Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 3, 1994 TAG: 9403020065
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Joel Achenbach
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"Why do we perceive ourselves as perpetually at the crest of a universal time wave, apparently leaving all past and future time lifeless or even non-existent (!), unless or until we grace it with our consciousness?"
Dear John: Your fears are justified. The past does not exist. The future does not exist. The "present" is a useful but arguably silly and self-defining concept. Indeed, time itself does not really exist.
You know the old story about Samuel Johnson being asked how he could refute Bishop Berkeley's statement that the world was an illusion. "I refute it thus!" he said and kicked a large rock. He was right: The rock was real. But you can't kick time. It's just an intellectual construct that's handy for describing rocks, authors, and the action whereby an author kicks a rock.
We spoke first to Freeman Dyson, the visionary physicist, who said he didn't buy the idea of past, present and future. "It's a statement about us and not a statement about the world," he said, somewhat obtusely we might add. He said physics had nothing to say about these issues, that they were matters of philosophy.
He referred us to a true expert: David Park, a retired professor of physics at Williams College and author of the book "The Image of Eternity." Park assured us that the things we remember happening in the past really did happen, or at least that it's "amazingly probable" that they happened, but nonetheless the past does not exist. Abe Lincoln is not the president of the United States, even though someone with a really great telescope on a planet 130 light-years away might be able to catch a glimpse of Abe pacing around the White House. The past leaves behind evidence (for example, reflected light), but that doesn't mean President Lincoln still exists.
"You get into an awful lot of trouble if you say that time exists. What exists are things," said Park. "We are surrounded by things, and they do things. What exists are events. Things happen. We're part of it. We happen. We do things. We experience things happening all around us. And I think we then construct the idea of time as a sort of verbal or philosophical framework for our thoughts."
It is easy to imagine a universe without time: It doesn't move. It is always the same. It's frozen. The coffee cup is poised halfway to your mouth as you stare at this sentence, eternally. The cat is stretched out motionlessly with mouth agape, a hairball ready to be spit up on the carpet. To describe this universe you have no need to invent so daffy a notion as "time."
We don't live in that kind of universe, but rather one that is dynamic. It keeps changing, in very tiny increments. It has inertial energy. The dynamic personality of this universe is a function of the Big Bang, or the Creation if you prefer. That "initial condition" remains beyond our explanatory powers at this moment. If you have any ideas, operators are standing by.
On the off-chance that this hasn't been perplexing enough, we should point out that we don't actually live in the present. Light and sound and heat and all the other things that stimulate our senses move at finite speeds. It then takes time to mentally process stuff. Science journalist Timothy Ferris points out that our optic nerve does not bombard our brain with continuous images of the world but rather creates individual snapshots, fewer than 24 a second, which is why you don't notice the 24 individual images that create a "motion picture."
So even if the present is a real thing, you ain't there. You are in the past. Which doesn't exist. Now please pardon us while we have brain surgery to repair a hernia.
Now This From the Booze Industry:
After we wrote that alcohol is a drug we got a letter from Elizabeth Board, director of the public issues division, Distilled Spirits Council of the United States. She said, "The problem of saying that alcohol is a drug is that it sends the wrong message. Adults may be telling children to avoid drugs, but if the adults drink after telling children that alcohol is a drug, the children see adults and their guidance on drugs as hypocritical.
"Given that alcohol is a legal consumer product for adults, and that recent medical data indicate that moderate drinking may be associated with certain health benefits, it is irresponsible and misleading to categorize beverage alcohol with such substances as crack and heroin."
Dear Distilled Spirits Council: We deeply apologize for referring to beverage alcohol as a drug when we could have used the more accurate and economical phrase "legal consumer product." If we were in a more argumentative mood we'd point out that the status of a handgun as a "legal consumer product" doesn't make it any less capable of putting a hole in someone.
The Why staff has no objection to moderate, immoderate or even coma-inducing levels of alcohol consumption. But we are greatly consternated by someone telling us that alcohol cannot be a drug because IF IT WERE A DRUG THAT WOULD MEAN PARENTS ARE HYPOCRITES. Sorry, but we figured out a long time ago that Mommy and Daddy are not infallible. Besides, raising kids is hard enough; if we can't resort to hypocrisy once in a while we're finished. Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB