Time will always reign over man

The problem of time was so real and puzzling to our ancestors that they were forced to do something about it. K. Santhakumari tries to figure out the riddle that is time.

TIME is different for different people. For the practising physicist it is the fourth dimension in the abstract sense, a riddle yet to be solved. For the biologist, time is slightly more tangible, though measured in billion of years of evolution of the life form. From the DNA to the fully grown organism he thus appears more concerned with the concrete, and the here and now. For the new-born, or a young child, it may be the time between feeds that tells the time. Despite such differences of view point, everybody appears to have a mutually acceptable and workable concept of time, though we find it often difficult to convey to the other our ‘lack of time’ or the timelessness’ of things that are rare and precious. Time is then what it appears to the beholder’s eyes like beauty. What could be an interminable wait for somebody at some point in time could be ever so sudden and breathtaking for somebody else.

Take for instance the interplay of words in this conversation between the devil and a jester in the movie classic The Seventh Seal: The devil says, "Your time is up", while axing the tree on which the jester is sitting and the jester replies mockingly, "I don’t have time." Our different languages refer to time — past, present and future — in so many different ways that a novice will often find it quizzical and difficult to follow. For some people, time is linear running in a straight line always forward, for some others it is curved, non-linear or even cyclical. One can hardly find a precise definition of time in any dictionary or encyclopaedia, other than a statement on how to measure time. For example, a dictionary of science and technology has this: "Originally measured by the hour angle of a selected point of reference on the celestial sphere with respect to the observer’s meridian". It appears that scientists know how to measure time even without a clear idea of what it is. In this it is closer to the problem of temperature. Earlier, scientists had little notion of it in any technical sense, yet they perfected the techniques for measuring it.

Then there are different kinds of time. Solar time, Greenwich mean time, local time, mean solar time, sidereal time, standard time and universal time. Getting into the intricacies of these can take one into the old age and more, and even it may elude you. We often talk of timelessness, of everlasting beauty. Time is intrinsic to our language, spoken, written, or sung in a lyric, non-verbal, even in silence. Time is always with us in sleep, and when we dream time is marked upon the dead and on inanimate objects like deadwood and rocks. Time takes on different shades and qualitative appearances depending on our states of mind. Time is then in the mind, yet can be outside us, out there to be beholded. Time changes as one grows and growth itself is marked by time. In infancy and childhood one is hasty and impatient, wants everything in a jiffy and in a hurry. In old age, one is more relaxed and ready to wait. The old man in a hurry is an unwelcome sight. We associate timelessness and solitude as partners in symbiosis. Those who can have it possess heavens in their hands. That is when there is no vantage point either in mind or outside. The passage of time or the interval is hidden from the person without a reference point. It is then that estimates of time go astray. People in different occupations have different ideas of passing time. Take the case of a farmer who has a long wait between the sowing season and the harvesting season. The process cannot be hurried and the delay has to be gone through. There is not need to mark time and the farmer is unlikely to overestimate his judgement of passing duration. In contrast, the busied one, the city-dweller, who is bombarded with events which are all markers of time has a sense of ‘timelessness’, literally. The ‘lack of time’ syndrome is a sign of fast life than of solitude and slow-paced rural living. Time in mind colors it in so many shades. For a lover longing for his/her beloved the duration is interminable, almost a torture. Once the loved is at hand, time passes ever so quickly.

The problem of time was so real and puzzling to our ancestors that they were forced to do something about it, and they went about it in a very remarkable way. But mistakenly they looked outward than within them for markers or clues for time. They found the sun and the stars, their positions and movement. Thus began the voyage of the scientific study of time. The ancients also were sceptical about the accuracy of their observations and as a safeguard they built a model of the cosmos. They devised an ‘astrolab’, akin to our computer, but more mechanical, but with the model in place, the calculations of time were bound to be more or less exact. Such devices dating back to Archimedes, about 300 to 200 BC, were the ancient makers of time based on the movement of sun and planetary bodies but augmented by the sheer power of thinking. This mechanical device could speed up or slow down time. Time can be made to go forward or backward or even can be stopped at will, more like our own wristwatch, yet so simple. Man at last became his own master of destiny. Later Greeks and Romans made fun of such gimmicks to mimick the Creator, for a poet of the fourth century AD wrote mockingly: "Has the power of mortal effort gone so far? Is my handiwork now mimicked in a fragile globe? An old man of Syracuse (referring to Archimedes) has imitated on earth the laws of the heavens, the order of nature.... Heavens revolve and sets the start in motion by human wit. Here the feeble hand of man has proved Nature’s rival". Unlike the ancient man the modern man learned to look inward for clues of time and he found there are biologically inbuilt markers of time in all living organisms and even inanimate objects.

