Zaadz: What is time?

Re: Zero plus

Sun, 24 Dec 2006 05:30:12 -0000

Very interesting. Numbers, space and time all configured together. If we dwelve back a little into our own lives we may find so many numerical similarities.
Siva

Back in Time

Sun, 24 Dec 2006 06:03:06 -0000

Frenzied star making was taking place in the Milky way around 2400 million years ago. This frenzy has been discovered to have had a connection with the formation of life on earth. Bacterial count of the seas soared at that time. This dismisses the idea that a warm climate is friendlier than a cold one in supporting formation of life.

Scientists noticed that the biggest fluctuations in productivity coincided with high star formation rates and cool periods in earth's climate. Conversely, with low star formation rates,cosmic rays were less intense and earth's climate was warmer but rate of life formation was less. in all icy epochs, the biosphere experienced exceptionally high productivity.

More cosmic rays give more clouds which leads to a colder climate, less cosmic rays give less clouds and a warmer climate. The carbon -13 signal is a remarkable data series spanning 3.8 billion years and variations in this signal corelate with the reconstructed cosmic ray signal. So the idea is that cosmic rays changed climate and that set the conditions for life.

Star formation is measured by counting the number of stars of a given size and determining their age. This is found to be proportional to the overall star formation rate at that time and therefore, also the number of supernova ( where stars are formed by the collision of existing stars) at that time. This gives way to cosmic ray calculation and the relation is drawn.

Re: Zero plus

Sun, 24 Dec 2006 11:05:27 -0000

Time started when I learned to tell the time, or when I was born, When the first clock was made, When the first choice was taken, When matter first came into exhistance, At the Big Bang, Before the Big Bang, None of the above. If a tree falls in the forest, but no-one is there to see it, would you like my audio recording of the event? My calendar tells me that time started just over 2006 years ago, my clock is unable to confirm with accuracy the length of any of the first 703000 days, yet I am still able to get up in the morning. Isn't life truly wonderful?

Re: Three Levels of Time

Sun, 24 Dec 2006 13:44:51 -0000

Dear Balder,

Thank you very much for answering my three questions. I cannot, of course, claim that everything you said trickled in substantively. I am gradually trying to understand. The three entities of Time, Space and Knowledge, all together is very difficult to comprehend like graduating from the two dimensional to the three.

A piercing wisdom and razor sharp intellect are perhaps the minimum that are required to attempt to get an inkling of the issues involved.

The alternative is perhaps the path of total submission or Bhakti, which frees the mind of all the trouble to work overtime to peep a glimpse at the metaphysical goings on. As a way out I am tempted to submit myself to mother Goddess Kali and leave the rest to her by writing a kind of a general power of attorney, perpetual and never ending.

But the thread of ego persists in time dangling a carrot of hope that perhaps the infinite is achievable through human rudimentary intellect. Time is that thread with which we attempt to weave a net. Perhaps.

Siva.

Re: Three Levels of Time

Sun, 24 Dec 2006 17:19:16 -0000

Hi, Siva,

If you are interested, the following paper presents one scientifically-oriented approach to understanding the relationship of knowledge to the timespace continuum. One of the scientists is a student of TSK, but the way they approach the subject does not rely exclusively on TSK. Their general thesis is that rather than trying to understand knowledge, or knowingness, as a process which arises out of insentient activities in space and time, it may be more appropriate to take knowingness to be on par with time and space.

Since they explain the argument quite well, I won't try to summarize more here. Here is a link to the paper:

http://www.ids.ias.edu/~piet/publ/turning/tuc2.1.html.

Best wishes,

Balder

P.S. For some reason, the forum software is not activating the entire url, so you may need to copy and paste it in your address window. I did just visit the website, so I do know that it is still active.

Re: Zero plus

Mon, 25 Dec 2006 06:16:25 -0000

If we study Sri Aurobindo's writings, a few questions emerge regarding time.
In "Symbol Dawn" in his book "Savitri"-a legend and symbol, he describes the moment in the following verse:

"It was the hour before the Gods awake,
Across the path of the divine Event
The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone
In her unlit temple of eternity,
Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge.
Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable,
In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse.
the abysm of the unbodied infinite;
A fathomless zero occupied the world."

