TIME IS NOT WHAT WE THINK IT IS

 ERC 2010

TIME, THE STUBBORNLY PERSISTENT ILLUSION

AFFLICTING CONSCIOUS BEINGS

© Copyright July 2022, Edward R Close

Introduction

These posts reflect the results of my on-going efforts, for about 70 years now, to understand the true nature of reality. These efforts were prompted by an experience I had at the age of fifteen, an experience that set me on a path of science, education, and self-study. After many years, when Dr. Vernon Neppe, MD, PhD, and I first met in person in this life, in Amsterdam in 2010, we were both professionals who had been successful in different fields of science for many years. We discovered that we had reached similar conclusions about the nature of reality, despite the differences in our cultural and educational backgrounds, so we  joined forces to combine and advance our work, and together we developed the Triadic Dimensional Vortical Paradigm (TDVP), a model of reality based on our independent research and the work of several notable scientists of the past, including Albert Einstein and Max Planck, who were instrumental in the last major paradigm shift, a shift in the understanding of the nature of matter, space, and time that prepared the way for a more comprehensive shift to the science of the future which will include the reality of consciousness and Spirit.

Together, we have made an astounding number of discoveries, but by far the most important finding of TDVP was the discovery of gimmel, the third form of volumetric reality which proved to be the organizing non-physical component of atomic structure without which there simply would be no physical universe.

We discovered gimmel while applying the quantum calculus I had developed using normalized data for the electron and quarks from the Large Hadron Collider to define natural quantum equivalence units. When the quantum calculus I developed in 1986, called the calculus of dimensional distinctions (CoDD) was used to analyze the structure of the most stable known physical object in the universe, the proton, the non-physical component of objective reality was discovered.

 

In this series of posts, I am identifying the assumptions that need to be more accurately defined in order to expand the logical system of scientific analysis to include the non-physical aspects of phenomena experienced by conscious beings, and, last but not least, to resolve the “Mind of God” paradox revealed in the last post. This paradox arises from the proof that infinity is necessarily incomplete. In the last post, I explained that the Mind of God paradox results from certain erroneous assumptions about infinity and time. The assumptions associated with the concept of infinity were explored using set theory, and in this post, I will focus on the assumptions associated with the concept of time.

 

The Cultural Aversion to Mathematical Logic, A Brief Lament

Before getting into the details of the assumptions underlying our illusions about time, as revealed by the logic of relativity, quantum physics, and the Triadic Dimensional Vortical Paradigm (TDVP), please permit me the luxury of briefly calling your attention to the recent historical trend toward a pandemic of public disinterest in mathematical logic. I find this cultural aversion, which is especially prevalent in the United States of America, regrettable, and lamentable because it has the potential of completely destroying Western Civilization by devaluing the critical thinking skills that were preserved from times of higher mental and spiritual virtue in the distant past by a handful of philosophers of natural science.

 

We live in an era of explosive mass media sound bites that have short-circuited critical thinking to the extent that the mere mention of the word ‘mathematics’ or ‘logic’ causes the average American to quickly turn away and look for an easily accessible shiny object promising immediate gratification. During my lifetime, (I started public school in St. Louis Missouri in 1940) I have seen the attitude of American public education change from one of honoring intellectual achievement to one of promoting dull mediocrity. As a result, mathematics has become confused with the simple repetitive operations that computers can be programmed to do, and the elegance of pure reason is in danger of being lost to the average person, allowing self-serving individuals in our government and educational institutions to promote a false intellectual elitism that does nothing but divide the citizens of our county and promote class warfare.

 

OK. Now I will get off my soapbox. But I hope that this brief rant will encourage readers to pause and think about some basic concepts of mathematical logic as they apply to consciousness and the conceptual models of reality that we are discussing. Here are some thoughts along that line:

 

·         Scientific paradigms are systems of logic designed to model reality, the ultimate system of mathematical logic.

