We may not like getting older but, in the developed world, most of us would feel short changed if we only got three score years and ten and, while it's true that you only get to be one age at a time, it's a pity that we don't seem to have much choice over the order. From smooth faced babies to wrinkly old codgers the signs of aging are the signs of decay. The thermodynamic arrow carries us with it to the grave..
For physicists time is a real conundrum. At the level of particle physics all the reactions that take place are reversible, you simply couldn't tell if a film of the events was running backwards.. Step up to the scale of everyday objects and there's no problem. Cups very rarely assemble themselves from a pile of scattered pieces. The general tendency for things to become more disordered, unless there's an input of energy from outside (which inevitably comes at the expense of even greater disorder somewhere else), gives time a natural direction.
Even the order of events isn't completely fixed. I might think that event A happens before event B but for another observer in a different inertial frame, i.e. someone that I would judge to be in motion, they could be equally confident that B comes before A. The one thing we do know is that the dimensions of time and space are thoroughly mixed up. Whilst Einstein's two theories of relativity may seem counter intuitive, unless you're blessed with that particular kind of intuition, they undoubtedly work. For example, one of the predictions of the Special Theory is that when you speed up an object it gets heavier (this is so that the combination of the energy it has by virtue of its mass and the kinetic energy it has by virtue of its motion remains the same for all observers no matter how they might happen to be moving). This means that the protons being accelerated in the Large Hadron Collider get heavier as they speed up and the super conducting magnets that keep them on track have to adjust to this increased mass. Programmed by the equations of the Special Theory they contain protons moving 10,000 times a second around a 27km circle in a tube little wider than a drain pipe. So far, the theory works with astonishing precision. The surprisingly non trite explanation for the the existence of time, given by the physicist John Wheeler, is that "time is what stops everything happening all at once".
It's how we think about the passage of time, the metaphors that we use, that is the point of this post. For psychological reasons upon which I could only speculate, most cultures in the world think of the passage of time as a metaphorical journey. One in which the future lies before us and the past gets left behind. Hence we get the expression "going forward" as a replacement for "in the future". Perhaps, getting drawn into half arsed speculation, this usage is tied up with the general idea of progress and of their being some sort of goal towards which we progressing.
However, a recent article in the New Scientist suggested that there are some cultures in which it isn't the past which is behind us but the future. After all, we can see what has happened in the past but can only guess what might happen in the future. And so, just like being in a rearward facing seat on a train, the future comes up from behind and turns into the past as it flashes by.
Spike Milligan might have sung "I'm walking backwards for Christmas" but I'm going backwards for life.
There's a famous quote from Frankfurt School Marxist Walter Benjamin:
ReplyDelete"A Klee drawing named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."
Not sure that adds much, but ...
Mike
Perfect. I even recognise the image being described without ever having known who it was by or what it was called.
ReplyDeleteI have to admit though, that identifying progress with the passage of time would seem to make progress almost inevitable.
Astrophysicists now have evidence that, rather than gravity slowly bringing the big bang to a halt, the rate of expansion of the Universe is actually increasing. Perhaps the purported agent for this, dark energy, could stand in for the Storm from Paradise and still leave room for us to debate whether we're progressing or not.
You clearly need re-educating into the totally scientific class theory of history, comrade ;) All that bourgeois science has muddied your thinking...
ReplyDeleteDo you remember the Posadists? Their impeccable logic was that, given the revolutionary inevitability of progress via the historical engine of class conflict (or however that old song goes), any extraterrestrial visitors would, inevitably, be socialist in orientation, as they must -- by definition -- be from post-capitalist planets.
Makes perfect sense.
Mike
I clearly stopped listening at that point. Thanks for filling me. I can now stop doing whatever it was I was doing and just sit back and let inevitability take its course.
ReplyDeletePerhaps the apathy of the masses is really just a sign of their advanced class consciousness.
I remain amazed at your ability to pluck an appropriate quotation, as if from thin air, as it were. Or have you just got a heap of them waiting for the appropriate circumstances as in "Do you mind if I smoke?" "I don't mind if you burst into flames" (Though the various smoking bans mean that's getting less and less likely to ever find a use.)
"I can now stop doing whatever it was I was doing and just sit back and let inevitability take its course." Yes, I think this was where classic Marxism let everyone off the hook. Give to charity? Agitate for workable compromises? What, and delay the inevitable historical process?
ReplyDeleteQuotes? Both: I have a heap, but it's in my mind. For some reason I have always liked the Groucho Marx one, waggling his cigar, "Mind if I don't smoke?"
Mike