Read The Return (Enigma of Modern Science & Philosophy) Page 6

  The sand squelched under my feet. The rain had stopped and a weak sun tried to break through the gray on the horizon. I stood for a moment to take in the beauty. It was inspiringly serene. It always is after the rain. The air has been purified. All the man-made pollutants have been washed away. Behind me the outline of the mountain against the skyline was crystal clear. The sun was now shining almost horizontally onto its peaty slopes and the chocolate browns and virgin greens condensed into a brilliant canvas. If I were a painter I would love to capture the intricate beauty of the moment. Into my canvas I’d try to instill some of my calmness at that very moment. I’d try and impregnate it with my being. The scene would be a window into my world yet a world shared by others. Do they see the same beauty?

  I walked on deep in thought. The sun while bright was not a warming sun and I needed to keep moving to generate heat. As the pace picked up I felt my temperature rise. My metabolism was converting some of the fatty breakfast into heat that spread throughout the body. The great irony about being outdoors is that we do not need central heating to keep our bodies warm. We move as nature intended and in doing so we burn up the excess fat that otherwise gets stored in embarrassing parts of our bodies. The indoor life is responsible for most of the obesity in western life. The ancient hunter gatherer was never going to suffer from a bulging tummy. Maybe we need to reconsider how we conduct our indoor life. So many hours are wasted going to the gym to work off excess calories from our poor lifestyles. If we determined never to sit down, to constantly busy ourselves at tasks of a physical nature, then the need not only for an expensive gym session but also for as much expensive heating would be obviated.

  I was thinking really of a return to nature. Get away from the sedentary life of television, computers and armchairs. Be a doer not a consumer. The modern paradigm has a fixation on consumption. The basis of economic life is one of personal greed. Advertising tells us we are worth it. We indulge and in our indulgence become less humane more self-consumed. Modern living forces us to become more inward looking. This introspection is a form of disease that consumes part of our humanity. Essential aspects of sociability are lost in succumbing to modern paraphernalia. The television or computer screens are some of the greatest threats to the norms of social convention. Children now associate meals, not with happy concourse around a table with chat about the events of the day, but with sitting passively on a sofa watching an inane sit-com that portrays a false virtual world full of senseless melodramatic themes. More and more the content of television programs descends to the level of the puerile.

  If not watching television the modern person must be hooked into a game, listening to music on earphones or maybe aimlessly surfing the internet. There is an avoidance of the quiet space of the personal in all these activities. The young person needs props to distract from the realities of life. As a result the level of self-awareness becomes diminished and the outcome is an individual who not only has problems with sociability but also with living with himself.

  This kind of thought shows that I am getting old - I chided myself. I am out of touch with the modern world. I don’t like what I see. I hanker after the old. I have become a conservative in my later years. How my younger self would have laughed in disbelief. I could never come to that. It seems to be part of growing older. I want the present to be like the past. Times change and so does the norm. If people want to watch ‘soaps’ while gulping down their dinner on the sofa - so what? The happy meals around the kitchen table are a lie. Life was never that rosy. Time has made them seem that way. I have filtered out the bad bits and maybe I am filtering out the good bits of modern life.

  There is no book of life. The Bible and other sacred books were written for an ancient society. What is needed is a modern bible. Perhaps the United Nations should convene an international committee to write a modern book of life. The committee should not have politicians on it but should be made up of renowned artists, scientists, philosophers, musicians, poets and literary figures. The religious should not be left out even though they themselves practice exclusivity. The theme of the committee should be inclusiveness. The most important thing is that the book of life should be an open book, one that is subject to continual change reflecting the changing environment that the individual experiences. This committee should become a permanent review committee. It would be the most powerful group in the world. There-in might be its downfall. Arguments would arise about its composition and how members were elected. Groups of increasing diversity would want representation. The committee would enlarge and descend into ineffective chaos. The book of life would be doomed.

  All great books have their discrete set of followers and the followers must blindly subscribe to the tenets of the book. There is no room for change. This lack of change is what has given the great religions of the world their longevity. To be conservative is to survive. Perhaps that is why we tend to be conservative as we get older. We know from experience what has worked for us and we are loath to experiment. The room for error or failure has greater consequences when our time is running out. There is less time to start over. That is why most people are most creative in their early years. The life ahead makes them unafraid of failure. There is plenty of time to try again.

