The Ancient Theory of Time That Terrifies Scientists

Think back to your earliest memories. Try to recall how time itself felt to you. Regardless of whether you remember it or not, before around the age of six or seven, time felt completely different to you than it does now. Not merely because you had only experienced very little of it by that point, but because you didn't even really know it existed. In some sense, during this time, time didn't really feel like time to you at all. This is true for all children in this During the first half decade or so of all of our lives, we sort of exist outside of time. The future and past, hours and months, clocks and deadlines, are all just sounds, words or objects we don't yet truly comprehend. All we fully know is the present. This might sound kind of bizarre, that you or anyone once existed essentially outside of time just because you didn't comprehend it. After all, we perceive and navigate physical space and our body to some meaningful degree before we fully comprehend them conceptually. But time appears to be different. And our early infant and childhood experience of it, or lack thereof, actually points to something fundamentally bizarre about the nature of time. As children, we might have in fact had a better sense of the true nature of time than we do now. And modern physics seems to paint an eerily similar picture as our childhood selves did. In a 2015 study by psychology professors Catherine A. Tillman and David Barner titled Learning the Language of Time, Children's Acquisition of Duration Words, the researchers evaluated how children of different ages assign and comprehend the meaning of time words, like second, minute, hour, day, week, month, and year. They found that preschoolers, quote, infer the orderings of time words but have little to no knowledge of the absolute durations they encode. Crucially, the researchers concluded from the study that, quote, associating words with the perception of duration does not come naturally to children. And they found that children's understandings emerge slowly over time only as they learn the formal definitions of these words. Similar findings have also been demonstrated in other studies. And so, we don't seem to enter the world with any innate understanding of time, especially the form we come to accept and understand as adults. And more yet, we don't learn it automatically on our own. Instead, during roughly the first five to seven years of our lives, we are taught time. We learn the concepts and frameworks, and only then do we come to recognize it as a fundamental aspect of reality. Soon, we become fully immersed in time, unable to know existence without it. We begin to share, define, measure, order, and perceive all our experiences through and with it. But what exactly are we learning, perceiving, measuring, and ordering when we refer to time? When you stop and think about it, there's nothing there. There's nothing that you can see, touch, taste, or smell. You can't grab it. You can't turn directions in it. You can't stop or control it. You can't really do anything directly to or with it. In the words of St. Augustine, For what is time? Who can readily and briefly explain this? Who can even in thought comprehend it so as to utter a word about it? What then is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not. Ultimately, we observe the unfolding of nature in apparently one direction and call it time. But is it? What is time? Is it real? Have we discovered it or constructed it? Perhaps the most interesting direction this question takes us is back in time to ancient human history. When humans first started referring to and understanding things in terms of time, was this discovered or invented? Was there a first minute, hour, day, and year? A first past, present, and future? Again, this might sound strange and perhaps impossible to us now. Everything is in time and thus must have always been in time. How could it be any other way? But this might not be the case. And both evidence from ancient human cultures and modern science reveal something remarkably bizarre and deeply counterintuitive. There was a time before time. Not before planets or matter or the big bang, but a time when the earth was populated by humans. But humans didn't yet live with or through time. At least not in any way similar to what or how we understand and experience it today. Rather, they seem to have possibly experienced existence more like how children still do today. That is, for hundreds of thousands of years, early humans very possibly experienced a kind of timeless universal presence. They almost certainly wouldn't have been able to comprehend anything close to what we mean when we say time, or future, or last year, or that something is due or will be needed at some later distant point. This isn't because they were biologically or cognitively less capable, and it isn't a product of some supernatural or superstitious-based belief system. Rather, it was because during this period of human history, there wasn't a need for time. Time hadn't been invented or discovered yet, whichever it was. Anthropologists note that all the way up to the industrial era, the schedules and orientations of humans were shaped by natural necessities. Hunting, gathering, harvesting crops, milking cows, and so on, all orchestrated the rhythms and comprehensions of reality for earlier humans. Historians refer to this as task orientation, as opposed to what we currently experience known as time orientation. In contemporary field research, exploring several indigenous Amazonian cultures, such as Huni Kuin in Kamaura, also found something similar. Event-based systems in which there are no abstract words equivalent to past and future, no conceptual timeline, and life orientations and activities based purely around naturally unfolding events. Before delving further into the implications of humanity's various experiences of time, and what it all might reveal about consciousness and reality, I want to talk about the importance of being able to shift our personal perspectives within our own lives. This video's sponsor is a book that compels you to do just that, in the most unique of ways. In fact, it's The Book, The Ultimate Guide to Rebuilding Civilization. It was created by Hungry Minds, an international creative group of artists, scientists, architects, designers, and entrepreneurs. And it is one of the most beautiful ways you can enhance not only your knowledge, but your affinity with human nature and human history. 