The fathomless zero is inclusive of time, I presume, for if space is zero time cannot be far behind. In the same canto he continues in another stanza:

"A sacred yearning lingered in its trace,
The worship of a Presence and a Power
Too perfrect to be held by death-bound hearts,
The prescience of a marvellous birth to come.
Only a little the god-light can stay:
Spiritual beauty illumining human sight
Lines with its passion and mystery Matter's mask
And squanders eternity on a beat of Time.
As when a soul draws near the sill of birth,
Adjoining mortal time to Timelessness,..."

How can you squander eternity on a beat of Time unless it is very flexible to the extent that eternity levels to a beat? And also there is Timelessness adjacent to our mortal time. How this duality and why? Do we exist at the edge of timelessness meaning there is no time beyond the point of our death?

Now Sri Aurobind goes on to describe the reasons of immediate birth of Savitri, the alienated goddess, thrown to this world from the heavens to atone for her imagined fault:

"A narrow movement on Time's deep abysm,
Life's fragile littleness denied the power,
The proud and conscious wideness and the bliss
She had brought with her into the human form,
The calm delight that weds one soul to all,
The key to the flaming doors of ecstasy."

Where is the deep abysm of Time located? Is our existence on the edge of that abysm?
And he describes Savitri's prospective torment on the day that Satyavan, her husband is destned to die in the following lines:

"Awake she endured the moments' serried march
And looked on this green smiling dangerous world,
And heard the ignorant cry of living things.
Amid the trivial sounds, the unchanging scene
Her soul arose confronting Time and Fate.
Immobile in herself, she gathered force.
This was the day when Satyavan must die."

Is Time a foe that Savitri had to confront along with Fate? Enduring the serried march of the moments was another torture for her. Was she able to confront Time and Fate from the front and stop both? If yes, Time is an entity that can even be stopped in the eyes of the great philosopher Sri Aurobindo.

Past happenings

Sat, 06 Jan 2007 13:44:09 -0000

Time is the common denominator in all the happenings. As if it is the highway along which man progresses in course of his life. It is present at every step, itself remaining discreet. It changes on its own.

Digressing from the serious to the more mundane side of life we perceive some interesting aspects of time and the cycle over which it rotates continuously through the seasons.

A friend was telling me the other day that time runs faster in winter because the Sun rises later and sets earlier allowing lesser number of working hours. Of course she did not say that the time runs slower during winter nights. It takes ages to clock 8 o'clock in the night.

I remember a late November morning of 1969 when I was waiting at a roadside tea stall at the central bus terminus of the city. It was the day I came to the city where I live now. I had to appear at a job interview later on that day. A few hours at my disposal had to be whiled away. I did that at the bus terminus. Later on I appeared at the interview and was successful. Much later in life I settled in the same city. Was time instrumental in bringing me back? Is it providence taking on the shape of time? Questions start popping up which just cannot be ignored.

Whenever I pass through that particular spot at the bus terminus, I still remember that morning. The crisp winter air with a chill - still rings the innumerable bells of my mind. Has time stood still at that point for ever?

Re: Past happenings

Sun, 07 Jan 2007 03:34:28 -0000

This morning as I was returning from my morning constitutional of walking for an hour a faint music greeted me. It was a favourite song by Tagore. The mild northern wind was carrying the song from somewhere in the vicinity. Probably it was a precursor to some sporting event along the banks of the lakes. What struck me were the two lines which reached me very clearly. At that moment I was thinking of "Time" and its ramifications. Was it telepathy? The lines in Bengali were:

"Samay je tar holo gato,
Nishi sesher tarar mato
Holo gato;
Sesh kore dao Siuli phuler
Maran sathe..
Amar raat pohalo.."

Translated roughly it conveys:
"Its time is depleted,
Like the Star at the day-break,
Let it end with the shedding
of the siuli flower..."

The great poet, therefore feels that time fades out like the shedding of the beautiful white siuli flowers or the cessation of the night to lead to where ? The poet remains silent on that.
Perhaps he had left it to his readers to imagine that out. My search for the flight of Time so far hasn't met with any success.

Siva.
My night fades out.."

Re: When was the start of everything?

Sat, 20 Jan 2007 13:16:22 -0000

I shall now report a few details of the research by Stephen Hawking who said "God not only plays dice. He also sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen."

