few others, I have been able to explain
the science and mathematics behind the discovery of gimmel, the
quantifiable non-physical component of reality and the three-dimensional nature
of time in published books, papers, articles, YouTube videos, and blogposts. What
I want to do in this post, is to open the door a little farther to provide a
glimpse of the multi-dimensional nature of time.
It is a fair question to ask: If time, like space,
is three-dimensional, why hasn’t mainstream science discovered this long before
now? The answer reveals a simple, albeit subtle truth: Ingrained beliefs, however
wrong they may be, form an almost impenetrable barrier to the expansion of
human consciousness to include a broader, more comprehensive view of reality. Weighed
down by the unwarranted limiting assumptions of materialism, mainstream scientists
and the bulk of humanity cannot surmount the barrier of belief to consider the
radical new idea of three-dimensional time. But this does not deter me, because
I know that radical new ideas grounded in truth have always been the hallmark
of scientific advancement.
As science historian Thomas Kuhn pointed out in his
book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, science does not merely
progress by the gradual accumulation of data and knowledge, as is generally
believed, but in periodic revolutions called paradigm shifts. When these shifts
occur, the scientific understanding of reality is abruptly expanded with the
introduction of new ideas that appear radical to the scientists working in the
existing paradigm. Radical new ideas are always questioned by established
scientists, and that is a legitimate part of the scientific method. But those
who have a vested interest in the status quo, often resist, attack, and
ridicule ideas that are outside the box of their belief system.
Kuhn argued that science advances in three stages: First, a period of
investigation during which a formal model of reality is formed. This is followed
by a period of what he called “normal science”, when scientists apply
the model of reality to solve real-life problems. Eventually, they find that there
are real problems that cannot be solved with their model. This should be
expected. (See the discussions of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem in my previous
posts). Finally, new facts about reality are discovered that form the basis of a
radical new, more comprehensive paradigm.
When the scientific community realizes that the new paradigm can solve problems
and resolve paradoxes that could not be addressed in the old paradigm, a revolutionary
shift in the understanding of the nature of reality occurs. More importantly
for the advancement of science, when a new scientific paradigm solves a paradox
that existed in the old paradigm, it also reveals a new aspect of reality so
radical that it could not even be imagined in the old paradigm. This, in my
opinion, is the case with the understanding of the nature of time.
Can Actions in the Present
Change the Future and the Past?
Of course, things we do
today can and do affect the future. We know this to be the case from everyday
experience. We see that actions taken in the present do affect the future in
predictable ways through the law of cause and effect. Without a logical
relationship between cause and effect, no stable reality, life, or science
would be possible. With the common assumptions about space and time, however, we
cannot imagine that choices we make and actions we take in the present could possibly
change the past, but there is evidence suggesting that they can. How is this
possible?
Space and time are just
words, names we give to the dimensional extent of objects and events, past,
present, and future. If objects and events of the past can be affected by making
changes in the present, then the space and time of the past will naturally conform
to those changes, and the past will be changed by present actions. If this can
happen, then the question is not just about time, it’s about the physical
objects of past events being affected by actions that can be performed now. There
actually is evidence that they can be. To explain this, I need to describe two relevant
experiments that I have discussed in previous publications, notably in Transcendental
Physics, published in 1997.
The discoveries of Planck
and Einstein early in the last century resulted in revealing serious paradoxes
in the mainstream materialistic paradigm that had been extremely successful up
until that point in time. Most striking was the Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen (EPR)
paradox. The EPR paper presented a thought experiment that if correct, contradicted
the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics formalized by German mathematical
physicist Werner Heisenberg. Studying the EPR paper, Heisenberg and Danish theoretical
physicist Niels Bohr realized that the only way out of the paradox was to challenge
the totally reasonable assumption that the elementary particles produced in the
proposed experiment were actually localized objects like the word “particle”
suggests.
Bohr proposed that
elementary objects like those in the EPR experiment are not discrete localized
particles until they impact a receptor in an irreversible manner. Until then, he
suggested, both the location and momentum of the “particles” can only be represented
by Heisenberg’s uncertainly principle using non-commutative matrix equations, or
wave-like probability distributions represented by the Schrödinger wave
equation. Eventually, experimental evidence proved that Bohr was right. When in
motion, the elementary particles of physical reality are not tiny, localized particles!
This solution to the EPR paradox was called the Copenhagen interpretation of
quantum mechanics, and a later version of it led to an eye-opening experiment that
would bring traditional beliefs about space and time into serious question.
A simple experiment with
light, called the double-slit experiment, producing wave interference patterns,
was first performed by an English physician, Dr. Thomas Young, in 1801. In
1804, he published the results of the experiment as proof that light is a wave
phenomenon. About one hundred years later, however, it was discovered that light
also exhibits particle behavior under some circumstances, and it was discovered
that the double-slit experiment could be modified to show that the physical form
of light can be caused to manifest as either particle or wave, depending upon specific
actions taken by the person performing the experiment.
