As Richard mentions in comments, another famous example of temporal reversal is Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. The protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, comes unmoored in time, and finds himself experiencing wildly disconnected moments of his life in an unpredictable order. At one point he becomes unstuck in time and watches a movie played backwards. The movie shows the firebombing of Dresden, which Pilgrim had witnessed in person.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
In the Afterword to Time’s Arrow, Martin Amis credits a “famous paragraph” by Vonnegut in inspiring his work; it is generally thought that this is the paragraph, although others have suggested something from Mother Night.
Besides incompatible arrows of time, Slaughterhouse-Five explains the temporal viewpoint of the intelligent beings on the planet Tralfamadore, who can see all of time at a single glance:
The Tralfamadorans can look at all different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on earth that one moment follows another like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
The Tralfamadorans are “eternalists,” who buy into the block time view of the universe — that the past, present, and future are equally real. They are so convincing, indeed, that Slaughterhouse-Five is quoted by Scholarpedia as an illustration of the concept.
But as with everything, our minds go from past to future thoughts, as these thoughts go from being in the future to being in the past.
If the present does not actually exist, than neither does the past or the future. So.. whenever we see physics articles discussing what happened to the universe in the past, or what will happen to it in the future, it’s all relative to this fantasy of “now” that we’re having, and should not be taken seriously 😉
Mike Schuler (#20) wrote:
>
> I still say that the past does not exist in any way other than a memory.
This is reminiscent of the well-known opening sentence from L P Hartley’s novel “The Go-Between” [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Go-Between ].
This evocative (if somewhat nostalgic and gloomy) novel was later made into a film, starring among others Julie Christie and Alan Bates .
For the benefit of anyone unfamiliar with this opening, and not curious or energetic enough to click the Wikipedia link, it goes:
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
Time is Nature’s way of stopping everything from happening at once.
John,
That is a good description of the past, given how much we really don’t know or remember of it. When my daughter was a baby, I had several flashbacks of my little sister at that age. I was four at the time and I remembered that at that age I still remembered being a baby.
Oftentimes it seems like life is a hall of mirrors and we see what we know, but occasionally something gets out of whack and everything is strange, then our instinct is to make it normal again. When this operates on the group level, it manifests as nationalism, religion, or other tribal clustering and the foreign is the other. Our minds like grooves, just sometimes they get too deep and become ruts.
Jeff,
What exists is the energy. Past, present and future are configurations of this energy.
I read Slaughterhouse 5: a great book! I plan to read the complete Vonnegut saga.
jeff on Apr 2nd, 2008 at 11:20 am said,
“…Just to elaborate a little on my last post: I once had a memorable experience that I’m sure many others have also had. I was anesthetized for several hours while my wisdom teeth were removed. The amazing thing was that those hours went by instantaneously for me. I was asked to count backwards from 100, and when I got to 97 the doctor said, “We’re done!” It was disorienting and hard to believe. A completely dreamless sleep. A sharp temporal discontinuity
– like a robot being turned off and on again.
When I recall that experience, I wonder if death might be like that – the ultimate temporal discontinuity. When you are dead, any finite amount of time will pass instantaneously. Twenty billion years or eight hundred googleplex years, it doesn’t matter. As far as we know, consciousness ends permanently at death, effectively erasing time and pulling the plug on the universe. As long as it’s finite, the universe will be over and gone as if it had never existed. A brief dream, and a dream without a dreamer has no chance of being remembered. On the other hand, if time extends infinitely into the future…”
The only reason this experience made an impression on you was that time for the universe as observed and measured by others, and eventually and indisputably noted by you, had continued, while your “plug had been pulled”.
You had enough perpective on what happened to be kind of shocked by becomming a mini-Rip Van Winkle. I was overseas for 10 solid years (and fully conscious!) but when I came back home to the USA had a very similar kind of (shocking) experience. Street corners didn’t even look the same. Buildings were gone. Other new buidings had been constructed. Even the mentality of the country had changed. I won’t even discuss the changes in technology. I still perfectly remembered the procedures for operating my business, but none of what I “knew” was appropriate any more…I had to re-learn everything.
This business of consciousness is a very practical matter. Lets look at it another way. Your consciousness never really ceased at all. Time ceased, so now if anybody asks you whether there are places in the universe which are timeless, you can say yes…you know of a place by experience.
I liked your saying that the universe seemed to cease to exist. That has an element of truth, but you were only able to make that observation because you had two different frames of reference (before and after) in which you had roughly the same level of consciousness to compare.
In death there is no passage of time, nor “rest”. Consciousness, the collective consciouness of all living is as eternal as the universe. Your consciouness is no different. This is where the geometry of the universe becomes important. Einstein points to a marginally closed space time.
If Einstein is right, and we sure have some powerful experimental verification of his concept!) after death you will not “awaken” with the full possession of your faculties so you can orient yourself and meditate on the nature of consciouness.
Rather, you will gradually become, after death, aware of your own childhood, with no rememberence whatever of your precious existence. Gradually, you will become almost identical to what you are now, but that will seem to be your “only” life…just as much as your present one. In a sense, we live in an eternal present…there is only “now”. As Einstein noted: “Time is an illusion”.
In fact this life, that one and the following ones IS your only life! You, like the universe itself, in an Einsteinian geometry have an eternal location in space and time…a UNIQUE location in space and time. When your invariant particulate coordinates come around in the momentum of General Relativity, there you are, forever. Only your scientific knowledge can help you establish a “memory” of the way the universe really is, and understand that from your 4D frame you are actually existing over and over again, forever.
If you, and all of us didn’t eternally exist, we wouldn’t be here talking about it, because we, and the universe would have ceased to exist long ago.
Errata,
Complete parentheses
previous, not precious!
Jeff,
One additonal thought. In a real sense with regard to consciouness itself, there is no such thing as non-existence, because non-existence must be defined in terms of the existing. By itself non-existence cannot stand alone, it means nothing at all…it is, like all knowledge, a semantic construct of the consciious which relates only to the existing universe….