·         No model of reality is a theory of everything unless it includes consciousness because consciousness is a major part of reality.

·         The system of mathematical logic underlying reality has the same mathematical structure as the logic of consciousness.

·         Only a conscious mind can create a logical model of the way consciousness experiences reality because only consciousness can experience itself as part of reality. Therefore, the reality that we experience is a product of a conscious mind.

 

Time is a very subtle part of the consciousness we experience directly, so let’s have a look at what Einstein actually said about time:

 

“We (physicists) know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion”

“When you think about it, time is an arbitrary construct”

“Time and space are modes by which we think

and not conditions in which we live”

“Time and space are not conditions of existence,

spacetime is a model for thinking”

– Albert Einstein

 

Relativity, Quantum Physics, and Assumptions about Space-time

Albert Einstein spoke about time on many occasions, and his quotes seem to bounce back and forth in one’s mind like the endless reflections of a rainbow around a bright light in a house of mirrors. They reflect the illusions of both time and space because together, as spacetime, they form the 4-D conceptual domain known as Minkowski space. They also allow us to have a peek at Einstein’s state of mind when the quotes were uttered or written. By the end of his life, Albert Einstein had begun to recognize the foreshadowing of the next great paradigm shift away from simple materialism, looming as the result of the acceptance of the counter-intuitive discoveries of quantum physics and relativity, but he would not abandon the convictions of a deterministic physicist. His clinging to a physicalist mind set is revealed in statements like:

 

“The physicist seeks to reduce colors & tones to vibrations, …thought and pain to nerve processes, in such a way that the psychical element as such is eliminated from the causal nexus of existence, and thus nowhere occurs [in the physicist’s model of reality] as an independent link in the causal associations. It is no doubt this attitude, which considers the comprehension of all relations by the exclusive use of only ‘space-like’ [and by extension, ‘time-like’] concepts as being possible in principle, [to represent] what is at the present time, understood by the term ‘materialism’ since ‘matter’ has lost its role as a fundamental concept.”

A mind like Einstein’s, much like science itself, evolves over time, and, I know that, like many other thinkers and writers, I tend to pick the quotes, as much as possible, that coincide with what I believe – and/or know. I also believe that the last insight he had about this subject and took the trouble to write down and publish, is likely to be the best one. In the 5^th and final appendix to the 15^th and last edition of his classic book; Relativity the Special and the General Theory, a Clear Explanation that Anyone Can Understand, on June 9^th, 1952, less than three years before he passed on to the other side of the one-way mirror of consciousness, he wrote:

 

“It is characteristic of Newtonian physics that it has to ascribe independent and real existence to space and time as well as to matter, for in Newton’s law of motion the idea of acceleration appears. But in this theory, acceleration can only denote ‘acceleration with respect to space.’ Newton’s space must thus be thought of as ‘at rest’, or at least as ‘unaccelerated’, in order that one can consider the acceleration, which appears in the law of motion, as being a magnitude with any meaning. Much the same holds with time, which of course likewise enters into the concept of acceleration.”

 

I recommend reading Appendix V, the final addition to Einstein’s “clear explanation that anyone can understand” in its entirety for yourself, if possible, because it gives you, in Albert Einstein’s own words (translated from the original German, the native language in which his thoughts were formed), about as clear a picture as you will find of his thoughts about some of the most important concepts behind the theory of relativity. In that appendix, titled “Relativity and the Problem of Space”, Einstein articulates the reasoning that leads to a very important view of space and time that I want to emphasize and elaborate in the context of the analysis we initiated in the last post.

 

In this last footnote to his explanation of relativity, he concludes that, unlike objects with measurable amounts of mass and energy, space and time cannot “claim any independent existence of their own”. This is a very important factor in determining how we can proceed to complete our analysis in the effort to resolve the mind of God paradox because it means that the assumptions underlying the notions of time and space, key elements in the concepts of acceleration, relative motion, and sequential events, cannot be represented as sets, or elements of sets of existing objects in the same way the assumptions about infinity were in the last post. We must, therefore, find a different way to analyze the assumptions that have created the current wide-spread persistent illusion of time.