In the modified form of
the experiment, a light source is aimed at an opaque wall with two slits in it
and a photographic plate is placed on the other side of the wall to receive the
light. If only one slit is opened, the light going through the slit behaves like
tiny particles (photons) producing a scattering of dot-like images on the
photographic plate. But when both slits are open, the light behaves like undulating
waves, producing an interference pattern on the plate.
As interesting as that
was, it got a lot more interesting when John A. Wheeler, a student of Einstein’s,
revisited the double-slit experiment, and reasoned that, given that Bohr’s
resolution of the EPR paradox had proved to be correct, the particle or wave
nature of the light impacting the photographic plate could be changed at will by
opening or closing one of the slits at any time before the light reached the
plate - even after it had passed through the slitted wall! This experiment was
appropriately called the delayed-choice double-slit experiment. When it was
carefully performed, by research teams in Germany and in the US, Wheeler’s
reasoning proved to be correct. Somehow, the light seemed to “know” that a slit
had been opened or closed, even when the action was delayed until after the
light had passed through the slitted wall.
Since the delayed-choice
double-slit experiment was first performed, it has been refined to the point where
one photon at a time can be fired at the slits. The speed of light is known
with great accuracy, and the distances between the light source and slits, and
between the slits and the photographic plate, can be determined with great
precision, so the exact location of a given photon or wave front can be
determined very accurately at any time after it leaves the light source, and
the exact times that it reaches the slits and the photographic plate can also be
determined. But no matter how many times the experiment was run with the opening
or closing of the slit performed at various points in time, the result was
always the same.
Note: It has also been shown that all
stable elementary particles behave the sa way, making non-locality a
fundamental feature of reality at the quantum level. This fact is important because
every atom in the physical universe is made up of elementary particles in motion.
Wheeler also developed
a thought experiment version of the delayed-choice experiment using light
coming from a distant star and reached some startling conclusions about time. Considering
light coming from a quasar at the edge of the universe, into an observatory
telescope, he realized that a choice made in the present, namely the choice of
whether to capture the light in a photon collector, or on a photographic plate,
would determine whether the light had curved around the gravitational lens of a
massive galaxy existing between the quasar and the Earth, billions of miles
away, and millions of years in the past, to be captured in the photon
collector, or if it had traveled through the galaxy as a wave, to contribute to
an interference pattern on the photographic plate.
In his book At Home
in the Universe, John Wheeler presents this delayed-choice experiment as a
paradoxical violation of the one-way arrow of time. We think of reality as existing
in the past, present, and future, but he says: “The past has no existence
except as it is recorded in the present.” And, based on the results of the
delayed-choice experiment: “It is wrong to think of the past as ‘already
existing’ in detail… What we have a right to say of past space, time, and past
events is decided by choices made in the present. The phenomena called into
being reach backward in time, even to the earliest days of the universe. Useful
as it is under everyday circumstances to say that the world exists ‘out there’ independent
of us, that view can no longer be upheld. There is a strange sense in which
this is a ‘participatory universe’.”
The results of the delayed-choice
experiments definitely verify Bohr’s resolution of the EPR paradox, rejecting the
assumption that elementary particles are localized objects moving through space
like tiny baseballs. And major aspects of the phenomena of the chain of events
that we call reality do not exist in detail in the past. They are “called into being
by choices” made by conscious observers in the present.
This understanding of
the nature of reality is basic to Wheeler’s “It from Bit” view of how everything
comes into being. In his view, choices and actions of conscious beings in the
present and near past determine what we can say about what happened in the
past, what reality is now, and what the potential realities of the future may
be. In other words, the here and now is real, but both the past and the future
are affected under certain circumstances by choices and actions in the here and
now, because the elementary particles of which everything is made are non-local
until registered in the present.
It is important to realize
that the reasonable, but unwarranted EPR assumption of continuous particle
localism is one that we all buy into as conscious human beings on a daily basis.
We assume, based on the time illusion created by the reliability of the
man-made mechanisms we call clocks, that time is a real thing that flows uniformly
from past to future in the same way, throughout the universe, but that simply is
not true. Empirical evidence from experiments verifying the principles of
both relativity and quantum mechanics, the two pillars of modern physics,
proves that time has no existence of its own and, like space, is not independent
of the mass, energy, and consciousness existing in the present.
I find it interesting
that Albert Einstein and Max Planck, the two brilliant scientists who created
the last great paradigm shift, were friends in the days before World War II
when they made their respective discoveries that led to general relativity and
quantum physics. Besides being serious scientists searching for truth, they both
loved music. Planck sang and played piano, and Einstein played violin. They
spent many hours together, playing and listening to classical music.
