She was almost paralysed by the surge of emotion. ‘Betrayal’ was incessantly running through her head. Several months had passed… and yet time had stood still. Locked in an embrace with that haunting moment from her past, she was lost in the emotional upheaval of a bygone time. He had walked away from the past and could almost taste the success of the future. He envisaged every moment could be filled with joy and care… but they were merely his hopes and dreams for a potential, aching to be built from a broken past. God soothed his brow and kissed her forehead, turned to Science and asked ‘How can you help these children of mine?’

Science: (Clearing his throat uncomfortably) Well Lord! There is a story among scientists – an immigrant who had lost his watch walked up to a man and asked, “Please, Sir, what is time?” The scientist replied, “I’m sorry, you’ll have to ask a philosopher. I’m just a physicist.”

God: (Raised his brow with a smile) how can time be a problem to man?

Science: Father! As you can see she is hung up in the past and he is dreaming into the future. They can meet only in the present… I can give her some drugs to ease her heartache, give him some advice on no guarantees on expectations… but this present moment is up to them to claim. The past and the future may have their own battles and wars. But it is only in the present that mankind can act. Time is not something humanity can control…yet!

God: Hmmm… What is time to man?

Science: Well the concept of time is one of the most difficult that man is still trying to define. And yet for all that everybody experiences time. According to Carl Sagan time isn’t a flow of something, because then what does it flow past? We use time to measure flow. How then can we use time to measure time? It is one of those concepts that profoundly resist a simple definition. We could bring in the principle of entropy to understand time – the concept that nature tends from order to disorder in isolated systems. But in day to day living, time is a more abstract concept that has concrete experiential evidence.

God: So how does man perceive time?

Science: To humanity time is divided into past, present and future. It is perceived only in one direction. Humanity is stuck in it. Everyone time travels into the future, one year, every year. No one can do otherwise. Creative writers like Woody Allen ponder on living life backwards. But as we don’t see a spilt glass of water jumping up and going back into the glass, nor do we see a broken egg reforming itself, these effects all add to the impression that there is some sort of “forward direction” in the time dimension. If man could travel close to the speed of light, then he could travel further into the future in a given amount of time.

God: Does man also measure time?

Science: Well innocent men think clocks tell the time, but according to both the pillars of physics (Relativity & Quantum theory) time is not something one can measure for time has no objective meaning. It is intangible. The ‘change’ we perceive is not variation in time but a pattern among the universe’s components. As Albert Einstein said time is simply what a clock reads – the clock being the rotation of a planet, sand falling in an hourglass, a heartbeat, or vibrations of a cesium atom.

God: So does humanity always get stuck in time like that woman? Or try to race forward into the future like our man?

Science: Lord! Time travel in the physical sense is a very tricky subject even to the best of my children. But yeah there are those who very often (almost always actually) live in the memory of the past or dream of the future rather than in the consciousness of the present moment.

God: (With a smile) why is time travel such a difficult subject for your brilliant minds?

Science: They have to deal with several paradoxes Lord! My scientists believe that time travel is indeed a possibility – in theory. In practice however several questions first need to be answered. Does time flow in one direction only? Does it have a beginning or an end? What is eternity? We know for example that an object travelling at high speeds ages more slowly than a stationary object. Now if a man boards a spaceship and takes off for deep space and his ship approaches the speed of light, time for him seems to pass as it always has. It takes him about five seconds to tie his shoe lace. But to an observer on Earth he would be moving at a snail’s pace. It looks like it takes hours for the man in the space ship to tie his shoe lace. Anyway, he continues on his journey and returns home to Earth. He has aged two years during his flight. However two hundred years have passed on Earth. He has successfully travelled forward through time. Now if he wanted to go back in time though, according to our theory of relativity he cannot! He can only move through time in one direction.

God: Oh! So he cannot travel into his past eh?

Science: If man could travel into the past, he would be facing the deep paradoxes of interfering with the scheme of causality that has led to his own time and himself. For instance if a man travels into the past and murders his own grandfather before he sires his parent, where would that then leave him? Would he instantly pop out of existence because he was never made? Or is he in a new causality scheme in which, since he is there he is there, and the events in the future leading to his adult life are now very different? The heart of this grandfather paradox is the apparent existence of the man, the murderer of his own grandfather, when the very act of murder eliminates the possibility of him ever coming into existence.

God: And then would be the problems of deterministic universe or free-will… I understand your predicament.

Science: Exactly Lord! If we could travel into the future, it would imply the future was already predetermined just as the past. But again if man used his freewill to alter something in his past, the entire future too would change and so the world will no longer be deterministic! It is a little too confusing for humanity right now!

God: (Looking deep into the eyes) Imagine if memory was of the future and not of the past. Having already lived the past and forgotten it, and having a detailed ‘memory’ of all that the future holds, what would be the motivation for mankind?

Science remained silent. He thought to himself – anyways the future is fixed and known as memory. Nothing can change that future. Anyways the past is over and forgotten – for all man knows a past doesn’t even exist. Wouldn’t that imply that life was indeed only deterministic – planned and unyielding, wrought with the iron of fate?

Science: (aloud) But Lord! The reality of life is that man’s memory is only of the past and his journey is only to the future.

God: Exactly. The very design of life says ‘remembering the past understand it has already been determined… act in the present exercising freewill to achieve the dreams of the future’. If man could in reality go back in time with the maturity of the future, it would still be like cloning – you create a clone which by its very existence is very different from the original! Humanity has no fixed pathway leading them in the future to either hope or damnation. The very fact that humanity perceives the past as a mere memory and the future as a dream that can be accomplished by acting upon today, shows that the past is deterministic from the perspective of the present and the future has freewill as it is his vision that can come true.

Science: So actually life by giving us a memory of only the past is telling us that freewill does exist in the present! All that is deterministic remains from the realm of the past!

God: Yes my child Science! Memory of the past is to understand the law of causality – past actions have gifted you the present moment in time. An absence of concrete ‘memory’ or ‘path’ for the future is to understand the law of freewill – you have the potential to create your life! Help every man and woman march forward from the past into the future they are willing to create by acting in the present!

Written by Gita Krishna Raj  |  Published in infinithoughts in October 2009

When Science met God… |  Segment Six: Lost in Time  | Chapter One: Life of memories & dreams