 

In addition to the quotes above, a few more quotes may help to clarify the logic of the axiomatic assumptions that need to be corrected to resolve the mind of God paradox and provide the basis of the shift to a new, more comprehensive phenomenology that is provided by the TDVP model. (Phenomenology is the study of consciousness and the experience of reality.) Einstein made no claim to be the first to see a problem with assuming that space, and by extension, time, possess the same level of objectivity ascribed to matter and energy:

 

“Time and again since remotest times, philosophers have resisted such a presumption. Descartes argued somewhat along these lines: space is identical with extension, but extension is connected with bodies; thus, there is no space without bodies and hence no such thing as empty space. … The weakness of this argument lies in what follows. It is certainly true that the concept of extension owes its origin to our experiences… But from this it cannot be concluded that the concept of extension may not be justified in cases which have not themselves given rise to the formation of this concept. Such an enlargement of concepts can be justified indirectly by empirical results. The assertion that extension is confined to bodies is therefore of itself certainly unfounded. We shall see later [in this appendix], however, that the general theory of relativity confirms Descartes’ conception in a roundabout way. … The psychological origin of the concept of space, or of the necessity for it, is far from being so obvious as it may appear to be… The idea of space, however, is suggested by certain primitive experiences.”

 

He goes on to provide an example of the “primitive experience” in the awareness of physical objects placed in boxes. Such an experiences gives rise to the concept of space as something fundamental but does not prove that “empty space” would not still exist if neither objects, nor boxes, nor any kind of containers existed. The reader may have already realized that the boxes and objects example he describes is equivalent to a set theory conceptualization, even though Einstein does not identify it as such. In the set theory language of the last post, one would argue that, if there were no objects, and no sets of objects, finite, or infinite, then a null, or empty set would have no meaning. On the other hand, because there is no way to test this empirically, the argument does not prove conclusively that there would be no space or time without the existence of matter and energy. (This weakness also applies to the argument about infinity in the last post.)   

 

Next, he explains how the principals of relativity, i.e., “no preferred reference frame and constant light speed”, in the special theory of relativity - which deals with uniform unaccelerated relative motion - eliminates the psychologically intuitive concepts of universal spacetime and simultaneous events, consistent with Lorentz’s work and the Michelson-Morley experiment. Then he discusses the details showing how the general theory of relativity does, indeed confirm Descartes’ logical leap to the conclusion that there is no such thing as “empty space”, and consequently no such thing as spacetime without material events. It can be summed up this way:

 

Physical objects are not in spacetime, but physical objects are spatially and temporally extended. In this way, the concepts of ‘empty space’ and time without events lose their meaning.

 

Next, I want to show how the conclusions of Planck and Einstein about the quantized and relativistic nature of matter-energy and space-time, combined with the potential resolution of the mind of God paradox from the last post, require fundamental changes in our basic intuitive assumptions about time.

 

Recall that Max Planck, said “There is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force … We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind.” And Einstein agreed with Planck. He said it this way: “Space and time can claim no existence of their own. … What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. Matter is spirit reduced to a point of visibility. There is no matter.”  

 

However, input data in the form of electro-chemical impulses that the physical sense organs deliver to the brain through the neurological networks existing in our bodies for the conscious mind to process and store as mental images, lead us to assume things about processes that we can’t see because of the extremely small-scale size of quantum phenomena. We think that objective reality is made up of matter and energy interacting dynamically in space and time. The a priori assumptions that support the concept of the existence of an external objective reality are the assumptions that matter, energy, space, and time are actual existing things that make up objective reality. Einstein and Planck are telling us that this is not true.

