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PERCEPTION OF TIME
At
this point in the site it has been explained that matter, thought
to be an absolute existent, is actually nothing but a perception-an
image experienced by every person in his brain. And it has been
shown how important this reality has been for the increase of
fear and love toward God, the spread of spirituality and good
morals and the collapse of materialism.
There is another concept similar to matter
that materialists have considered eternal and absolute-time. But
like matter, time is also a perception and is not eternal; there
is a moment when it was created. This fact, which has now been
established by scientific proofs, was revealed in several verses
of the Koran.
Time
Is A Concept That Is Formed From The Comparison Of One Moment
With Another
Time
is a concept that depends totally on our perceptions and the comparison
we make between our perceptions. For example, at this moment you
are reading this book. Suppose that, before reading this book,
you were eating something in the kitchen. You think that there
is a period between the time when you were eating in the kitchen
and this moment, and you call it "time". In fact, the
moment you were eating in the kitchen is a piece of information
in your memory, and you compare this moment with the information
in your memory and call it time. If you do not make this comparison,
the concept of time disappears and the only moment that exists
for you will be the present moment.
 We
think that a lapse of time has occurred between the moment
the telephone rings and when we hear the voice of a friend,
and we call this interval "time". Time is a perception
that arises from making a comparison between what we experience
at one particular moment and the past. |
For
example, a high school graduation ceremony is something in a person's
memory. By comparing other pieces of information in his memory
since the graduation, with the present moment, he forms an idea
of time and, according to the information in his memory, he determines
the length or the shortness of this time. But this sense of length
or shortness is completely in his brain, and comes from this comparison.
In the same way, when someone sees a
person bend over to pick up a pen that he had dropped on the floor
and put it on the table, he makes a comparison. In the moment
when the observer saw the person put the pen on the table, that
person's bending over, picking up the pen, walking to the table
are pieces of information in the observer's brain. The perception
of time arises from the comparison of the person putting the pen
on the table with these pieces of information.
 Time
is a concept that depends on comparing events we have experienced.
For example, someone goes into a room. Later he sees a pen
on the floor and bends over to pick it up. Then, he takes
the pen to a table and places it there. The person makes a
comparison between all these actions. He thinks that a space
of time has passed between each one and so the perception
of time comes to be. |
Renowned
physicist Julian Barbour defines time in this way:
Time
is nothing but a measure of the changing positions of objects.
A pendulum swings, the hands on a clock advance.40
In short, time is composed of a few pieces of information
hidden as a memory in the brain; rather, it arises from the comparison
of images. If a person did not have a memory, that person would
live only in the present moment; his brain would not be able to
make these interpretations and, therefore, he would not have any
perception of time.
A person's past is composed of information
given to her memory. If a person's memory is erased, her past
is also erased. The future is composed of ideas. Without these
ideas, only the "present moment" of experience remains.
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The
Views Of Scientists On The Idea That Time Is A Perception
Today
it has been scientifically accepted that time is a concept that
arises from our making a definite sequential arrangement among
movements and changes. We will try to make this clearer by giving
examples from those thinkers and scientists who have established
this view.
The physicist Julian Barbour caused a
great stir in the scientific world with his book entitled The
End of Time in which he examined the ideas of timelessness and
eternity. He pointed out that the idea that time was a perception
was very difficult for many people to accept. In an interview
with Barbour reported in Discover magazine, these comments are
made about time being a perception:
"I still have trouble accepting it"
he (Barbour) says. But then, common sense has never been a
reliable guide to understanding the universe - physicists have
been confounding our perceptions since Copernicus first suggested
that the sun does not revolve around Earth. After all, we don't
feel the slightest movement as the spinning Earth hurtles through
the void at some 67,000 miles per hour. Our sense of the passage
of time, Barbour argues, is just as wrongheaded as the credo of
the Flat Earth Society.41
As
we can see above, this renowned physicist pointed out that any
idea we have of time being absolute is false, and that research
done in modern physics has confirmed this. Time is not absolute;
it is a variously perceived, subjective concept depending on events.
François Jacob, thinker, Nobel laureate
and famous professor of genetics, in his book entitled Le Jeu
des Possibles (The Possible and the Actual) says this about the
possibility that time can move backwards:
Films
played backwards make it possible for us to imagine a world in
which time flows backwards. A world in which milk separates itself
from the coffee and jumps out of the cup to reach the milk-pan;
a world in which light rays are emitted from the walls to be collected
in a trap (gravity center) instead of gushing out from a light
source; a world in which a stone slopes to the palm of a man by
the astonishing cooperation of innumerable drops of water which
enable the stone to jump out of water. Yet, in such a world in
which time has such opposite features, the processes of our brain
and the way our memory compiles information, would similarly be
functioning backwards. The same is true for the past and future
and the world will appear to us exactly as it currently appears.
