by Robert Lanza
ness to an atomic nucleus equals that of a proton to a large city.
Planes, like shadows upon a flat wall, which have the two dimen-
sions of length and width.
Solids such as spheres or cubes have three dimensions. An actual sphere or cube is sometimes said to require four dimensions because
it continues to endure. That it persists and perhaps even changes
means that something “else” besides the spatial coordinates is part
of its existence, and we call this time. But is time an idea or an
actuality?
Scientifically, time appears to be indispensable in just one area—
thermodynamics, whose second law has no meaning at all without
the passage of time. Thermodynamics’ second law describes entropy
(the process of going from greater to lesser structure, like the bot-
tom of your clothes closet). Without time, entropy cannot happen or
even make sense.
Consider a glass containing club soda and ice cubes. At first,
there is definite structure. Ice is separate from the liquid and so are
the bubbles, and the ice and liquid have different temperatures. But
return later and the ice has melted, the soda has gone flat, and the
contents of the glass have merged into a structureless oneness. Bar-
ring evaporation, no further change will occur.
This evolution away from structure and activity toward same-
ness, randomness, and inertness is entropy. The process pervades
the universe. According to nearly all physicists, it will prevail cos-
mologically in the long run. Today, we see individual hot spots like
the Sun releasing heat and subatomic particles into their frigid envi-
rons. The organization that now exists is slowly dissolving and this
entropy, this overall loss of structure, is on the largest scales a one-
way process .
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In classical science, entropy does not make sense without a
directionality of time because it is a non-reversible mechanism. In
fact, entropy defines the arrow of time. Without entropy, time need
not exist at all.
But many physicists question this “conventional wisdom”
regarding entropy. Instead of the act of structure-loss and disorga-
nization representing a concrete directionality to time, it can just
as well be seen as a demonstration of random action. Things move.
Molecules move. They do so in the here-and-now. Their motions are
haphazard. Before long, an observer will notice the dissipation of the
previous organization. Why should they then assign arrows to it?
Shouldn’t we regard such random entropy as an example of the non-
essentiality or reality of time, rather than the other way around?
Say we have a room full of oxygen, and an adjacent one filled
with pure nitrogen. We open the door and come back a week
later. Now we find two rooms, each with a well-mixed combina-
tion of both gases. How shall we conceptualize what happened? The
“entropy” view says that “over time” there was a loss of the original
neat-and-tidy organization and we now have a mere randomization.
It is not reversible. It demonstrates the one-way quality of time. But
the other view is that the molecules just moved. Movement is not
time. The natural result is a mixing. Simple. Anything else is just
human imposition of what we consider to be order.
Seen this way, the resultant entropy or loss of structure is only
a loss in our own minds’ way of perceiving patterns and order. And
boom, there goes science’s final need for time as an actual entity.
Time’s reality or lack thereof is certainly an ancient debate. The
actual answer may be mind-bendingly more complex because there
may be many planes of physical reality, which, like even our purely
subjective sense of time, may appear to operate on some levels (for
example, biological life) but be nonexistent or irrelevant on others
(for example, the quantum realm of the tiny). But the bottom line is
always appear.
As an interesting side note, physicists looking into the time issue
in the past two or three decades have realized that just as all objects
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must have shapes, if time existed it would need a direction of flow.
This has given rise to the issue of an “arrow of time” that can alter its
course. Even Stephen Hawking once believed that if and when the
universe starts to contract, time would run backward. But he later
changed his mind, as if to demonstrate the process. In any event,
time running backward (though ultimately a non-starter) was not as
screwy as it may have initially seemed.
We protest because we think that it means effect would precede
cause, which never can make sense. A serious car accident would
become a macabre affair where injured people instantly heal without
a blemish while their wrecked vehicle leapt back while uncrinkling
and repairing itself seamlessly. This is not only ridiculous, it doesn’t
accomplish any purpose, such as, in this case, instruction in the
evils of using a cell phone while driving.
The usual answer to this objection is that if time ran backward,
everything including our own mental processes would operate in the
same new direction as well, so we’d never notice anything amiss.
Such endless unanswerables and seeming absurdities come to
a blissful end, however, when time’s nature is seen for what it is—a
biocentric fabrication, a biologic creation that is solely a practical
operating aid in the mental circuitry of some living organisms, to
help with specific functioning activities.
