Lens to the Natural World. Kenneth H. Olson
Читать онлайн книгу.
of East Africa prior to recounting his travels in his book, The Tree Where Man Was Born. He described the Hadza hunter-gatherers, thus: “For people who must live from day to day, past and future have small relevance, and their grasp of it is fleeting; they live in the moment, a precious gift that we have lost.”
Secondly, there is the cyclical conception of time, the idea that it is moving in vast circles. The ancient Maya had an accurate calendar some 1400 years ago, with much of their ceremonial and social life revolving around the mystery of time’s passage and their attempt to predict the huge cycles of their imagination. The Hindus, still today, see the universe as moving in vast arcs of hundreds of millions of years. In that system of belief, an individual goes through one incarnation after another, so time is likened to a wheel. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed the universe itself was eternal; they had a circular or, at least, a “spiral” conception of time. Their saying, “History repeats itself,” is old, indeed, and expresses the idea that there were whirlpools in the stream, where things came to be, then passed on, perhaps only to come again.
Such a concept of time, while it may seem remote and abstract, might have great practical significance in one’s daily life, should one adopt it, for it is, ultimately, a pessimistic view: history is going nowhere and humanity is tramping about on a kind of eternal treadmill. Historian Will Durant has written of what he calls the “indispersible gloom which broods over so much of Greek literature.”
Ecclesiastes is one of the most heavily Greek-influenced books of the Bible, and it has this tone. The book is included in Scripture, some say, to illustrate the consequences of such a point a view. Thus, in addition to those beautiful verses about there being “a time for every matter under heaven,” there are passages like these: “What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever . . . What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun . . . all is vanity.” (Eccl 1:4, 9, 12:8b)
The third conception of time is linear, i.e., there is an arrow, a direction to time’s passage: time is going somewhere. In this perspective, the universe, everything we know, has not always been. It had a beginning. Time moves “forward” and each moment in the present and the future is different from the past, unique. The universe, thus, is evolving.
This is the dominant time frame found in the Bible. There, time is the medium of the divine drama, wherein God is moving creation from a beginning toward the goal of fulfillment or consummation. Many have noticed that such a view is compatible with that of modern physics and astronomy, which speak of the universe beginning in a single instant: the primordial explosion that has come to be known by the trivial name of the Big Bang, then developing onward and outward from there over the course of nearly 14 billion years. Robert Jastrow, the founder and past director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, wrote of the scientist searching for answers who follows his data back to that initial event, but who is stymied by the fact that every bit of the evidence needed for studying the cause of it has been obliterated in the explosion. All the fingerprints have been erased, and the first cause is forever beyond reach: “The scientist’s pursuit of the past ends in the moment of creation . . . He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
An old saying is to the effect that if one marries the science of the time, one will soon be a widow/widower, a caution that must be kept in mind. However, there are more than a few who maintain that science itself owes a huge debt to this fundamental Christian perspective that time is linear. The idea is that science, which traces causes and effects and evolutionary sequence, could only develop if you had, as you did in Western Europe, some such idea of the linear, progressive, or developmental character of time that infused the entire culture.
One aspect of time is that which is past. In a sense, we never experience anything but the past. The sounds you are now hearing come from a thousandth of a second back in time for every foot traveled to reach you. And what is true of sound is true of light, but on a “faster” scale. When we look up toward the sun, we see it as it existed eight minutes ago, for it takes that long for light, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, to traverse the 93 million miles of space to earth.
All winter long the great galaxy M31 in Andromeda hangs in the night sky. This near twin of the Milky Way is the farthest thing that any human being has ever seen with the naked eye. If you know right where to look, you can see the hazy, glowing patch of light that our large telescopes reveal to be a spiral of perhaps 200 billion stars. It is 2.3 million light years away! That is to say, its light that reaches us tonight began its journey to us that far back in time, and what we see is a ghostly image formed that far in the distant past. Thus, deep space takes us into deep time, as well.
The attempt to transcend our limitations in time is a persistent theme in literature. H. G. Wells wrote a short story in which he imagines the possibility of science tapping into the “memory” of the human race itself: “A day may come when these recovered memories may grow as vivid as if we in our own persons had been there and shared the thrill and fear of those primordial days; a day may come when the great beasts of the past will leap to life again in our imaginations, when we shall walk again in vanished scenes, stretch painted limbs we thought were dust, and feel again the sunshine of a million years ago.”
In 1955, Albert Einstein learned of the death of his best friend, Michele Besso and wrote a brief letter to the family (as it turned out, just a few months before his own death): “He has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn illusion.”
Virtually everyone knows of one of Einstein’s ideas, that time may pass differently, depending upon the speed at which an object is moving, i.e., that time is relative to motion. At 99 percent of the speed of light, a month in a spaceship might be a year on earth. An imaginary space traveler might return to earth in what she thought was five years, only to find her friends and family had aged fifty or be all dead and gone. A movie that captured the public imagination decades ago, 2001: A Space Odyssey, had such a theme, and there have been numerous others since. There has been much silly stuff written about time travel; however, the universe may be strange beyond our imaginings.
There are additional ideas concerning the unevenness of time’s passage. In England’s Chester Cathedral is an inscription on the face of a clock, part of which reads: “When, as a child, I laughed and wept, time crept. When, as a youth, I dreamed and talked, time walked. When I became a full-grown man, time ran. And later, as I older grew, time flew.” All of us have known something of that. As kids, we waited for our parents to finish shopping and it “seemed like an eternity.” We have heard the elderly talk about how, for them, “time has flown.”
The Swedish paleontologist Björn Kurtén suggests that whether time seems to pass slowly or quickly is not, in fact, just seeming; rather, it depends upon our pace of living. Thus, he says, a child’s wound heals more rapidly, tied to bodily processes. He points out that a child makes decisions quickly, while the old take their time thinking it over; we may say this is due to experience and the wisdom of age, but it might reflect a different tempo of life, so that both are ruminating on the subject to about the same degree.
Kurtén suggests that time, for human beings, has something of a “logarithmic” character, the distance from year one to ten being as long as the distance from ten to one hundred. Thus, during one-half of our subjective lifetimes, we are children, illustrating why these are the teachable years.
Perhaps, says Kurtén, how time is experienced is relative to size, as well. Smaller animals live at a frantic pace. Although a generation for a shrew may be only a few weeks, it may “live” just as much as an elephant of seventy years, only at a much faster rate; the hearts of the two animals make about the same number of beats in a lifetime. A single day to a hummingbird with its frenetic metabolism would be as long and as full of experience as several months for a ponderous, huge animal with its slow heartbeat. So, experientially, do the mayfly and the Galapagos tortoise both “get the same?” Interesting, isn’t it?
We