To an email acquaintance on problematical issues and conundrum of time:

Have a nice time in the emerald Isle, I am off that week as well - going to see a friend in Boston in lovely USA for the 4th of July so should be a sunny time.
If you want to go into the discussion about time and Einstein theory of relativity it goes something (briefly) like this. Time is a construction of 'humans' to place a mental consciousness in the passing of a period of sun / moon motion / seasons and a biological 'clock'. This is the passing of time as humans understand it and for convenience is worked out now from the solar year into months-weeks-days etc BUT with the application of different forces of - say nature, i.e. as the earth rotates effecting night and day, over time the spin of the earth is slowing down due to the ‘breaking’ effect of the moon’ and the day gets longer so our measurement of time increases. Also there are different ways of measuring time. Solar time, atomic time, GPS time and static vs. momentum time. In addition if you were in on a planet in a different part of the solar system, with a planets rotation around the sun and its spin being slower or faster, its measurement of time would have to change. Using the moon as an example, as it does not rotate its day / night remain constant, one side is always day the other always night, its time is ‘fixed’ relative to the rotation around he earth and sun and so another means to note the moon passing of time relative to Earth is used i.e. Earth time, however the further you get from the dwelling point of Earth the more difficult it becomes to measure actual time except by using a known standard referenced to earth time and as earth time is ‘solar local’, its relevance diminishes over distance. The same thing would happen if you were in another galaxy, time would be measured and experienced differently. So the first thing to grasps is that time, as humans know it is solely a construction of local convenience, used to note the passing of a period in liner terms, it does nothing to effect or explain the substance of what or why time is, more of this later.

Now this is were it gets really complicated, as you know with distance, the time it takes to transmit a message gets longer and the ‘conversational’ gap increases so it becomes difficult to have a real time discussions. This is a function of distance and the method of communication used, which is governed by the speed of electricity and radio waves that do not exceed the speed of light. So it takes time to get something from one point to another and this bring me to the next element of the time construct.

The theory is that the closer a travelling body gets to the speed of light the slower time seems to go (this has been proven on a small scale so I am not making this up) and as a consequence a human travelling at near the speed of light would 'age' much slower than from whence it came and after making a trip, on return, would find those left behind had 'grown' older with the traveller being comparative younger.

This throws up the first problem of time – what is the cause of this difference in the experience of time that it can have this physical effect? The assumption is that by the simple expedient of travelling – moving between two points at a speed, somehow slows the time experienced by the moving body down and by inference if it were possible to get to the speed of light, time would perhaps stop or reverse?
In practical every day terms this timing difference does not cause a problem. On a local level, humans time shift regular by gaining time or loosing time when travelling by air to different time zones, adjusting for summer time or winter time, and they have an arranged accommodation with time in differentiating between past, present and future. The instant ‘now’ of time is not required.

This is the current physical dimension of human time, however this theory is based on the notion that time is linier i.e. one tick of a clock follows another and is fixed, that this is not the case and is open to doubt due to the antics of quantum mechanics. This seems to allows an event to occur before there is a cause or for the 'event' to be changed by conscious observation or two event to be seen from a single cause at the same 'time'. As may be appreciated this causes quite a conundrum, yet it is assumed that it is a symptom of the physics of quantum mechanics only. This of course is ignoring the power of dark matter (unproven) that is understood to form the missing 90+% of matter in the universe and has an unknown effect. How is dark matter influencing the visible material universe? If it forms the largest part of the continuum is it the ‘fabric upon which all things depend? Can it be that the nature of dark matter is the boundary between dimensions time and space and it does not exist at all until it becomes a reality in our perception? So for the moment humans only understand time as a practical material construction that limits their ability to circumvent ‘time’.

Why is time so important? In one practical way it is important as it allows coordination of events to take place. However in an, as yet, esoteric way it is not. With the first element it has been important to organise the world social systems. It has a use in the formulation and coordinating action and placing events in time slots. Human’s concept of time is for the moment governed by the physical constraints of their environment and short span of life. All of which is acceptable in the practical world relevant to the habitation of a planet.

On a cosmic scale time is not so important, at least to humans, as they have no control over it and do not understand or use the essence of it. This may always be the realistic case but with the advent of their infringement into space and the desire to go further the practical problem of space travel with a human’s short life span and the time dilation, limits their ability to get much beyond their solar system. This is assuming that an effective propulsion system is devised by them to engender solar travel and that the debilitating physical effects are engineered around. The issues of time dilation in physical space travel will invariable cause more investigation into the nature and mechanics of time and this is were the problems will arise.

There are three current discussions that revolve around time. When did time begin, if it began at all? What is it and the proposition of time travel?
These leads to other human imponderables, if there is intelligent life elsewhere why is it that earth does not have evidence of it, this assume that this other life came into existence and advanced before humans got started and it has the same drive of curiosity and it has space travel ability. Or if there is no life elsewhere why or how did humans come into existence and why did the universe that exists here have to be so big? Look at the night sky and think all these galaxies are just for you! What a magnificent expanse, what a waste and humans can never get there.