 

Our assumptions seem to be verified by the fact that we can measure matter as mass, energy as force, space as volumetric dimensions, and time as duration of physical events, all of which we perceive through the senses. But this handy verification is clearly circular reasoning because our proof of the existence of physical objects depends upon the existence of physical objects, and proof of the existence of time as an objective reality, depends on the existence of mass-energy events that depend upon the existence of time!

 

Reality and The Role of Intuitive Assumptions

Our intuitive assumptions about infinity and time play a powerful role in the shaping of our beliefs about reality and even affect how we live our lives. Given that reality is what really exists, it should be obvious that when assumptions behind our beliefs are at odds with reality, many problems will arise because erroneous beliefs lead to mis-guided, ineffective, and possibly even destructive self-detrimental actions. In the last post and in this one, we have identified the a priori assumptions underlying beliefs about infinity and time that are held by most people, and we have seen how they are in conflict with the realities that are revealed by empirical investigation and logical analysis. The task now is to put what we have found out about infinity and time into the proper perspective related to what actually exists as objective reality, into practical application.

 

The universe is remarkably complex and stable, exhibiting numerous precise cyclical patterns that recur without beginning or end for as far as we can see or detect by logical extension, into the distant past and foreseeable future, despite the experimentally documented entropic decay of complex atomic, molecular, and macro structures with the passage of time. The universe appears to be expanding into an endless, perhaps even an infinite extension, toward the most distant visible objects, the enormous brightly burning stars called quasars. Because the contents of the dimensions of reality are quantized, we have been able to push our investigation, conceptually at least, down to the smallest quantum, and to trace the remarkable complexity and stability we perceive all the way down to the most stable physical object in the universe, the proton.

 

We found the proton to be a combination of three rapidly spinning objects called quarks, only one of which, the up quark, even begins to approach the stability of the proton. It is only gimmel, which occurs in measurable quantum equivalence units of volume, but with no mass or energy, that gives the proton additional mass and amazing stability. The fact that the total angular momentum of the three quarks is conserved and increased significantly in a mathematically predictable way in the proton, raises the question of why elementary objects like electrons and quarks are spinning relative to all observers at such high rates of rotation in the first place; an important question that no current theory other than TDVP, attempts to answer.

 

The answer turns out to be relatively simple, requiring nothing more complex than Newton’s Third Law of Motion: “For every force in nature, there is an equal and opposite reaction”. Elementary objects at the quantum level are spinning because the force expanding the universe evokes an equal and opposite reaction, which is the sum total of the inertia created by the spinning of localized vortexes (called elementary particles) in the fabric of reality. OK, I can hear someone saying: but now you have to answer an even deeper question: Why is the universe expanding? A flippant answer might be: “Because empty space sucks!” But we’ve just been explaining that there’s no such thing as empty space! - I can imagine Niels Bohr jumping up and down, dropping his pipe, and spilling his box of matches all over the floor in excitement and anticipation of the progress we are about make!

 

This paradox cannot be resolved quite as easily as the Mind of God paradox because it involves expanding the axiomatic basis of the scientific model of reality to the point where we can understand why the speed of light is the upper limit of relative motion, how one can perceive the extra dimensions beyond the three of space and one of time, and why time and space, like mass and energy, must also be quantized. I also want to get into how consciousness expansion related to this new understanding of time leads to an interesting practical application. But, since this post is already somewhat long, I will stop here and continue with this train of thought in the next post.

 

ERC – 7/16/2022

NEW APPROACH PART TEN

 

TEN: SEEING BEYOND THE LIMITATIONS OF LINEAR SPACE AND TIME 

Copyright 2022, Edward R. Close, PhD

“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.” – Plato

One of the sub-themes of this series of posts is that the advancement of human consciousness occurs by concurrent triadic expansion, i.e., by expanding in three dimensional domains: physical, mental, and spiritual. Neglecting any of the three, leads to serious imbalance and instability. This is because none of the three have much meaning without the other two. Like mass, energy, and consciousness, all three are quantified aspects of the essence of reality, providing conscious experience ranging from the simplicity of physical reality to the subtlety of mental reality, to the infinite complexity of spiritual reality. No model of reality is complete without all three.

