I attended Catholic elementary school in Illinois during the 1950s.  Some 60 years later, two memories from that experience still stand out.  The first dealt with Hell, a really hot, pain-filled, agonizing place where the dead resided after committing a mortal sinꟷforever.  That description really scared me, especially after I ate meat on Friday a few times, which then qualified as a mortal sin and a quick trip to Hell.  The second memory concerned Heaven, a lush, beautiful, pastoral scene where one travelled (after death, of course) to be with God, who officiates thereꟷforever.  A trip to Heaven required Friday meat abstinence, no serial killing, raping, flag burning, etc.  One aspect of both scenarios disturbed me, the notion of forever.  I didn’t mind a trip to Heaven for a short visit to see what things are like there—milk and honey and other nice stuff—but not forever.  I might have even considered Hell just as a brief visitor but without the pain.  The Medieval graphic images of a tiered condominium in Hell made for interesting observation, but an existence without time frightened the Hell out of me.  I couldn’t deal with words like lasting, perpetuity, eternal, enduring, and ageless either.  Later, I discovered concepts such as infinity, zero, asymptotes, and limits in math.  I ultimately became a Naturalist, one who believes primarily in physical and biological laws as reality.

Human culture is drenched in time-related words and phrases, thousands of them in every language: clock time, dinner time, past, frozen in time, present, future, Miller time.   I’ll get back to you later.  Live in the moment.  It was a long time coming.  In 1992, I was a geologist. Tomorrow, we move clocks back one hour. Time flies when you’re having fun. For the hundredth time, shut up!  And it just keeps going.  Just check the Internet, and you’ll see thousands of phrases and words dealing with time.  Time permeates our lives.  We are human beings and experience human (anthropomorphic) consciousness.  We seem to be the most conscious living beings on the planet, although I’m not certain of that.  Existence is about time.  It’s all rather complicated.  In high school and college, I discovered physics and philosophy, Newton and Einstein, Darwin, Aristotle, and many other smart people from the past.  I read about quantum theory, photons and the nature of light, and time itself.

My friend Michael Delvaux and I have been collaborating on time.   We occasionally talk about esoteric subjects like free will, the meaning of existence, and foliation in two billion-year-old metamorphic rocks. He’s a geophysicist and has the ability to think in terms of equations and the rock cycle.  I can handle the rock cycle but without the equations.  We had recently started a discussion about time and the meaning of time.  To illustrate the curvature of space, Michael pointed out a hypothetical location for the Tadpole galaxy, a composite star system about 420 million light years away from us somewhere in the Draco constellation.  Tadpole is a spiral galaxy that merged with a smaller intruder galaxy about 100 million years ago forming a long tail about 100,000 light years long.  The magnitude of these numbers is astounding.  Michael’s point though, was to identify that the current location of Tadpole is not where we were seeing it.  The light currently emitting from the source is more than 400 million light years old.  The galaxy is now somewhere else.  Space-time is curved.

We agreed there are different ways to think about time.  First, there is day-to-day time, weeks, months, or years, the span of our individual lives.  Humans think in terms of living at most 100 years, a very long time.  Then there are historians who think generationally using much larger segments of time.  They study wars and pandemics, cultural changes over many generations, empires and civilizations.  People may perceive time differently depending on their views of science, religion, philosophy, and the arts.  As humans, we perceive time in the context of our own lives first, memories of our past, a fleeting present, and an anticipated future.  We see time as a personal experience as well as an event witnessed by the entire human population.

Some people are limited by spiritual or religious beliefs and cannot time travel beyond history, a frame of reference established in the Old Testament or other treatises.  According to a recent Gallup poll, forty percent of U.S. adults hold a view that God created the Universe in its present form within the last 10,000 years.  That’s a significant plurality of the population, one that seriously influences the spiritual and political thinking of the Nation.  Many Americans view creation in allegorical terms, in metaphorical years, or we just don’t want to think about time beyond human history.  It’s like death.  The easiest way to end a conversation is to suggest talking about death.  Religion and spirituality are complex subjects.  I have friends who are Mormons.  They believe that when they die, they will be joined by their deceased relatives in some kind of reincarnated state in Heaven in perpetuity, but it’s very complicated.  As a non-Mormon, it’s impossible for me to attain as high a place in Heaven.  My friends are geologists, and they believe in deep time, evolution, the scientific method, and the nature of geologic phenomena.  In the Dutch Reformed Church, Christians do not earn their salvation.  It’s a gratuitous gift from God.  That concept really disturbs me. I’ve pondered all of these conflicting views and can’t seem to reconcile the contradictions.  I guess that’s why I’m a Naturalist.