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Communicating through modes of speech and physical action. Perceiving things outside ourselves through our senses and thinking about them with thoughts. We also tend to think that any apparent discrepancies in the views or behaviors of other and ancient humans are merely the result of less accurate belief systems about reality. But fundamentally, in many meaningful ways, early humans may have literally experienced and understood a very different reality, and it isn't clear if it was more or less real. This all ultimately points back to the fundamental question of whether time is real or an illusion. Whether it was discovered or invented. Of course, change appears to be real. Events happen, and they happen differently. Things move, coalesce, decay, spread out, and so on. And of course, memory and anticipation appear to be real. But none of these things require time itself to be real. Change, motion, and decay are not time. And memory and anticipation are not time either. Things get even stranger when you try to measure and understand time in terms of modern physics. If you're familiar with current theories, you know that we understand time to be relative. The speed that time passes is relative to where an individual or object is, and how fast they are moving. Next to a massive object, like a planet, time moves slower. Move at immense speeds, time also becomes much slower. And everything else ages faster, or moves through time faster, compared to you. We understand all this based on Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, formulated in two parts in the early 20th century, which, in its most basic form, shows that space and time are linked together in a fabric-like structure known as spacetime. Mass and energy bend this fabric, affecting the rate at which time passes, as well as the way objects move through space. This theory has become our best established description of gravity and the universe at large scales. As a result of this, however, technically, time moves at different speeds for everyone. Since no one person or object is ever in the same positions, or moving at the same speeds throughout their entire existence as anything else. Every time you drive a car, take a train, or plane, run, walk, or simply sit in place, the relative speed at which time passes for you changes. And therefore, so does the average rate of time across your lifetime change. Of course, at this scale, we're talking about nanoseconds, or fractions of nanoseconds, relative to other humans and things on earth. But if time is real, so are nanoseconds. And these differences are not trivial, especially when considering the fundamental nature of time. The implications undermine our most deeply held intuitions and beliefs about the past, present, and future. If time passes for everything and everyone at slightly different rates, then there could be no single shared universal now. No universal present. Though we tend to define time as past, present, and future, wherein everyone is in the same shared vehicle, always moving away from the past and toward the future, this isn't at all what physics seems to reveal. Rather, we are each in our own ever so slightly different vehicle of now. And when you take this vehicle up into larger scales of space and time, things become so much stranger and more unsettling. To illustrate just how counterintuitive and strange the present moment truly is, in 1989, physicist Roger Penrose created a thought experiment known as the Andromeda Paradox. It goes essentially like this. Imagine you're walking on a sidewalk in a small, quiet town. It's nighttime. The sky is clear and filled with stars. You're walking at a normal pace. In front of you, as you move forward, a man appears on the same sidewalk. He is standing in place, looking at his phone. Soon, you reach where he is standing and continue past him, as he remains in place. As you pass him, something in the sky catches your eye. A twinkling star in the distance of the cosmos. You look up at it, and the man notices you doing so, prompting him to look up in the same direction at the same time. Unknowingly, you both are looking at the Andromeda Galaxy, a galaxy about 2.5 million light years away. Though from both your perspectives, you're looking at the same distant galaxy, at the same exact time, the seemingly negligible speed of your leisurely walk, compared to the man's stationariness, means that time operates ever so slightly differently for each of you, including what counts as the present moment. Though on Earth the difference is infinitesimal, over the enormous distance between Earth and Andromeda, that tiny difference becomes magnified as a result of what is known as the relativity of simultaneity. The difference multiplies into days or even weeks relative to events in the Andromeda Galaxy. And so, assuming you're walking in the direction of Andromeda, the present moment in that galaxy that corresponds to your current frame of reference is days later than the present moment that corresponds to the man's. What's somewhat terrifying about this is, now imagine if there were some cosmic event or extraterrestrial activities taking place in Andromeda that were going to affect Earth, or perhaps the entire Milky Way Galaxy. These extraterrestrial plans or occurrences would seemingly happen for you before the man. For you, an alien's decision, or some cosmic event, may have already occurred, while for the man, it hasn't. It's still days away. So what does all this mean besides that, at the very least, time and the present moment are extremely bizarre and counterintuitive? Crucially, it suggests that the past, present, and future aren't really real, not in the way we think of and intuit them. As Albert Einstein once wrote, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. If walking instead of standing still can shift what is happening relative to you and Andromeda and cause something to become the past for you but still remain the future for others, then this future must already exist. It can't be both indetermined and have already happened for entire droves of humans. The past, present, and future cannot be both relative and linearly, universally real at the same time. In what has come to be known as the block universe theory, this notion of past, present, and future all coexisting at once makes increasingly more sense. The theory suggests that the entire universe is one single geometric block. Space, time, everything is contained within this fixed structure. Consider how all the pages in a physical book or all the frames in a film reel are all there in the book or reel from start to finish all at once, regardless of what word you're reading or what frame you're watching. In the block universe, so too is this the case for not only space, but time. Moments in the universe are like coordinates, single words on the pages of the book of the cosmos, all possible pages already there, stacked on top of each