Getting back to the
subject of the nature of time, I want to be clear that the demotion of time from
the status of a uniform tangible feature of reality to a variable structural
feature, does not make it any less important in our lives, and it does not
imply that we can manipulate time in any frivolous manner we might fancy. All
of the quantifiable and measurable aspects of reality, including time, are
inter-related in a mathematically invariant structure that is identical with the
logical structure of pure mathematics. The exact way time varies throughout
the physical universe, from the quantum scale of the electron to the macro-scale
of galaxies, can be accurately calculated. Such calculations can be made by applying
the primary quantum calculus of TDVP to the processes of quantum mechanics and
the principles of relativity expressed in the time-dilation equations of
general relativity.
The Dimensionality of Reality
The Calculus of Dimensional
Distinctions (CoDD) was developed by expanding G. Spencer Brown’s calculus of
indications to include consciousness and dimensional geometry as fundamental features
of the form. In developing the Laws of Form, Brown took the drawing of a
distinction with a closed boundary as the first step in the construction of any
model of reality. The calculus of indications, based on two equations
describing expansion and contraction of the form, is a mathematically elegant system
of binary logic. The laws of form, comprised of theorems proved within this system
of logic, begin to mimic the structure of reality when the logical counterpart
of “imaginary” numbers is brought into the calculus, a fact that takes most
people by surprise, apparently including even Brown himself.
Conceptualization of the
dimensionality, or more accurately, of the dimensionometry of the TDVP model
is key to seeing how the structure of pure mathematics corresponds with the logical
structure of reality, including space, time, and consciousness. Dimensionality does
not arise explicitly in Brown’s derivations until the logical counterpart of
imaginary numbers is introduced in the next to last chapter, Chapter 11 of Laws
of Form. In contrast, the calculus of dimensional distinctions was expanded
from the beginning to include the distinctions of space, time, and consciousness,
each with variables of content, extent, and intent. Because of this, it should not
be surprising that the TDVP model reflects the structure of reality in considerably
more accuracy and detail than the calculus of indications.
Three Dimensions of
Time
Albert Einstein was
arguably the most brilliant physicist of modern times, with the possible
exception of Wolfgang Pauli. But it is not a criticism, nor does it lessen my
respect for him in any way, to acknowledge that he was not really a
mathematician. In fact, it was not Einstein, but his former math professor at
Zurich, Hermann Minkowski, who developed the four-dimensional model for special
relativity. Because mathematics was not his main interest, Einstein dismissed
the 4-D model at first, as unnecessary mathematical sophistication, and David
Hilbert, considered to be the leading mathematician of the time, almost beat him
to completing the 4-D model for general relativity.
Application of the CoDD
to expand the model by dimensional extrapolation to include these additional
features of reality revealed the fact that dimensions beyond the first three could
not be dimensions of space due to an important mathematical invariance, and
that after the three dimensions of space, the next three dimensions are
dimensions of time. And we know that G. Spencer Brown realized that the fourth
dimension had to be a dimension of time. On page 58 and 59 in Chapter 11 of Laws
of Form, speaking of the “imaginary state” he says:
“Since we do not
wish, if we can avoid it, to leave the form, the state we envisage is not in
space but in time. (It being possible to enter a state of time, without leaving
the state of space in which one is already lodged.)”
Both of these
statements by Brown are verified by the application of the CoDD in dimensional
extrapolation. The three dimensions of space are measurable in integer quantum
equivalence units. The fourth dimension, measurable in integer multiples of i, the
square root of -1, completes the 4-D domain, which includes the three
dimensions of space. Thus, entering the 4-D domain of space-time does involve
leaving the domain of space.
The same mathematical
invariance, described in detail in several other published papers, requires
that, after three dimensions of time, the next three dimensions cannot be
dimensions of space or time. They have to be dimensions of consciousness,
measurable in units of integral complex numbers, a + bi, and the conscious
domains also contain the space and time domains.
The derivation of the
quantum equivalence units that I call Triadic Rotational Units of Equivalence
(TRUE), the basic measurement units of the Calculus of Dimensional Distinctions
(CoDD), has been published in several books and papers. (See References.) These
quantum equivalence units are defined by the mass and volume of the free electron,
the smallest stable elementary “particle”. This definition of the TRUE ties the
TDVP model to physical reality and the application of the CoDD using them
solves a number of problems that are not addressable in the current mainstream
paradigm known as the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Physical parameters
like the mass of the proton and neutron, and the Cabibbo quark mixing angle,
calculated from TDVP theory correspond exactly, or within measurement error,
with experimental data. These results verify the TDVP model and the correspondence
of the structure of pure mathematics with the logical structure of reality.
Conclusion:
Time, like space, is three dimensional, and the reality we experience as human
beings consists of the stable union of mass, energy and gimmel in a nine-dimensional
domain, three of space, three of time, and at least three of consciousness.
ERC – 11/21/2021
