Monday, May 17, 2010

The Nature Of Time Revisited

By: Rachmat Sudibjo



“I know what time is until someone asks me about it,” said St. Augustine (400 AD). Many philosophers and scientists have tried to explore about the nature of time and relate it with the solar time, biological or atomic time, but nobody has given a clear explanation about the mechanism on how the time has taken place.
For that purpose, we wish to take a simple idea from the fundamental characteristic of time which consists of the past, present, and future. If we consider time passage as a line, then we can imagine an instant as a point in that line representing the present (now). 

This point splits the timeline into two parts: the past on one side of that point and the future on the other side (Fig. B)

Now, imagine that we remove the point. Then, what will we get? We have time without now and consequently without the past and the future. We, thus, have the eternity, a timeless world (Fig. A). We see that time is created from eternity through the act of separation. It is the most profound philosophy about the nature of time.

The point that separates the past from the future in this structure of time (Fig. B) is a mathematical point abstractly put in on a straight line. The end of the past is almost immediately linked to the beginning of the future, as though the point that separates them exists is just about an imaginary ("Maya”).

We can describe our feeling about the passage of time as though the present time (now)  is sliding linearly along the timeline. Following the principle of relativity such a linear timeline should form, on a grander scale, a grand circle (Fig. C) as such the past and future times become entirely relative analogous to the notion of above and below for people inhabiting a spherical globe.

The point mentioned above does not move forward displacing all the other points lying down the line, instead the movement is similar to that of a water wave in which different particles subsequently move up and down on the way down the line.

Now, since we do live in an expanse (space), it is, therefore, more appropriate if we designate the now as a three-dimensional geometrical unit (space) instead of a point (zero dimension). Consequently, the time which we metamorphically describe as a line should be more appropriately described as a four-dimensional continuum, in which space (the now) is embedded in such a continuum (Fig. E).

The relativity theory confirms that space and time are, indeed, inextricable and merge entirely into what we call spacetime, a four-dimensional continuum. As such, the spacetime represents the eternity, a timeless world, in the sense that there is no clear cut between the past, present, and future. It is also spaceless in the sense that there is no locality for events to take place. Space and time have yet no physical reality. Not even a single matter could exist; the darkness covers the whole (Fig. D). Alas, the mainstream physics has adopted this embryonic spacetime (eon?) to represent the actual world which leads us the crisis as we know today.

It was the slit of the four-dimensional spacetime into two parts that made the proper time as we perceive it. The interface between the two halves represents universal now which is nothing but the three-dimensional space (the slice of 4D-space is 3D-surface). The one side of the spacetime represents the past and the other side the future (Fig. E). Similarly to the point that separates the past and the future, this interface exists just about in an imaginative way; its thickness is only 10-33 cm below which there will be no separation at all.

Such a system is dynamic; the 3-interface is rotating at the speed of light in the direction normal to its surface (Fig. F). We may assign a full cycle of such a rotation as one cosmic day. In Hindu belief, such cosmic cycle is called Kalpa whose duration is equal to 4.32 billion years, the day of Brahman.

Similarly to what we described previously, the interface (our space) does not move ahead, but different spaces appear and disappear subsequently down in time. It is the big secret underlying the quantum phenomena which have puzzled physicists for such a long time.

The next question is naturally on how and what makes the spacetime split and why does the 3-interface rotate? (to get the answer, please refer to The Unfinished Relativity Theory).

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