At this point in planetary time, because it is the simplest, our understanding of the physical aspect of reality has outstripped mental and spiritual virtue, causing a dangerous imbalance in human societal activity. If a balance of the three is not achieved, civilization will continue to become more and more divided, until the bulk of humanity realizes that we are on the brink of self-destruction. Then, whether it is called TDVP, or something else, a science based on the fundamental recognition of the triadic nature of reality, physical, mental, and spiritual, must emerge.

These posts have also been about recognizing that what most of us call reality is primarily our own involuntary personal conceptual model, burdened with illusions created by our perceptual limitations. If we don’t seek to think for ourselves and expand our consciousness beyond the awareness we were born with, we are simply accepting the average-to-lowest common denominator of the illusions of mainstream mindlessness. Today’s society seems to be designed to interfere with the freedom to seek the truth, rather than to aid in the effort, and formal education, both public and private, and even modern science, has become more of a hinderance than a help.

With the specialization and dumbing down of education over the past century, we now have hundreds of thousands of people who think they are scientists. But the vast majority of them have MS or PhD after their names simply because they parroted back to university professors and department heads what they wanted to hear, while those same professors were too busy getting mostly mediocre papers pushed through the academic bubble of peer-review to teach their students how to think clearly. Sad to say, but, to many of them, any original thought that might actually lead to scientific advancement is labeled as pseudo-science. They are just too busy complying with the groupthink of their narrow field of study, in search of tenure, to think outside the sterile box of simplistic materialism. As a result, there has been no real paradigm shift in human thought since Einstein and Planck, nearly a century ago, - until TDVP.

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”  – Mark Twain

In this post I want to continue to explain the triadic nature of dimensionality. Without a clear understanding of how and why there are three dimensions of space, three dimensions of time, and three dimensions of consciousness, progress in individual consciousness expansion is very difficult. While spontaneous mental and spiritual leaps into hyper-dimensional domains may happen for many of us, an understanding that there is a step-by-step procedure from where you are now, into an expanded state of consciousness, is critical. A basic awareness of the triadic nature of reality is very helpful, if not necessary for progress at this point in planetary time.

Because most of the changes in our individual physical existence are governed by the time cycles of Earth’s rotation on its axis and revolution around the sun, it is difficult to conceive of why and how the apparent flow of time we experience on this planet is not uniform and universal, but it is not. We have Albert Einstein to thank for exposing the cultural shadows and lies related to space and time. But modern science has yet to discover the complex laws governing the connections between the cycles of space, time, and consciousness. With the TDVP model, we are drawing science into a deeper analysis of the triadic nature of reality. In this post, we will have a slightly more detailed look at what applications of the CoDD reveals about the dimensional domains of space and time.

Expanding Our Awareness of Space and Time

With the application of the CoDD TRUE analysis, once again, we find that the phenomenon perceived through the physical senses as light, plays a critically central role in the expansion of our awareness of the nature of reality. The simplest, most basic aspect of light is its constant speed for all observers, regardless of relative motion. While the speed of light is expressed as a ratio of linear units of distance per linear unit of time, in current scientific analysis, CoDD TRUE analysis shows that this linear expression of light speed is inadequate, and that it results in erroneous implications about reality, because light is a three-dimensional phenomenon, not a linear one.

In fact, light is not propagated linearly. It is propagated radially by alternately fluctuating electric and magnetic fields expanding to infinity in every direction of the three-dimensional domain. When expressed in triadic rotational units of equivalence (TRUE), the speed of light is equal to one TRUE unit of space per one TRUE unit of time, For easier calculation in the CoDD, that ratio is set equal to one. At first glance,  this may appear to be identical to the setting of the speed of light equal to one in Planck units, but it is not. In the TDVP model, the speed of light is defined by the expansion of light through one 3-D TRUE volume of space in one 3-D TRUE of time, making the speed of light equal to (one TRUE)/(one TRUE ) = 1. In this way, the speed of light is automatically unity because of the basic principle of quantum equivalence.