It is generally assumed here that time started at the mythical big bang, the start of the universe 15+ billion years ago. The actual point cannot be pinned down as it seems to vary as space observation gets better not that this is actually important as it does nothing to establish the x point at or before the bang that might suggest that there was a ‘time’ before the bang. This could mean that time has a substance not reliant on matter, or it is a function of matter maybe linked to gravitational waves. For the moment humans can only play with the concepts.

To try to put humans notion of time in some context, assume for the moment that there is other intelligent life that has a requirement to measure time, it would do this initially from the base point of their own physical environment – just like humans did but the measure they would use would be different as they relate to their own fixed points, so days, weeks, months, years, devisable measurements of time as humans call them, will be irrelevant to them as their time parameters would be to humans for the value attached to each part – if there is an identifiable part, it will be different. There will of course be ways of drawing parallels rather like a money exchange rate that would work on a practical level but not if there is any interaction between species that might occur over time travel if such a thing existed. Also could there be local difference in time, maybe local differences attached to a galaxy and the gravitational forces it exerts on matter within it?

For the time being it is assumed that the only form of intelligent life is human. There is no real acknowledgment that there is life elsewhere in the galaxy or indeed any ‘alien’ life form that has the ability to space travel. The argument is that if there were it would have made it's self known by now. Also the distance involve in getting from the nearest star system would take 5 solar years and that is travelling at the speed of light (or faster than the speed of light – which is to humans impossible?), or to have incredible long life span or have some way of travelling in hibernation which seems physically impossible as well, ergo there is no other intelligent life in the galaxy but humans on earth.

The nearest galaxy is 2.2m light years away and the nearest star 4.3ly away. The now of our time and the now of a star in another galaxy is exactly the same but we can only relate to it if there is a known fixed point of reference and this is by the observation of light, however light from these distant points is light years old, so in fact the light source may no longer exist. Everything that is observed in the sky is known by light emissions or radio waves and is old data. The light from the sun is 8 minuets old. The now of an instant in space-time can be fixed if one can assume that there is a known datum from which a measurement of the passing of time can be noted, the problem is getting to a fixed beginning. The current idea is that the age of the universe based on the furthest point that can be detected is 15 billion years old, created after the “big bang” and that it is expanding. It is also assumed that at this point ‘time’ began hence there was nothing before. Whether the universe is ‘expanding’ into something or creating the ‘space’ to expand into or is looped back on itself, is unresolved, as is the idea of the opposing view of the universe, as a ‘steady state’ universe, multi universe or multi dimensions.

If the universe is expanding at the speed of light, could this account for the time dilation effect? As all matter is vibrating or moving i.e. electron circulating a neutron the closer matter get to the speed of light the closer it gets to the expansion speed of the universe and so is forced to ‘slow’ down? (Quantum chaos effect) The speed of matter and the expansion speed of the universe become in sync…and possibly if the speed of light is exceeded then the body slips outside ‘normal’ space time to move from space ‘A’ to ‘B’ without the passage of time, so is time a function of speed as the experiment seems to suggest?

The associated difficulty with this idea of time is that it limits the ability of humans to accept that there is the possibility of other life form in the galaxy due to the distance involved and the time it would take to get there or back. This is to some extent a protective stance, it assumes that if intelligent alien life knows of human existence it would attempt to make contact, so where are they? After all, humans have been pumping radio ways out for more that fifty years so there has been enough time to be noticed as a radio source to be investigated. Humans have not picked up their transmissions, they have not responded to ours so aliens can’t exist?

There are a number of issues with this stance and these are: -
If all life in just this galaxy started at the same time, other life sources may not be in any better position to space travel than humans are. There is an assumption with this idea that other life develops at the same speed and follows the same technological physiological path.
If other life does exist and is more advanced due to it being able to maximise the development time it had (based on the idea that intelligent human development has been stalled due to the 5 mass extinction that has occurred on earth) it may be so advanced that it has no need to make its self-known or indeed has any desire to communicate / interfere with a more primitive creature. The parallel here is that if a modern human were able to go back in time with the passing of say 10,000 years there could just be the ability to communicate with distant natives and reach a measure of understanding but taken back to the dawn of humans and it would be like trying to communicate with a seemingly unintelligent creature, there would be no reference points, no common cultural bases, no usable language and would be a task not resolvable.

A further problem, even assuming that there was other alien life, it is quiet conceivable that humans would not be in a position to be able to communicate with it, even assuming again that there was the ability to recognise ‘intelligence’. The success so far of humans in understanding its own species or indeed communication with the nearest mammals – dolphins, whales, monkeys etc does not offer much in the way of confidence that other intelligence could be understood!

So I think that is enough for now, I leave you with the task of adding more obscurity to confound clarity (Notice that I have not gone into the paradox of time travel as I can argue the paradox does not exist it – there is an infinite number of time 'now’s' on different dimensions and changes in one does not affect the other.) Nor have I broached the issues of matter not being a substance at all but is existent as AO energy wave that models the requirement of life. Is matter ‘aware’ that it creates life to know? Is life aware that it shapes matter to be?

All this is most secret so keep it to yourself. A useful starting point is to know that time is all in the mind so you aren’t dead until you are and that bring me to another misunderstanding but that's for next time!

P.27.6.03©