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THE END OF TIME

6

Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of Heaven,

That time may cease, and midnight never come.

—Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (1604)

When we grow up watching our loved ones age and die, we assume that an external entity called time is responsible for the crime. But as we’ve seen, many lines of science and logic cast doubt on the existence of time as we know it. We must repeat that, although we do observe change, change isn’t the same thing as time.

So what are we experiencing? To observe change, such as motion from one point to another, we should examine the process—what actually is unfolding. Now, to measure anything’s position precisely is to “lock in” on one static frame of its motion, like a single frame or screenshot of a film. Conversely, as soon as we observe movement, we can’t isolate a frame, because motion is the summation of many frames. Sharpness in one parameter induces blurriness in the other.

Let’s pay homage to Zeno and consider a film of his flying arrow. We can stop the projector on a single frame. The pause enables us to know the position of the arrow with great accuracy—there it is, hovering eight feet above the archery tournament field. But we’ve lost all information about its momentum. It’s going nowhere; its path is uncertain.

What’s interesting is that, since the 1920s, numerous experiments confirm that such uncertainty is not merely a matter of having insufficiently precise technology. Rather, uncertainty is built into the fabric of reality. This basic fact of nature was first expressed mathematically by German physicist Werner Heisenberg and today is of course universally known as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

The truth of this started to become clear when scientists measured objects like electrons. Increasing accuracy in figuring out their direction and speed (momentum) yielded ever-growing blurriness in knowing where they were at any given instant (position). At first everyone assumed that we’d eventually be able to nail both down with high certainty. In other words, our inabilities were due to our own technological immaturity, and we’d soon do better. We never did. Thus, an amazing thing soon became obvious. An electron doesn’t have an exact position and an exact motion. Rather, the act of observing results in perceiving one characteristic or the other or else a vague sense of both. The uncertainty principle became a fundamental concept of quantum physics.

It may seem spooky, but the weirdness completely goes away, and the whole thing makes sense, when viewed from a life-based perspective. According to biocentrism, time is the inner sense that animates the still frames of the spatial world. Remember, we can’t see through the bone surrounding the brain; everything we experience right now, even our bodies, is a whirl of information occurring in our minds. Space and time are merely the mind’s tools for effortlessly putting everything together.

So what’s real? If the next image is different from the last, then it’s different, period. We can award change with the word time, but that doesn’t mean that there’s an invisible matrix in which changes occur.

We view life while perched on the edge of that paradox described by Zeno. Because an object can’t occupy two places simultaneously, we can synopsize his conclusions by noting that an arrow is somewhere (and nowhere else) during each instant of its flight. To be in one place, however, is to be at rest, however momentarily. The arrow must therefore be motionless at each discrete moment. Thus, motion is not what’s happening, at least not if we insist it’s a time-based phenomenon.