After reading the Introduction and first three chapters of In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment by Jo Marchant, I’m hugely enjoying this book that pushes all of my nonfiction literary buttons: scientific, personal, well-written, provocative.
I have a hint of where Marchant is going to end up in her book from reading her New Scientist article that I wrote about in “Intriguing idea: reality is stitched together from interlocking perspectives and experiences.” But what I’m looking forward to is how Marchant builds a case for what she admits is a decidedly minority scientific view of the foundation of reality.
So far, in three of her twenty chapters, she is presenting the mainstream scientific view of reality, which is plenty interesting and mind-blowing in its own right. Marchant, a scientist by training and a science writer by occupation, says in her Introduction:
Yet here’s what really blows my mind about the flowing hum of happening that we call Now. According to the most trusted models of physics, Now doesn’t exist. There is no such thing.
From vast, billion-year expanses spanning the lifetime of our cosmos down to the impossibly brief femto- and zeptoseconds that capture the whirling of atoms; and from the universe’s explosive birth to its cold, dark predicted end; each and every point in time is ever-present and mathematically equal.
In all the equations that we use to explain the universe, there’s no moving spotlight; no meaningful flow from one moment into the next; no fixed past versus uncertain future; and absolutely nothing whatsoever that’s special about Now.
The unfolding present is what gives human existence meaning, what makes our lives worthwhile; it’s the only reason we know we are here at all. Yet our conventional theories tell us it has no deep physical relevance. Events are governed by predetermined mathematical laws; there’s no special moment of choice, of happening.
Now is an illusion constructed by our brains, merely a potent hallucination in a non-negotiable universe. The dice have been rolled, the cards already played.
This is why I’m enjoying Marchant’s book so much: from what I’ve read about it, she skillfully blends physics, neuroscience, mindfulness, meditation, and such into a sort of scientific detective story where, I’m pretty sure, what seems apparent early on in her investigation of Now will be called into question as additional facts and speculations are brought to bear on the question of Now.
I can’t recall ever reading a book about embracing the present moment that contained an extensive (or indeed any) discussion of Einstein’s relativity theory and the block universe that emerges from the theory. Marchant writes:
You might think that in that distant corner of space, there was a point when the collision happened, when reality altered and two black holes became one. But as we’ll discover in this chapter, Einstein insisted this picture of Now is an illusion.
There is no privileged ‘moment’ in the cosmos when events occur, no detectable point at which reality changes and the universe is not what it was before. Instead, what we think of as past, present and future are all just the same.
If we transcend our limited human perspective, as physics aims to do, we can see two black holes, and also just one, and also neither: before either one formed, and perhaps even after the merged monster finally evaporates away. At different points on the timeline, all of these situations exist. But none of them ever happen or become.
They just are.
Of course, this is very different from how we humans perceive reality. Things happen constantly. The past is gone; the future hasn’t happened yet; the present is all that exists for us. Now. This is our psychological reality. But the reality shown by Einstein’s relativity theory, which has passed every test thrown at it by scientists, has a very different perspective.
Over the past century, physicists working from Einstein’s blueprint of relativity have developed a variety of ideas for what the universe might look like without a global, advancing Now. The most popular model, and perhaps the closest to Einstein’s vision, is much like the world of the heptapods [in the movie Arrival].
Called the ‘block universe’, it is essentially a static brick that encompasses all of space and all of time. Rather than a three-dimensional place that evolves, the block universe is a static four-dimensional entity (the fourth dimension being time).
You can imagine it as a vast block of glass or ice, stretching out in every direction in space as well as back and forth in time, containing all the connections and events that make up the universe.
This glacial brick encompasses everything that happens, from the universe’s creation in the Big Bang until its final moment, with each event positioned according to its unique location in space and time. Each particle emission, star explosion or black hole collision has its eternal coordinates. Your birth, death, and every breath of your life in between, all have their place.
From our human perspective, we experience a fundamental difference between things that have happened, are happening and will happen. But in the block universe, there’s no such distinction. We can say that one event is in the past or future relative to another, by looking at where they sit within the block. This relation will always be true.
But there is no sense in which past events are any different — more solid or real, say — than future events. How could they be, when any event that’s in the future from one vantage point might be in the past from another?
…Yet the block universe also has devastating consequences for our view of humanity. Because if the present moment doesn’t exist, then neither does our ability to intervene in that moment. We might feel we’re here in the now, making decisions and controlling our actions. But that’s an illusion too.