Even primitive organisms have a sense of time though not conscious. The secrets of learning reside in such processes as the ability to habituate to repeated sensations like touch, conditioned reactions to formerly made associations. Once such associations are made by tiny chemical molecules in the nervous system, they are stored away like tapes in a computer for later retrieval. Passage of time is also recorded in such a fashion. The cycle of sleep and wakefulness, stages of sleep, cyclical variation in body temperature are rhythms timed by inbuilt biological clocks. Even birth, aging and decay and even death are timed processes, similar to the markers of time found for aging in plants, trees and rocks. The seasonal rhythm, menstrual rhythm are also instances of fine timing in nature. Though most instances of change and growth in nature are cyclical, many of us subjectively believe in a linearly ordered sequence of time running forward in a straight line. Except those few who are philosophically minded believe in the cycle of time, many of us, including learned physicists, are prone to such a conception of time. Living in the present is not only for the underprivileged, without a concern for the past and the future, but for man. The past gets collapsed into capsules to be stored away and forgotten. Some gets faded and erased forever, making living in the present more easy. Yet, it is the past that permeates the created present and the unknown for the mind.

The sense of the present is so overwhelming for the modern man, the past and the future are nothing but creations of fantasy. Some go as far to deny the existence of the past and future. Albert Einstein once wrote about the death of his friend: "Michele has left this strange world before me, that is of no consequence. For us convinced physicists, the question between past, present and future is an illusion, although a persistent one". For physicists of this kind time is symmetric. There is no arrow of time. The sense of past, present and future is nothing but mind’s folly. There is a controversy here, because not all physicists agree. Some like Prof. Ilya Priogogine, a physicist chemist from Belgium, agree with the more conventional wisdom of time’s arrow —that there is a past, present and future and that time asymmetric. Otherwise how can anyone experience novelty and get thrilled, he says. The two phenomena — repetition and novelty — lie at the core of every human experience, be it sorrow or happiness. The cycle of sunrise and sunset hardly brings any surprises to us compared to the suddenness of a child’s arrival and the abrupt departure of a loved one. This novelty is of immense importance to us in terms of a break in the drag of time. Conversely, just imagine the tedium of going through a movie or fiction with no beginning and end.

There is another human aspect to the experience of time. This pertains to the difference between the sexes in their experience of time. Psychologists have found that women are more accurate in their judgements of time passed and experience it differently, though men are keen on scheduling and keeping up with the ongoing present. Women’s greater accuracy probably arises from their fine tuning to nature’s rhythm which their own bodies experience cyclically every month, ever since their coming-of- age. They are so acutely aware of the past and the ever imminent future, and this being inbuilt into the biological system that any break in the cycle of events tells on their whole being, the mood, the thoughts and emotions and more so even physically. Often this subconscious awareness takes on certain dramatic qualities as seen in the trauma associated with abortions and post-partum psychosis — mentally disturbed state accompanying childbirth. In certain cases women who have undergone natural or medical termination of pregnancy experience a sudden depression several months afterwards, close to the time the child would have arrived had it not been lost. This overwhelming sense of internal awareness of time in women enables them to monitor the passage of time in themselves and in others. It is not surprising then that old women even today tell their past in terms of childbirths, and milestones of child’s growth — events closely experienced.

Yet, the complexity of knowing the before and after and even the living present is too much for one’s own lifetime. The world of science has left it to gadgets to mark these, assuming the infallibility of recording devices and time telling machines. But the certainty of having time within the grasp is ever eluding the human kind. Even after granting total freedom to gather and stock both knowledge and matter, this one will continue to elude the man, moving back and forth and ever expanding into the infinity like a spiral.