When the Arrow of Time Flies Backwards

.

If you got Einstein and Aristotle together for a little time traveling tête-à-tête the one thing they probably would agree on would be time. They would both assert that the arrow of time flies forward. Aristotle would be on solid ground given the state of theoretical physics circa 300 BCE. Einstein, not so much so. After all he was the guy who turned time into a variable in an equation that could be flipped back and forth over the equal sign like a spirited rally at Wimbledon. But when push came to shove, match point, and all that, Albert might be forced to admit that there was nothing that would, mathematically, prevent time from running backwards. The fly in that intriguing ointment is that we have never been able to catch time pulling off that, theoretically possible, maneuver. In the wild, in the lab, despite the best efforts of the men in black and women in white, time seems to continue to trudge doggedly down its oneway street.

Until this past week. Now, before I share this seemingly remarkable event with you, I do need to clarify some definitions. "Ah, yes, what is ‘time' Grasshopper?’" No, but seriously, if we want to look for something frolicking forward and backward, we ought to have some sort of operational definition of what this critter “time” looks like. We have moved from “sand through the hour glass,” and shifting shadows on a sun dial, to marks on a candle, to springs unwinding, pendulums swinging, and now to, I believe, the decay of ytterbium atoms to mark the passage of time. The the problem I see here is that all these gizmos are one way devices. It is like plotting traffic in a town with only oneway streets and in cars with no reverse gears. In such an exercise it would be easy to come to the conclusion that traffic could only move forward.  We seem to have put our trust in measurement devices that can only measure “time as we know it” and then declared that time can only follow the path those devices have been designed to measure - flee forward you arrow of time! Seems a little pointed-headed to me.

So let us take a slightly different approach to the definition of time. And here I am going to engage in one of my favorite activities - making stuff up.  We are all familiar with DNA  - deoxyribonucleic acid, and RNA - ribonucleic acid - those miraculous strings of acids that code our physical characteristics. I would like to suggest a new member of the team, ENA - Exceptional Neurological Activity. ENA occurs as we experience life.

Think about it for a moment. Experience occurs in the brain. Everything else that we “experience” is the result of the transmission of information to the brain. Eyes -  directly hard wired to the brain via the optic nerve, ears, same thing for sound.  Smell, taste, pressure, pain, pleasure, everything gets picked up by the billions of little “radio telescopes” of our nervous system and is beamed back to the brain that codes it into the specific events that we experience in our lives. I would posit that these events get laid down in the brain as bits of ENA, most likely as unique electrical clusters part of which includes the duration of the experience. OK, now hold that thought as I jump way out into the outfield.

As I have mentioned before, after having spent every month of the last 51 years of my life either being a college student or teaching college students, I am entering phased-retirement.  This has directly or indirectly triggered several activities. First, the on-going effort to organize the last 20 years or so of this blog into a quasi-book form. Another shout out to sister Margaret who kept all the emails. Second, gathering and categorizing the various drawings, sketches, photographs and doodles created over those previous 50 or so years. Yeah, I kept those old class notebooks. Third, as I move out of the big office I garnered over the years, I am again laying hands on the images and sculptures I have created, and lived with, for the last few decades.

What I am now encountering in those essays, images and sculptures is refined ENA. I have written elsewhere that a work of art is a repository for the artist’s chord.  Hand me a huge block of marble and an array of hammers and chisels and, no matter how many Red Bulls you pour down my throat, David is not going to leap out. That iconic work is the result of a bit of refined Michelangelo ENA - Exceptional Neurological Activity;  a unique synthesis of Michelangelo’s chord, including his skills and intuition and the marble itself infused in that unique harmonic “Michelangelo creative construction.” 

So here is the interesting part. As I encounter my earlier works - the product of my chord and the moment in which the drawing, doodle, poem, whatever, was created - the original refined ENA fires up again. Through my current interaction with these artifacts, I am there again, in that moment. This is different from memory, or recall. This is a duplication of the original ENA, and as such, I would hazard to assert, is the arrow of time flying backward. Obviously, I am not physically transported back to the moment in which those works were created. But to make that a deal breaker is to give into the corporeally dominated oneway street mandate of previous definitions of time - time as we know it. I am becoming increasingly fascinated by the idea of “time as we don’t know it.”

If we mark time not as the decay of atoms or the other physical devices from the past, but rather as the unfolding of experience, then to “re-experience” an event is to literally move to a different point in time. I am intentionally trying to avoid the phase “go back in time” as that will give unintended credence to the “oneway street” notion of time. It might be more accurate to think of time as all possible routes through experience.  Hence time only becomes oneway when we choose a particular experiential route, and remains oneway only as long as we choose to remain on that route, to engage with experience on that route.

I do need to admit that we probably cannot “unchoose” a route we have already traveled. We cannot unbreak the glass, we cannot unspill the wine, we cannot call back the unfortunate words. But what has occurred on a route we have already traveled need not pre-ordain the route we next choose.  The “many worlds” version of quantum mechanics, which purports that part of the weirdness of quantum mechanics is that there is not just the world of our here-and-now, but countless alternative worlds in which some versions of our self explores the “roads not taken,” is very much like the notion of time I am suggesting.  After all quantum mechanics does live in the space-time continuum, and who is to say that our ENAs cannot slip along that highway? So when I pick up a drawing from 2006, touch a sculpture from 2000, I’m not saying I return to those points on the calendar, rather I am saying that I experience again that particular, unique, perhaps folded, place in time.  Which, now that I think about it, implies that we just might be able to learn how to unbreak the glass and unspill the wine - just in time for dinner.

An analogy. Deep breath - here we go. 

The Velcro Sphere:  Imagine each Exceptional Neurological Activity - ENA - event as a snippet of velcro. Both sides, the side with all the tiny hooks and the side with all the tiny loops that the hooks attach to.  One side of the velcro is the historic moment when the ENA was completed. The other side is the artifact that was created as a result of the ENA.  OK, so once the ENA is completed, the two sides of the velcro separate and get tossed into a universe-sized snow globe - you know those glass things with a scene inside, you shake it and little flakes of fake snow swirl around so it looks like it is snowing inside? The two halves of the ENA are now out there in existence. Swirling around. Could be they hook up with another harmonic snippet out there and become a new insight or inspiration for someone else in another place and time - interesting - but I don’t want to go there right now.

Rather I am intrigued with what happens when I encounter the artifact that I created at an earlier point in time - a drawing, a piece of broken sculpture, a poem, anything that was the product of an earlier ENA.  I would like to hypothesize that at that moment those separated snippets of velcro reconnect. I do not “remember” that previous ENA - I live it again.  The historic moment and the artifact reconnect, generating a new ENA in which that which we have learned to call “the past” becomes a part of "the present," with a continued potential to become part of "the future.”

And, yes, I am aware of how truly strange that sounds.  My intention is not to assert that there are other limited particular paths for the fabled “arrow of time.” My intent is the opposite. I would posit that like the “many worlds” theory in quantum mechanics, time is an entity of many paths for many arrows; forward, backward, right, left, up, down, and off into all those dimensions we have yet to discover. And so why haven’t we discovered them? Consider blinders. Driving those forward-only cars down oneway streets.  I see only that which I expect to see. Alternative visions of time and experience - rather common in non-traditional, non-western, views of the world, time and existence - are often written off as “mythology" or “primitive epistemologies." 

Maybe. Maybe not. But certainly worth our consideration and our “time.” Or to quote a proverb from someone, somewhere in a somehow different time - “There are none so blind as those who will not see."

==========================

Note:  [New Scientist just posted in its June 30, 2018 issue has a neat article on how to think about time.]

.