To understand this, consider for a moment that you are watch-
ing a film of an archery tournament, with Zeno’s arrow paradox in
mind. An archer shoots and the arrow flies. The camera follows the
arrow’s trajectory from the archer’s bow toward the target. Suddenly,
the projector stops on a single frame of a stilled arrow. You stare at
the image of an arrow in mid-flight, something you obviously could
not do at a real tournament. The pause in the film enables you to
know the position of the arrow with great accuracy—it’s just beyond
the grandstand, twenty feet above the ground. But you have lost all
information about its momentum. It is going nowhere; its velocity is
zero. Its path, its trajectory, is no longer known. It is uncertain.
To measure the position precisely, at any given instant, is to lock
in on one static frame, to put the movie on “pause” so to speak.
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Conversely, as soon as you observe momentum, you can’t isolate a
frame—because momentum is the summation of many frames. You
can’t know one and the other with complete accuracy. Sharpness in
one parameter induces blurriness in the other. There is uncertainty
as you home in, whether on motion or position.
At first it was assumed that such uncertainty in quantum theory
practice was due to some technological insufficiency on the part of
the experimenter or his instruments, some lack of sophistication in
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br /> the methodology. But it soon became apparent that the uncertainty
is actually built into the fabric of reality. We see only that for which
we are looking.
Of course, all of this makes perfect sense from a biocentric
perspective: time is the inner form of animal sense that animates
events—the still frames—of the spatial world. The mind animates
the world like the motor and gears of a projector. Each weaves a
series of still pictures—a series of spatial states—into an order, into
the “current” of life. Motion is created in our minds by running “film
cells” together. Remember that everything you perceive—even this
page—is actively, repeatedly, being reconstructed inside your head.
It’s happening to you right now. Your eyes cannot see through the
wall of the cranium; all experience including visual experience is
an organized whirl of information in your brain. If your mind could
stop its “motor” for a moment, you’d get a freeze frame, just as the
movie projector isolated the arrow in one position with no momen-
tum. In fact, time can be defined as the inner summation of spatial
states; the same thing measured with our scientific instruments is
called momentum. Space can be defined as position, as locked in a
single frame. Thus, movement through space is an oxymoron.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle has its root here: position
(location in space) belongs to the outer world and momentum (which
involves the temporal component that adds together still “film cells”)
belongs to the inner world. By penetrating to the bottom of matter,
scientists have reduced the universe to its most basic logic, and time
is simply not a feature of the external spatial world. “Contemporary
science,” said Heisenberg, “today more than at any previous time,
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has been forced by nature herself to pose again the old question of
the possibility of comprehending reality by mental processes, and to
answer it in a slightly different way.”
The metaphor of a strobe light might be helpful. Fast flashes of
light isolate snapshots of rapidly moving things—like dancers in a
disco. A dip, a split, a snap becomes a still pose. Motion is suspended.
One still follows another still. In quantum mechanics, “position” is like a strobe snapshot. Momentum is the life-created summation of
many frames.
Spatial units are stagnant and there is no “stuff” between the
units or frames. The weaving together of these frames occurs in the
mind. San Francisco photographer Eadweard Muybridge may have
been the first to have unconsciously imitated this process. Just before
the advent of movies, Muybridge successfully captured motion on
film. In the late 1870s, he placed twenty-four still cameras on a race-
track. As a horse galloped, it broke a series of strings, tripping the
shutters of each successive camera. The horse’s gait was analyzed
frame by frame as a series. The illusion of motion was the summa-
tion of the still frames.
Two and a half thousand years later, Zeno’s arrow paradox
finally makes sense. The Eleatic School of philosophy, which Zeno
brilliantly defended, was right. So was Werner Heisenberg when he
said, “A path comes into existence only when you observe it.” There
is neither time nor motion without life. Reality is not “there” with
definite properties waiting to be discovered but actually comes into
being depending upon the actions of the observer.
Those that assume time to be an actual state of existence logi-
cally muse that time travel should be valid as well—and some have
misused quantum theory to make this case. Very few theoreticians
take seriously the possibility of time travel or of other temporal
dimensions existing in parallel with ours. Aside from the violations
of known physical law, there’s this little detail: if time travel were
ever possible, so that people could journey into the past, then—
where are they? We’ve never been faced with tales of unexplained
people arriving from the future.