The principle of quantum equivalence is the central mathematical axiom of the TDVP. The unitary quantum equivalence of the rest mass and volume of the smallest stable elementary object, the electron, is the most logical natural base unit for analysis of quantum phenomena. Defining the electron mass/energy/volume quantum equivalence unit as the basic unit of measurement for quantum phenomena, allows us to develop a natural primary calculus for mathematical analysis of phenomena at the quantum scale. I call that calculus the CoDD.

Max Planck discovered that energy is quantized and suggested that “there is no matter as such”, while his friend and colleague, Albert Einstein, derived E = mc², defining the mathematical  equivalence of mass and energy, and declared that space and time have no existence of their own. With no physical existence, it seems reasonable to assume that space and time are infinitely divisible, even though energy and the mass equivalence of energy are not. But, if space and time are infinitely divisible, and the speed of light energy moving between two observation and measurement locations is constant, then we have another paradox related to light.

The fact that that this is a paradox may not be immediately obvious, but to see that it is a paradox, we need only remind ourselves that speed is distance traveled divided by the time it takes. For example, if it takes us two hours to drive 100 miles, then we compute our speed as 100 miles divided by 2 hours equals 50 miles per hour. Of course, we didn’t drive at the exact speed of 50 mph all the time during the 2-hour trip, so 50 mph is an average, but light doesn’t speed up or slow down, because light speed is constant. As the linear distance in space between the two points decreases, and the time interval between measurements approaches zero, instantaneous linear velocity (speed) of a moving object determined by Newtonian calculus approaches either some finite linear value divided by zero, or zero divided by zero (0/0), and both are mathematically undefined. What does this mean? Every basic course in algebra includes a demonstration showing that dividing by zero results in erroneous results or mathematical absurdities like 2 = 1.

So, how is this paradox resolved? By looking at the assumptions and determining which one is erroneous. There are only two assumptions in this case: 1) the speed of light is constant, and 2) space and time are infinitely divisible. Constant light speed is the basis of the theory of relativity, and the fact that the speed of light is constant is so well documented that we must accept it as true. So, we are left with the conclusion that the assumption that space and time can be divided into smaller and smaller amounts indefinitely must be wrong. To eliminate the paradox, we simply recognize that TRUE quantum units, whether of energy, mass, space , or time, are three-dimensional. Then, the smallest possible ratio is one 3-D quantum/ one 3-D quantum = 1.

This is just one example of the many ways that ignoring the fact that everything existing in quantized reality is three dimensional, not singular, one-dimensional, or two-dimensional, leads to absurd results. In fact, application of the primary calculus to quantum combinations exposes all of the “weirdness” of quantum mechanics that particle physicists like to talk about, as simply the end result of the inappropriate application of Newtonian calculus to phenomena at the quantum-scale level. Why is the Newton/Leibniz differential and integral calculus inappropriate for application at the quantum level? Simply because it is based on the assumption that space and time are infinitely divisible. Why does it work at the macro-scale? Simply because TRUE quanta are many orders of magnitude (powers of 10 times the basic unit) smaller than the limited precision of our means of direct observation and measurement, so that the facts of quantum-scale phenomena must be ascertained by indirect means and deductive reasoning.

In future posts in this series, I intend to further clarify exactly how the misapplication of Newtonian calculus to quantum phenomena came about and why it leads to paradoxes and errors that can be explained and corrected using the quantum calculus I call the calculus of dimensional distinctions (CoDD). We will also see how the appropriate application of the quantum mathematical principle made the discovery of non-physical quantized reality possible. Of course, I am referring to the discovery of gimmel, the measurable non-physical aspect of reality.

ERC – 2/14/2022

THE NATURE OF TIME

 

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