  Time is always on my mind. I feel its constant ebb. As each moment passes I know the store of my life-force empties. At what point did I start to feel that the half way point was reached? There is no defined midway through a life. For most of my life I felt I was young and then unknowingly the paradigm had changed and I fell into the old category. There was no life event. I took the death of my parents in my stride - saddened but not threatened in my own existence. The divorce was a threshold but not one related to my age. At some stage I realized I had passed a tipping point and I fell over into old age.

  It was when I asked myself the question - ‘Is this all there is?’ - that I realized I had left youth behind. As a young man I ploughed my way through life without awareness of my existence. I just got on with it. I drank, played games, caroused, woke with a heavy head and then started all over again as if there was all the time in the world. Life was a playground in which to experience as much as possible. Work, career, were enablers. There were no longer term goals. Youth was decadent. But that is what youth should be. It should ignore the responsibilities of old age. There is no accountant weighing up the purpose of our actions. To live life you have to experience it. Thinking is for old men.

  At some stage I started to think about life and that is when time revealed itself to me. Since then I have been jousting with time. Attacking it in forceful thrusts and retreating always from its insistent rebuffs. Time is like a monster that looms over us yet we can neither repulse it nor conquer it. It plays tricks on us - feigning friendship only inevitably to betray us by mockingly revealing the terror of death. No - I am no Socrates or Spinoza. I want to cling to life. I fear death.

  My steps remained as imprints on the wet sand. They stretched backwards as a world line record of my errant path. Each imprint was a point in space but its position in time was not quite clear. The time had passed. The mark in the sand was in my present - it was the making of the imprint that was in my recent history. How could I see this in space-time? It was not intuitive or natural. The precise moment of footfall was gone yet space-time suggests that it still exists somewhere not accessible to me. I found this hard to believe. Maybe space-time was just a mathematical construct after all. The scientists who claim a reality for it could be deluding themselves. If space-time really exists then my moment of footfall must be forever repeated in the infinitely receding worlds of my past. This vision has no economy of content.

  So what if space-time doesn’t exist? Space certainly exists. I perceive it and I know of no human being who has not felt its presence. That could mean that space and time are separate quantities and not part of an integrated construct such as Minkowski space-time with its time cones of light past and future. Perhaps our understanding of time as a
real phenomenon is incorrect. Space ‘is’ and is occupied by objects. These objects are in perpetual motion relative to one another and there relative positioning is what gives the illusion of a separate phenomenon called time. The movement of the objects in space is caused by forces that relate to the type of object interacting. At the level of planets, stars and galaxies, it is the gravitational force that operates. It is an extremely weak force and thus gives rise to a concept of time that is very long term. The resultant changes in space occur relatively slowly; the earth takes a day to rotate, a year to orbit the sun. The sun takes two hundred million years to orbit the galaxy. The Milky Way in turn moves in intergalactic space on even longer time scales. At each scale of time the yardstick is the rate of movement of some slower scale. It is as if the measure of time is correlated to our view of space. On earth the space is that of the daily spinning of the planet about its axis. It sweeps space around with it, the space of our atmosphere and biosphere. The movement causes changes in the weather systems causing winds and cloud movements that are the local markers of time. The constant rate of rise and fall of the sun across the sky makes out time as something continuous and even in its flow.

  The greatest mystery has to be what has happened to the immediate past. Has it disappeared into nothingness? Philosophically and scientifically if the past persists then the future also exists. What then of free will? Maybe the past does not exist, nor the future. What only is exists is the ‘now’. This is consistent with the view that time is just the relative position of objects in space. Now is just one layout of all the objects in the universe. Now, for me, is my visual and perceptual ability to see the nearest objects to me as they are currently moving. I am limited by my visual field to a limited subspace of the universe and as the objects therein, including my own body, change position I get the delusion of time passing. All that is happening is that the objects are changing position in space in accordance with the force laws. When I look at the skies and the heavens on a starry night it is the force of gravity that causes the movement of these large distant objects. When I look around me at the trees, birds, animals and indeed other human beings, it is the electromagnetic force that causes the movement of all these things. Compared to the force of gravity this is a far more powerful force - greater than gravity by a factor of ten to the power of forty! Luckily this powerful force always seeks an equilibrium state in which there is no net external effect. It settles down in neutral atoms which make up all the moving objects of our universe. The way it forms these atoms and their subsequent interaction gives rise to the chemistry of life. The more modest pace of chemical interaction as compared to the fast, speed of light pace of the electromagnetic force is what gives us our sense of human time flow. The changes in our bodies occur at this modest bio-chemical rate and our observance of these changes gives us our sense of psychological time. This psychological time is sometimes supplemented by electrochemical nerve cell changes that generate a keener sense of time in times of danger or excitement.