other. Objects and beings occupy different letters and words based on their position within the book and their path through it. Thus, what one sees depends solely on what page they are on and what word they are reading. There is no special universal present moment in which everyone joins together to read the same word in the same sentence on the same page. If that wasn't strange enough, several important equations and models in physics, like physicist John Wheeler's and Bryce DeWitt's Wheeler-DeWitt equation, which attempts to bring quantum mechanics and general relativity into one framework, results in time disappearing. In other words, at the most fundamental level of the universe, time appears to potentially not exist. At the very least, it does not appear necessary. Physicists call this the problem of time. Though modern physics maintains time as a means of ordering, measuring, and understanding causal structures and temporal coordinates in the universe, it discards it as the very thing that feels intuitively real to each of us, the linear consistent psychological passage of it. And more eerily, it seemingly discards it as something necessarily fundamental to the nature of everything. But so then why do we experience time in the way we do? Is it related to some layer of reality or order that we've tapped into, or is it something we have imposed onto the world merely as a means of improving our functionality? Again, was it invented or discovered? If our ancestors, before complex civilization, experienced change without time, and physics may ultimately describe reality without time, then perhaps our modern experience of time is a construction, a sort of intermediate layer of perception overlaid by consciousness onto a world of increasing complexity. As we have built up this world through tools, language, concepts, civilization, and advanced technology, the complexity of our mental models has too required being built up, and perhaps time is merely one of them, a mental model we have built up. If this is true, then perhaps our ancient ancestors, as well as modern human children, were and are, in a sense, experiencing something more real about reality compared to us right now as modern adults, something less removed with fewer layers of perceptual distortion. One of the oldest stories in Western culture is a rather bleak one. It refers to humanity as having experienced a kind of fall out of nature, from blissful innocence into knowledge and conceptual awareness. It's known as the fall of man, or sometimes just referred to as the fall. Its roots are found in the Genesis account of Adam, Eve, and the Garden of Eden, while similar stories, myths, and themes spread through the grounds of ancient Greek mythology, Hindu cosmological tradition, and the Epic of Gilgamesh from Mesopotamian mythology. The premise essentially purports that, at the beginning of human existence, humans lived in a state without any awareness of themselves being separate from everything else. Beings without individualized, uncertain conditions and futures. At some point, however, through the acquisition of knowledge and or the augmentation of consciousness, humans became aware and saw themselves in the world as separate entities. Humankind separated from Mother Nature, like a child from their biological mother, and suddenly we became vulnerable individuals with partitioned realities and circumstances. The world became a plurality of objects and phenomena in space and time. This concept and theme also often appears in modern philosophy, explored in various forms by individuals like Arthur Schopenhauer, Soren Kierkegaard, Blaise Pascal, Emile Turan, Peter Wessel Zapfa, and Ernest Becker, each more or less framing human consciousness as a kind of burden, mistake, or overgrowth that weighs us down, distorts reality, or inflicts us with suffering. Famously, Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapfa compared the development of human consciousness to the overgrown antlers of the Irish elk, whose antlers grew so large and heavy as a result of evolution pushing the trait to the extreme, the elk became weighed down and less agile, eventually causing them to go extinct. Whether considered religiously, philosophically, or simply as myth and story, the notion of humanity's fall points to the idea that both as individuals and as a species, we have and continue to seemingly separate from the oneness of our origins, the oneness of species and environment, of individual and group, of being and space and time. For better or for worse, we have fallen, and we are perhaps still mid-fall. It's unclear where we have or will land, but what is clear is that we likely can't ever go back. Not into childhood, not into history, not into ignorance. All that falls goes down in the one direction of gravity, and forward in the apparent one direction of time. Now, because of the conditions of modern culture, technology, and civilization into which we have emerged, because of what we must learn and teach to function and operate within this world, we experience time largely the way we see the physical space around us. Something real, something fundamental, something outside us, something that we have a relationship with. Though we must have a relationship with it, perhaps that relationship doesn't always need to be the one of strife we so often find ourselves in at this point in human history, one in which we are always fighting with it and always anxious about its state and future. Today, you so often hear people referring to time as something you need to master, to maximize, a resource. People say things like, time is the currency of life, or time is the most valuable commodity, or make the your time. These all sound nice, inspirational, intuitive, and endearing, and in some sense they are. But as a result of this mentality, we can often find ourselves constantly grappling with time, attempting to make it work in our favor and maximize its use, as if it were some actual object or resource in the world, as if there were some future that will ever not be now. If time is potentially not even real in the way we experience it, what are we trying to maximize? What are we fighting with? Have we confused psychological prosperity with time maximization? Perhaps when we see time as a sort of elusive psychological function, real enough in many important ways, but illusory enough in equal amount, we can recognize that it doesn't always need to be something to use, or improve, or maximize, or beat. We can cease fighting for a moment, put our arms at rest, look up, and see there's nothing even really there. And perhaps in these moments, even if brief, we can recall a sense of that bliss of childhood, of archaic human experience, of everything and nothing.