I don’t believe in free will, so that last paragraph doesn’t disturb me. Regardless, I’m looking forward to reading the rest of Marchant’s book. She says:
But in our search for Now we’re looking for something more. We want to pinpoint the moving boundary between past and future: the ever-changing moment where stuff happens, where our actions matter. This, physics tells us, is within you and me: not in the universe itself at all, but in how we perceive or experience it.
So in the next part of the book, let’s switch focus to look at Now from the inside out. Instead of exploring the vastness of physical reality, let’s dive into our minds and brains and investigate how we create human time: the intricate, inexorable paradoxical flow of events of which our lives are made.
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Looking into this intriguing question of time, I read an article by Helen Pitcher in the BBC Science Focus magazine: “Studies suggest smaller animals may experience the world in slow motion, compared to humans.”
“Salamanders and lizards, it seems, perceive time more slowly than cats and dogs. And while this may help to explain the infuriating ability of flies to elude rolled-up newspapers, it also raises an important question: why?”
And. “From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense for animals that need to respond quickly – for example, to evade predators or catch fast-moving prey – to perceive time at finer resolutions, but what’s remarkable is that some animals appear to dial up or down their experience of time to suit their needs.”
I recall as a child how the six-week summer holidays seemed to go on forever, and waiting for Christmas felt like a lifetime. A collision with a bicycle happened in slow motion. This all points to the fact that we can experience variations in time under different circumstances. This I understand, but time, according to some physicists, is baffling to me. I read what they say, understand the words, but the concepts are so removed from everyday life that they make little sense.
Perhaps a little like trying to comprehend the vastness of the universe, I understand the figures but cannot imagine the time and distance, unlike local Earth travel, where the mind can grasp them.
So, I’ll just have to make do with the Earth-bound time scale that the past and future are merely thought structures, leaving ‘now’ as the only time I can ever know – and leave the theoretical physics to the Einsteins.
And if they don’t exist all at once ( past present and future) then they may as well should. That’s why we are souls with a body and not bodies with souls. In fact Pam Bondi is living proof.
The entire creation can be viewed as a hologram of infinite points of time from infinite perspectives.
We each see from a single dimensional point viewing outwardly the patterns of time that line up to that view.
But we could just as easily view from any other point, here, there, past or future. It was all created at once.
This isn’t a new perspective at all. Calculus depends upon the assumption that all time is an infinite linear sequence of static points. We’ve commented upon this ad nauseum here over the years.
It’s only hard to believe when you haven’t experienced it. The portal to that experience is through the now. And the now, before mind translates and reinterprets it, is accessed through spiritual meditation upon the Holy Name. So simple.
On Calculus it doesn’t matter if time moves forward or backwards in a summation. The summation remains the same.
Human memory works this way. We travel through the records, the images of time mind has recorded but not in a linear way. We have snippets and one Norton leads to another unrelated by time, and we reconstruct a series of events to connect them. Since they are connected causally one could just as easily think backwards, that the events from the future were linked causally to the past.
Did Donald Trump cause Adolph Hitler? Or some third, fourth or fifth dynamic outside of linear time cause them both to emerge? Like blooming flowers from the same evil plant.
In a place where all events exist at once only the connection matters to any causality.
Living through a consciousness that is nailed to a one dimensional string we think that one thing from the past can no longer cause something so distant in time in the future.
But thinking as if all events were created at once, emerged at one time by their similarities and not distinct by time, we begin to see other dynamics at work.
Then it is easy to see how two similar events can emerge across very different geographies and points in time. They are part of something else which they share.
Did Donald Trump make Hitler? The Hitler we see today is informed by what we have seen in Trump. Hitler may not have been quite so cunning a strategist, we might have thought. Now we know differently, through the modern example of Trump. They could have been twins as far as their character is concerned. And it is only in Hitler’s example where we realize society’s vulnerability to the mass production of hate, despite the exhaustive efforts to restore reason, goodwill and compassion to government, the inevitable, if temporary, triumph of greed, lust and corruption. What we have in Hitler is a crystal ball into the future. A self-destructive future where America is left desolate and decimated. A future where every hopeful effort to reverse course was overwhelmed by a mob mentality.
It hardly matters whether that mob is an uneducated or poorly raised electorate, or a group of investors, a well paid senate, or a cadre of judges, each encouraged to expect more for themselves by their personal act of contributing hatred.