  As humans we should be unaffected by the changes generated by the electromagnetic force except in their subsidiary electrochemical instances. We do not see an atom losing or gaining an electron. While we experience the impact of millions of photons entering our eyes the single photon is outside our range. If we could sense these events happening as they do at the speed of light -some three hundred thousand kilometers a second - what we would experience is that, relative to our normal world, the world of electrons and atoms changed at an incredibly frantic pace. The sheer amount of change would make our sense of time go askew and we would sense time rapidly passing - a lifetime’s change could occur in one second. But this is nonsense - no human being can ever experience such rapid change. In less than a twelfth of a second an observed electron would be distant from the observer by a distance comparable to the circumference of the earth. To observe such an electron an observer would have to be sited in deep space with very special eyes. The ingenuity of humans has got round this obstacle by replacing human eyes with special instruments that can track the movement of the electron even at these great speeds. This can never add to the human paradigm of time as sensed by the body and time remains firmly rooted in the bio-chemical change rate.

  Quantum mechanics has opened up the world of the infinitesimal time scale. Scientists talk of incredibly tiny times such as ten to the power of minus thirty five seconds. In fact they have reconstructed the initial moments after the Big Bang at these very time scales. What that tells us about the world at that time is that changes were happening furiously. The more the universe changes the greater it can be dissected into smaller time increments. But the curious thing is that the ‘now’ for the world just milliseconds after the big bang is the same as the ‘now’ for the present époque with the only caveat that there was no conscious observer there to experience it.

  Time is change. For us here on earth we are lucky that for the present period we have the resources to record the changes that have occurred. We use these histories to generate theories about future changes and have managed to fabricate laws that at least in a local sense can foretell the future provided we do not require perfection. We can forecast the return of a comet or the eclipse of the moon. Newton’s Laws were sufficient and still are for most astronomical applications. Einstein changed the way we looked at space. The absolute space of Newton was replaced by the concept of a space-time manifold made up of events in space time. An event is another name for a change. The world is made up of events. Yet events must be the interaction of objects and for Einstein’s universe there must be a priori objects or matter. It is quantum mechanics that tries to gives an explanation of the origin of matter at least down to the singularity of the Big Bang. The origin of the initial energy of the universe is the greatest unsolved mystery of science and philosophy.

  One of the greatest problems in unifying Einstein’s General Relativity and modern quantum theory is the carryover of the concept of time from one to the other. Wrapping up time in a new concept of space-time makes time a different concept to human time which is related to concepts of change of things. The general way of showing space-time for the scientist is to see it as a cone shape stretching from the point here and now into a diverging future view. For simplicity the space axes are reduced to a single horizontal x axis and time is seen as a perpendicular axis upwards towards the future. But what is sometimes missed in this representation is that the time axis is actually time multiplied by the speed of light ‘c’. Now a speed multiplied by time is distance but what is not realized is that this distance is very, very large. If the x scale is in meter units, a unit on the ct scale will be over three hundred thousand meters! The scale is incredibly skewed in the ct direction and is in effect swamped by the effect of the speed of light. Bringing this scale into the quantum world does not seem to be a practical proposition. Yet this is what is attempted in some cases.

  A more pressing problem with Einstein’s space-time is that it assumes the continued existence of the past and the real existence of the future. This is completely different from asserting that the laws of science are time symmetrical. If a process is reversible then the changes can be undone to recreate the present but the parallel existence of past and future is no more than a mathematical fantasy. This mathematical fantasy can be depicted on the space-time manifold but only in a heuristic sense. There is no objective space-time manifold.

  All that exists is the now. The now is in fervent change. Time is the concept that arises when the change is recorded. But what gives time its arrow - its sense of flowing into the future? Science gives the second law of thermodynamics as the answer - entropy. Entropy is directed change, change in the direction of increasing complexity. It doesn’t try to explain why all things must become increasingly complex - that is the law. If time is just change of objects in the universe should not the change be just random? It is the forces of nature - gravity, electromagnetism, weak and strong force- that cause the change so it must be an as
ymmetry in one or all of these forces that causes the asymmetry of time.

