by Tenebris

Created on: May 19, 2010

“Colonel Sandurz: ‘Now’, sir. You’re looking at ‘now’. Everything happening now is happening ‘now’.
“Dark Helmet: What happened to ‘then’?
“Colonel Sandurz: We passed ‘then’.
“Dark Helmet: When!?
“Colonel Sandurz: Just now. We’re at ‘now’, now. …

“Dark Helmet: When will ‘then’ be ‘now’?
“Colonel Sandurz: Soon.”
  - Spaceballs (1987)

On the surface of it, any theory that proclaims that time does not exist would seem to be madness. We know time exists, we can mark off seconds on a clock against the decay of caesium 133 atoms, we can see the flow of it in the cycles of our sleep and the graying of our hair.  Time erodes all things. Within the limits of human perception and human consciousness, time is essentially entropy.

Yet time is also a dimension, one (or more) of several. Seconds then take on a parallel function to metres: a measure of a certain ‘distance’ of time. It confuses us because we perceive a location in time only in cross-section. At the same time, our perception is moving along the dimension of time, so our cross-section constantly changes.

Already we run into a problem that goes far beyond semantics. Movement is usually measured as distance covered in a certain amount of time: but how then can we possibly measure movement within time? To say that time covers precisely one second each second is meaningless. If we are moving through time, how can we possibly measure that movement? If time is ‘flowing’, what is it flowing relative to?

Even a simple concept such as a second demands a universality that simply cannot exist. If one twin remains on earth while the other travels to the stars and back, they will no longer physiologically be the same age. In exactly the same - call it a ‘container’ - of ‘time’, each will have counted off a different number of seconds: and each will be ‘objectively’ corroborated by his or her own personal pile of caesium atoms. A universal clock will rapidly become meaningless when we reach the stars.

It takes light years to reach us from even the closest star. What we see, ‘now’, happened years, or centuries, or millennia ago. To look into the universe is to look backward in time: yet those events may as well not have existed until they reach our human perception. From somewhere

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