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Even time’s seeming rate of passage varies in perception and def-
initely alters in actuality. We point telescopes to places where we can
see a more lethargic unfolding of time à la relativity, and also observe places as they existed billions of years ago. Time’s makeup seems as
strange and elusive as that of sausages.
Let’s try to clarify one common alteration in the passage of time
with a simple thought experiment. Pretend you’re blasting off from
Earth, looking out your rocket’s rear-facing window, telescopically
observing the people near the launch pad who are applauding the
successful liftoff. Each moment you are farther from them, so each
moment their images have a longer distance to travel to your eyes
and are therefore delayed, arriving significantly later than the last
“frame” of the movie. Result: everything appears in slow motion,
their applause dishearteningly lukewarm. Nothing speeding away
from us can fail to appear in slow motion. And because nearly every-
thing in the universe is receding, we’re peering at the heavens in a dreamy kind of mandatory time-lapse photography; the unfolding of
nearly all cosmic events takes place in a false time frame.
This was exactly how the speed of light was discovered, by a
Norwegian named Ole Roemer, more than two centuries ago. He
noticed that the moons of Jupiter slowed down for half the year, and,
realizing that Earth was then moving away from them in our orbit
around the Sun, was able to calculate lightspeed to within 25 percent
of its true value. Conversely, those satellites would seem to speed up
for the other six months, just as inhabitants of an alien world would
go about their business at an accelerated fast-forward, Charlie Chap-
lin pace as viewed by approaching astronauts.
Superimposed on these illusory yet nonetheless inescapable dis-
tortions is the actual slowdown of time at high speeds or in stronger
gravitational fields. This is not merely something we can shrug off
with facile rationalizations, like an errant spouse’s late homecoming.
This zooms to the far end of peculiar.
This time dilation effect is minor until one nears the speed of light, then it becomes awesome. At 98 percent of lightspeed, time travels at
half its normal speed. At 99 percent, it goes just one-seventh as fast.
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And we know this is true; it’s real, not hypothetical. For example,
when air molecules high in our atmosphere get clobbered by cosmic
rays, they smash apart like the breaking of a stack of billiard balls,
their innards spewing earthward at nearly the speed of light. Some
of these subatomic bullets pierce our bodies, where they can strike
genetic material and even cause illness.
But they oughtn’t to be able to reach us and do such villainy;
this atomic material is so short-lived that these muons normally
decay harmlessly in a millionth of a second�
�too quickly to be able
to travel all the way to Earth’s surface. They manage to reach us only
because their time has been slowed by their fast speed; an extended
fantasy world of false time allows them to enter our bodies. So rel-
ativistic effects are far from hypothetical; they have often brought
poisoned offerings of death and disease.
Travel in a rocket at 99 percent the speed of light and you’ll
enjoy the consequential sevenfold time dilation: from your perspec-
tive nothing has changed; you have aged a decade in ten years’ worth
of travel. But upon returning to Earth you’d find that seventy years
have passed and none of your old friends are still alive to greet you.
(For the famous formula that lets you calculate the slowdown of time
at any speed you care to consider, see the Lorentz transformation in
Appendix 1.)
Then the truth rather than the theory will have hit home: ten
years can really pass for you and the rest of the crew, while at the
same time seven decades elapse back on Earth. Abstract arguments
then fail. Here a human lifetime has elapsed while there it’s only
been a decade.
You might try complaining that time is supposed to have no pre-
ferred state—how, then, can nature determine who should age faster
or slower? In a universe without privileged positions, couldn’t you
claim to have been stationary while the Earth moved away and then
came back? Why shouldn’t Earth’s inhabitants be the ones who aged
more slowly? Physics provides the answer.
You were the one who has lived longer, therefore the answer
must lie with you. And it does: it was you who felt the acceleration
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and deceleration forces of the trip. So you cannot deny that it was
you and not Earth that made the voyage. Any paradox is nipped in
the bud; the one who made the trip also knows who should experi-
ence the slowing of time.
Einstein taught us that time not only mutates, performing its
own unique rite of passage by varying its rate of passage, but dis-
tance contracts as well—a totally unexpected phenomenon. Some-
one zipping toward the galaxy’s center at 99.999999999 percent of
lightspeed experiences a dilation effect of 22,360. While this per-
son’s watch ticks off one year, simultaneously, 223 centuries elapse
for everyone else. The roundtrip involves a mere investment of two