  Change is caused. It doesn’t just happen. It is driven by forces that act between objects in the world. Science has identified only four separate forces at our current state of the cosmos. At earlier times, infinitesimally close to the Big Bang these four forces may have united into one original force. But in current times these forces have separated out and act independently. The force of gravity is the force that is ever present in our experienced world. It keeps us rooted to the surface of the earth and the earth warm in its proximity to the sun. It generates the heat at the core of the sun to enable the process of nuclear fusion that provides us with our photon energy for bio life on earth. Gravity is an attractive force bringing the objects of the world together. This is an ordered arrangement with a strict evolution from separateness to togetherness. While on the human scale change happens over long times, the resultant motional constraints on the objects have created periodic phenomena that can be translated into time motion - diurnal, seasonal and annual variations. We could set our time system to follow the phases of the moon if we had so felt the need.

  This gravitational sense of time comes from our being in the environment of the solar system. At any instant the objects in our local part of the world are fixed relative to each other and this relation together with the gravitational dynamic laws determine the change and the rate of change into the future. For the gross objects like planets and satellites this future is very determinate. We can predict very precisely where the planets will be in a thousand years time relative to one another. But the actual position in an absolute space of the solar system is less well determined. We know the sun rotates at a certain rate measured in hundreds of millions of years around the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Future prediction now becomes much less precise. Our knowledge of the relative positions of all the solar systems in the galaxy is very limited. Knowledge has now been introduced into our concept of time. To record change one needs knowledge of the current state of the system. At the level of galaxies and even broader still at the level of clusters of galaxies or even the greater expanses of large parts of the cosmos, our knowledge becomes very trivial and our ability to record change almost non-existent. We lose track of time. In fact time has no real meaning at this scale because it entails acquiring knowledge of possibly infinite systems in a possibly infinitely expanding universe. Even if the universe is finite in extent there is no likelihood of attaining complete knowledge of its composition and state changes to which would constitute time generation.

  When there is great change, time intervals must be suitably small. The greater and more complex the system the greater the change that can be effected and the time scale required to capture that change must become infinitesimally small. When we look at the celestial sphere on a frosty night we stare in awe at the expanse of space before us. We know now that the light coming to us from the twinkling dots is coming to us after a journey of millions, even billions of years. We say we are looking into the past. It trivially makes us think that the past can be present. Yet all we are experiencing is photons that have traveled across the vast spaces of the cosmos without being absorbed by intervening objects. The past that they carry the record of is not there now - in the now of our local time. All that is left of the far distant past is the stream of photons. At best they give us information about the past but they do not allow reconstruction of the past.

  Einstein’s theory of General Relativity is a model for reconstructing the past. The dim and distant past of the cosmos appears to us in the form of photons traveling at great speed - the speed of light ‘c’. This world of great speed is far removed from our everyday experience and the space-time in which such speeds are possible must be on the grand scale of the cosmos. The genius of Einstein was to be able to take the information of all these incoming photons and trace them back through a space-time made up of objects changing in space. The key to the structure of space-time was that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light - change could not happen other than at the speed at which light could record it. This defined the network of nodes of space-time. Space-time was a grid where each node was an event or change. The physical spacing was determined by the limitation of the speed of light. This space-time was a construct - a model to recreate the past and create the future. Events in space-time were linked by the dynamic laws of gravitation. Objects being in the world and their mutual attraction made space-time curved unlike flat Euclidean space of which we are aware in our local part of the cosmos. The space-time of General Relativity is that of the grand scale of the universe. It does not have real relevance to our local parish of the sun and its planets. It cannot, as it deals with speeds close to the speed of light which by definition means that the distance scale is set to that of the universe as a whole or at least substantial portions of it.

  While the model attempts to recreate the past and determine the future it does so only at a very crude level. The information it delivers about the present is very limited. It tells us how the universe looks to us now in a very coarse grained way. We may map the galaxies and their clusters into broad groups such as spiral or spherical. We determine the mean density of matter visible yet know that there is substantial unknown matter that has eluded us. Not knowing the present very well means our change observations have to be very broad and fuzzy. The time presented by this lack of knowledge will be correspondingly very broad and will be on a scale of millions of years.

  The gravitational force gives a sense of direction to time. All matter is attracted to other matter and clumps together to form the structure of the universe. When sufficient mass is achieved then the process of nuclear fusion is initiated. The force spectrum is now increased to encompass the strong nuclear force and electromagnetism. These forces counter the force of gravity in its insatiable desire to clump things together even more densely. At the level of the star like object these new forces prevent the gravitational force completing its destiny and creating a black hole or point of infinite density - the singularity. If this were not the case local time would disappear or otherwise become disconnected from the universe. Unfettered gravity leads to the death of time. So while it gives time its direction or arrow, it also points in the direction of the end of time. The great savior is the emergence of the new role of strong and electromagnetic forces that have little or no relevance at the greater scale of the cosmos, being very local in their action. These forces only manifest at the scale of the atom.