What about the arts and esthetics, everything from creative writing, architecture, music, painting, drama, photography?  Art forms are snapshots of time, but not necessarily. It depends on how we view them.  It may take a lot of time to create an object of art.  Creative media transcend time and the scale of time.  Looking back at a documentary on the Civil War, one can view that tragic event as an instant of time.  Looking at in detail, it spanned four tortuous years, a long time by human standards.  Clark Blaise, in his book Time Lord, addresses the portrayal of time in the arts.  He introduces the term atomizing, the dissection of time into minute segments, by analyzing Gustave Caillebotte’s famous painting, Paris Street, Rainy Day.  I remember that work (an immense 7 X 9 foot painting) when I last visited the Art Institute in Chicago some years ago.  I gazed at the integration of time and motion on a cloudy, rainy day in an urban landscape, the footsteps of umbrella-clad men hurrying across a cobblestone street as buildings appeared to retreat in the background, a strolling couple conversing about mundane events of daily life. Time permeates the arts.

Archaeologists and paleoanthropologists think beyond history at the evolutionary and cultural development of humans, usually in terms of thousands of years.  They analyze artifacts, tool making, hunter-gatherer cultures, and broad changes in human development.  With an increasing time frame, geologists and geophysicists take over.  They lap up millions or a few billions of years at a shot.  Earth scientists think big, way past human participation, beyond all complex creatures, into the origin of life and the early history of our planet.  When I taught introductory geology classes, I summarized the uses of geological knowledge: economics, safety, the environment, mineral extraction, etc.  I also introduced the term poetic geology, having an aesthetic appreciation of our planet and deep time while living day-to-day on a large rock.  The biggest thinkers of all are cosmologists and astrophysicists, ponderers of the origin of the Milky Way galaxy and the Universe.  But scientists jump time frames too.  A check may still bounce at the end of the month if an astrophysicist is so busy studying deep time and the Universe that she forgets to pay a bill.

According to Newton, absolute time exists independently of humans and progresses at a consistent rate through space.  Einstein put an end to that static view by saying that time (in terms of past, present, and future) is an illusion and varies with the observer depending on location and velocity in space.  It’s just an additional dimension added to three spatial dimensions he called space-time, resulting in a block universe.  Time is dependent on an invariable light speed (some 300 million km/second or 1.6 billion mph).   Space-time must be flexible, resulting in a warped visible Universe.  Gravity is nothing more than the warping of space-time around large masses such as stars and galaxies.  In short, time is relative and can only be understood clearly with mathematics. 

We humans perceive the passage of time by experiencing motion at multiple scales.  Based on the math, exceeding the speed of light requires an infinite amount of mass and energy, but as a space explorer approaches that speed, time slows and ultimately stops.  Einstein called this time dilation.  That concept reminds me of other invariables in physics: Planck length and absolute zero.  The Planck length is the smallest distance in which conventional laws of physics apply.  Technically, nothing smaller can exist.  At absolute zero (459.67 degrees F), all molecular and subatomic motion ceases, which is impossible according to physicists because reaching it would require an infinite amount of work.

Then there’s the issue of entropy.  The second Law of Thermodynamics says that potential energy decreases in a closed system with increasing time.  In simpler terms, this means that disorder or randomness increases with time in any closed system.  Things get messy as time progresses.  You can’t unbreak an egg.  We are born young and die old.  Time can only move in one direction.  Entropy has been an intrinsic property of our Universe since the Big Bang, whatever that really means.  Apparently time did not exist before the Big Bang.  If T is time, and T=0 at the Big Bang, then the Universe has existed for all time.  Okay, I can only superficially grasp this, so I decide to visit some philosophers in a branch referred to as ontology, the study of existence and the nature of reality.

Robert Kuhn is the creator, writer and host of Closer To The Truth, a public television series featuring the world’s leading philosophers investigating humanity’s deepest questions about the Universe, human consciousness, and the search for the meaning of existence (Space.com, 7/6/15).  Kuhn interviewed several philosophers to determine how they thought about time.  I also read Jim Holt’s book, Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing, some of the works of Adolf Grünbaum, a philosopher of science at the University of Pittsburgh, and additional works of physicists, Timothy Ferris, Brian Greene, Lisa Randall, and others.  I wanted to determine if time is real or just an artificial construct of the human mind.  I’ve summarized a few tidbits from the article by Kuhn below.

Huw Price, a philosophy professor at Cambridge, suggested that the three basic properties of time have origins in the human mind rather than in a physical universe.  They are (1) the nature of the present, (2) a flow or passage of time, and (3) an absolute direction or arrow of time.  We sense the arrow, the present, and can only move in one direction.  Price added that physics gave us a block universe with four dimensions, and Einstein’s theory of relativity established that change is an illusion. The past, present, and future are here together.

According to Andreas Albrecht, a cosmologist at UC Davis, “The essence of relativity is that there is no absolute time, no absolute space. Everything is relative. When you try to discuss time in the context of the Universe, you need the simple idea that you isolate part of the universe and call it your clock, and time evolution is only about the relationship between some parts of the universe and that thing you called your clock.”