42
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| Because every event is
shown to us in a definite series, we think that time always
moves forward. For example, a skier always skies down a mountain,
not up it. A drop of water does not rise up from a pool, but
always falls down into it. In this situation, a skier's position
on a mountain is in the past, while his position down the
mountain is the future. However, if the information in our
memories were to be displayed in reverse, as we would rewind
a film, what is for us the future, that is the downhill position,
would be the past and the past, that is the uphill position,
would be the future. |
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Because
our brain works by arranging things in a sequence, we do not believe
that the world works as described above; we think that time always
moves forward. However, this is a decision our brain makes and
is therefore totally relative. If the information in our brains
were arranged like a film being projected backwards, time would
be for us like a film being projected backwards. In this situation,
we would start to perceive that the past was the future and the
future was the past and we would experience life in a way totally
opposite than we do now.
In fact, we cannot know how time
moves or, indeed, if it moves at all. This demonstrates that time
is not an absolute reality but only a kind of perception.
The fact that time is a perception
was proved by the greatest physicist of the 20th century, Albert
Einstein, in his "General Theory of Relativity".
In his book, The Universe and Dr. Einstein, Lincoln Barnett says
this:
Along with absolute
space, Einstein discarded the concept of absolute time - of a
steady, unvarying inexorable universal time flow, streaming from
the infinite past to the infinite future. Much of the obscurity
that has surrounded the Theory of Relativity stems from man's
reluctance to recognize that sense of time, like sense of colour,
is a form of perception. Just as space is simply a possible order
of material objects, so time is simply a possible order of events.
The subjectivity of time is best explained in Einstein's own words.
"The experiences of an individual" he says, "appear
to us arranged in a series of events; in this series the single
events which we remember appear to be ordered according to the
criterion of 'earlier' and 'later'. There exists, therefore, for
the individual, an I-time, or subjective time. This in itself
is not measurable. I can, indeed, associate numbers with the events,
in such a way that a greater number is associated with the later
event than with an earlier one. 43
According
to the "General Theory of Relativity", time is not absolute;
apart from the series of events according to which we measure
it, it has no independent existence.
Einstein himself
pointed out, as quoted in Barnett's book: "Space and time
are forms of intuition, which can no more be divorced from consciousness
than can our concepts of colour, shape, or size."44
According to the "General Theory
of Relativity", time is not absolute; apart from the series
of events according to which we measure it, it has no independent
existence.
Our dreams are very important in
understanding the relativity of time. In our sleep we experience
events that we believe go on for days but actually, we are having
a dream which lasts for only a few minutes or even a few seconds.
In order to make this clearer, let
us think of an example. Let us think of a specially designed room
with one window and that we spend a certain amount of time in
it. In the room there is a clock by which we will be able to see
the passage of time. Through the window we can see the sun coming
up and going down at regular intervals. After a few days we are
asked how long we have stayed in the room. Our answer will be
calculated by information we have received based on looking at
the clock from time to time and on how many times the sun rose
and set. For example, we calculate that we have spent three days
in the room. But if the person who put us in the room comes and
says that we were actually in the room for two days, that the
sun we saw in the window was actually artificially produced, and
that the clock in the room was fast, then our calculations would
make no sense.
This example shows that our knowledge
about the rate at which time passes depends on references which
change according to the person who is perceiving it.
This is an example
of how under different circumstances a person perceives the same
amount of time as longer or shorter. Here is another example.
For a person who is waiting for his brother to come out of an
operation, one hour seems like several. But if the same person
is doing something he really enjoys, he cannot understand how
the hour passed so quickly.
Einstein scientifically established
the following fact in his "General Theory of Relativity":
The rate at which time passes changes according to the speed of
a body and its distance from the center of gravity. If the speed
increases, time decreases, contracts, moves slower and seems that
the point of inertia approaches.
One twin sister takes a space trip
at a speed close to the speed of light. When she returns thirty
years later, the sister who stayed on the earth will be much
older compared to the sister who went into space. |
Let
us explain this with one of Einstein's thought experiments. Suppose
that there are two twin brothers. One of them stays in this world,
the other goes on a space journey during which he travels almost
at the speed of light. When he returns from space, he will find
that his twin brother is much older than he is. The reason for
this is that the time passed much more slowly for the brother
who went on the space trip. The same example can be thought of
in relation to a father who went on a space trip in a rocket traveling
at nearly 99 percent of the speed of time and his son who remained
on this earth. According to Einstein, if the father was 27 years
old and his son was three, 30 earth-years later when the father
returned to earth, the son would be 33 and the father would be
30 years old. 45
The relativity
of time is not something that is relative to the speeding up or
slowing down of the clock; it comes from the fact that every material
system, to the particles at the subatomic level, works at different
rates of speed. In an environment where time was slowed down,
a person's heartbeat, rate of cell division and brain activity
would happen more slowly. In this situation, a person would go
about his daily business unaware that time had slowed down.
40- Tim Folger,
"From Here to Eternity", Discover, December 2000, p.54
41- Tim Folger, "From Here to Eternity", Discover,
December 2000, p.54
42- François Jacob, Le Jeu Des Possibles, University
of Washington Press, 1982, p. 111
43- Lincoln Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein,
William Sloane Associate, New York, 1948, p. 52-53
44- Lincoln Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein,
William Sloane Associate, New York, 1948, p. 17
45- Paul Strathern, The Big Idea:Einstein and
Relativity, Arrow Books, 1997, p. 57
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