  Gravitational time is slowed down by the action of these new forces. The life of a sun can vary from tens of millions of years to thousands of millions of years. The nuclear force engages in a long battle to restrain the tide of invincible gravity. The sparks of the battle are the floods of radiation in the form of low entropy photons that suffuse the direct vicinity of the star providing the energy store for the chemical revolution that eventually led to the first stirrings of life on a rocklike planet caught in its gravitational wake.

  Time for the sun is a different concept to that on earth. The sun is sustained by constant nuclear reactions at its incredibly hot core. Change is chaotic and very rapid. To capture this change the time scale must be infinitesimally small. Yet a single photon can take thousands even millions of years to make its way from the core to the surface from where it can escape to space. While gravity still is felt on earth, its effect of the normal processes of the planet is minimal. Here the electromagnetic force takes pre-eminence. The main elements of matter have long ago being manufactured by suns and their eventual resting place is the rocky earth with its molten core of iron and silicate crust. It is the lucky presence of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and a host of other elements at or near this crust that has allowed the electromagnetic force to engage in chemical synthesis.

  Chemical synthesis like gravity is directional. Gravity looks to clump things whereas chemical synthesis seeks to find chemical equilibrium - a lowest energy stable state for any collection of elem
ents in close contact. What drives this is the need for the exterior electrons in any element to attain a minimum quantum state. Left isolated such elements would settle down to a dormant state. There would be little change after the initial ‘kerfuffle’. Time would cease rather like it has for the moon - a timeless desert in the night sky. But the system is not allowed to settle into monotonous rigidity. The sun’s photons constantly bombard the planet. The energy imparted to the mix leads ultimately to an atmosphere that fortuitously doesn't evaporate off into cold space. Change is maintained by the sun’s low photon entropy. We take in these low entropy photons and re-radiate them back to space at higher entropy. The net energy remains constant - we export as much energy as we import but at a higher entropy. If we didn’t the earth would heat up. Unfortunately humanity has upset the delicate balance and the massive carbon dioxide released by modern society has prevented much photon escape and the earth is overheating accordingly.

  Time on earth is characterized by the pace of chemical change fuelled by the sun’s photons. The direction of this change is the constant quest for thermal equilibrium. The patterns of our weather are driven by attempts to equalize pressures and temperatures in the atmosphere. The state of thermal equilibrium is that of highest entropy. The scientific view of the arrow of time does seem to eventually reduce to that of the direction of entropy flow. The great paradox is that life is a state of very low entropy that has emerged spontaneously from this sea of elements being driven relentlessly in the opposite direction. Life is in effect anti-entropy. If entropy is increasing disorder, life is increasing order. Life is like a backward flowing stream in the great tidal flow. Each rivulet survives for a brief time but eventually like all others is swamped by the power of the greater flow.

  More than just life, all structure in the cosmos is anti-entropy. Structure emerges from the sea of high entropy equilibrium. Structure is like an anti-entropy pushing up stars and galaxies from the clinging viscous ocean of equilibrium. Indeed structure may be likened to gravity but is anti-gravitational only in the sense that it operates in a reverse direction to the entropy arrow of time. Stars are like mountains in the flat plains of high entropy equilibrium. Time is, in essence, structure in the world and our human sensation of time is the perception of change in this structure. Time exists outside of human and living organisms because structure exists. The evolution of structure is the evolution of time.

  Time had passed unnoticed. I had reached the end of the beach and was standing still not looking at anything in particular. The dark interior of a cave faced me and the tide was sending wavelets forward to its entrance. The rain had stopped and I sucked the fresh air into my lungs. My mind had worked too much on theorizing and it needed a washout. By inhaling deeply I had the sensation that the air was infusing my body with its purity. I had a mild sense of euphoria and wanted the moment to last. Somewhere in my body endorphins were being released and the feel-good sensation took hold.

  I turned and began to retrace my steps already beginning to disappear in the coming tide. There was no noise only the musical rhythmic pulses of the water. This is happiness basking in the moment of pure calm. The release of my mind from the turmoil of search was revealing an inner dimension of peace where the current moment in itself was enough to savor.

 

  Seven

  Modern Science and Philosophy