Julian Barbour, a British physicist, identifies time as a succession of images or snapshots constantly changing from one to another.  Change or motion is real but time is not.  Time is just a reflection of change.  Our consciousness constructs a sense of time.  John Polkinghorne, a quantum physicist and Anglican priest states that time is real and relentless, not an illusion at all based on the theory of relativity.  Kuhn ends his article with the following:

“The idea that time is not real is counterintuitive. But many ideas about how the world works that humanity had taken for granted have required a complete rethink.  What reality is depends on what time is.  Is time irreducible, fundamental, an ultimate descriptor of bedrock reality?  Or is our subjective sense of flowing time, generated by our brains that evolved for other purposes, an illusion?  Opinion is divided, but many physicists and philosophers now suspect that time is not fundamental; rather, time emerges out of something more fundamental—something non temporal, something altogether different (perhaps something discreet, quantized, not continuous, but smooth).  The alternative, of course, is our common intuition: time does flow, the present is super special as the only real moment, and the deep nature of reality is one of becoming.  I cannot decide.”

I cannot decide either, even with my geological prejudices and the bits of remembered knowledge from college courses in physics and chemistry, philosophy, social science, and history.  So I decide to read about human history and the nature of thought.  I went to Sapiens by Yuval Harari.  The book received mixed reviews but is an authentic and revealing representation of human history, how humans think.  Harari teaches at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  According to Harari, humans are myth makers, which separates them from other creatures.  Humans use imagination and language to create new mythical worlds of religion, politics, money, corporations, cities and towns, social systems, and other institutions as a way to organize and control the World.  Without myths, there would be nothing to bind humans together.  Individuals are memory makers too, but as a species, humans are myth makers.  The genetic mutation that allowed the cognitive powers of speech and imagination to emerge some 70,000 years ago enabled the myth making process to begin.  Maybe time is just another myth, a complex one that simply addresses the progression of events, natural and human phenomena.

It’s surprisingly warm for a mid-February afternoon, just shy of 60 degrees.  The sun is shining brightly behind a cloudless sky, and I can see clearly to the far horizon.  There’s no one around but me.  I’m standing on a broad pediment surface on the north side of the San Juan River, about 10 miles west of Bluff, Utah, gazing at the river 100 feet below me.  My early Christmas shopping is going well.  I’ve collected polished jasper pebbles from pediment gravels covering the surface.  They are bright red to orange and yellow, burnished by wind and water, ventifact memories of an old Pleistocene river channel now suspended above the modern day river.  Ten thousand years ago, during the retreat of mountain glaciers to the east, torrents of water cut into the Mesozoic surface I’m now standing on.  The pebbles have been carefully crafted by nature, winnowed to perfection and polished by the elements.  I carefully examine a few and bag the best.  Later, I will write a short missive about their geologic history to include with each gift and place bunches in small muslin bags.

I continue to gaze at the distant horizon.  It’s peaceful here today.  I mull over the vast amount of time involved in creating this landscape and its hidden treasure.  That’s what geologists do.  I look to the south, then turn and look north.  Bluffs of the Entrada Formation form the sides of an even older, higher, wider river valley, one that might be a hundred thousand years old.  It’s hard to say.  The San Juan River and its antecedents have drained the Colorado Rockies for millions of years, carrying debris west and south into the San Juan and Colorado Rivers to ultimately empty into the Gulf of California.  Fifty million years ago, my pebbles were embedded in buried layers of Jurassic sandstone, maybe the Kayenta, Bluff, or Morrison Formations, cherty layers formed by subterranean waters buried beneath several thousand feet of younger Cretaceous rocks.  The younger overlying Cretaceous cover is as old as 100 million years.  It formed in an inland sea that blanketed the region, shales and sands during a vast Greenhouse climate.  Thousands of cubic miles of these rocks have since been loosened and carried downstream into the drainage systems.

Still buried beneath me are thousands of feet of older sedimentary rocks, depositional remnants of Early Mesozoic and Paleozoic rivers, lakes and oceans that existed from 200-300 million years ago.  That’s not much time when compared to stuff yet deeper, trilobite-bearing limestone beds of the Early Paleozoic, and the oldest rocks, Precambrian granites, schists, and gneisses.  I consider where the nearest Precambrian rocks are exposed at the surface, the oldest metamorphic rocks we call basement.  There’s the inner gorge of the Grand Canyon, of course, at the bottom of the Grand Staircase, but even older basement rocks are found in the Uinta Mountains in northern Utah, 200 miles north of me.  There, the Red Creek Quartzite, a metamorphosed quartz sandstone, was dated radiometrically at about 2.7 billion years.

The geologic intervals represented here are staggering, mind-boggling chunks of geologic time, crustal plate movements, evolution of mountains, development and extinction of life forms.  For me, time does exist.  It’s deeply entrenched in my geologically-focused mind, staring at me in bold face type with explanation points!  It forms the basis of my field of study, the way I think and perceive reality.  If time is a myth, it’s a vivid, seemingly realistic one, full of color, animation, and splendor created by Sapiens.  It’s time to walk back to my vehicle and return to my campsite.  I try to mentally reassemble North America during the Early Paleozoic while pouring a double scotch (on the rocks).

The future ain’t what it used to be — Yogi Berra