Hawking's had researched the concept of singularities (the most important example of a singularity is a black hole, the final form of a collapsed star) break downs in space and time where the classic laws of physics are no longer applicable. Space-time is the combination of time and three dimensional space.
In late 1960s Hawking established that if GTR was correct then it was at the big bang that a singularity had occurred. The start of the universe and time-space coincided with the big bang. The cosmic clock came into existence then only. His research in space and time sometimes blurred the thick line between science and philosophy. That was why he said: "Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Or does it need a creator, and if so, does he have any other effect on the universe? And who created him?"
Stephen Hawking believd that the reason we came to the Earth was to find the reason for our existence in this planet, or of any existence at all.

Re: When was the start of everything?

Sun, 21 Jan 2007 10:59:20 -0000

I have a problem with big numbers. It sems to me that if there are billions of people on this planet, then the likes of Hitler or Ghandi are bound to occur. There power for good or evil are tempered by the support they get. In a infinite universe, or an extraordinarily big one, I fail to see how we should speculate on a beginning. Of course we can say we believe ( or not ) in a big bang, but who is arrogant enough to claim Knowledge beyond what we can measure? How many times will man claim answers he does not have? Is not our current Environmental troubles entirely the fault of previous so called knowledge. In a universe this big there is always a bigger picture.

Krishnamurti on the Ending of Time

Wed, 24 Jan 2007 05:58:00 -0000

Here is an excerpt from one of Krishnamurti's inquiries into the 'ending of time':

KRISHNAMURTI: We were saying that psychological time is conflict, that time is the enemy of man. And that enemy has existed from the beginning of man. And we asked, why has man from the beginning taken a `wrong turn', a `wrong path'? And, if so, is it possible to turn man in another direction in which he can live without conflict? Because, as we said yesterday, the outer movement is also the same as the inner movement. There is no separation between inner and outer. It is the same movement. And we asked whether we were concerned deeply and passionately to turn man in another direction so that he doesn't live in time, with a knowledge only of the outer things. The religions, the politicians, the educators have failed: they have never been concerned about this. Would you agree to that?
     DAVID BOHM: Yes. I think the religions have tried to discuss the eternal values beyond time but they don't seem to have succeeded.

     K: That is what I want to get at. To them it has been an idea, an ideal, a principle, a value, but not an actuality, and most of the religious people have their anchor in a belief, in a principle, in an image, in knowledge, in jesus or in something or other.

     DB: Yes, but if you were to consider all the religions, say the various forms of Buddhism, they try to say this very thing which you are saying, to some extent.

     K: To some extent but what I am trying to get at is: why has man never confronted this problem? Why haven't we said `Let's end conflict'? Instead we have been encouraged because through conflict we think there is progress.

     DB: It can be a certain source of stimulus to try to overcome opposition.

     K: Yes, Sir, but if you and I see the truth of this, not in abstraction, but actually, deeply, can we act in such a way that every issue is resolved instantly, immediately, so that psycholog- ical time is abolished? And as we asked yesterday, when you come to? that point where there is nothing and there is everything, where all that is energy - when time ends, is there a beginning of something totally new? Is there a beginning which is not enmeshed in time? Now how shall we discover it? Words are necessary to communicate. But the word is not that thing. So what is there when all time ends? Psychological time, not time of...

     DB: ...time of day.

     K: Yes. Time as the `me', the ego, and when that completely comes to an end, what is there that begins? Could we say that out of the ashes of time there is a new growth? What is that which begins - no, that word `begins' implies time too.

     DB: Whatever we mean, that which arises.

     K: That arises, what is it?

     DB: Well, as we said yesterday, essentially it is creation, the possibility of creation.

     K: Yes, creation. Is that it? Is something new being born?

     DB: It is not the process of becoming.

     K: Oh, no, that is finished. Becoming is the worst, that is time, that is the real root of this conflict. We are trying to find out what happens when the `I', which is time, has completely come to an end. I believe the Buddha is supposed to have said `Nirvana'. And the Hindus call it Moksha. I don't know whether the Christians call it Heaven...

     DB: The Christian mystics have had some similar state...

     K: Similar, yes. But you see, the Christian mystics, as far as I understand it, are rooted in jesus, in the Church, in the whole belief. They have never gone beyond it.

     DB: Yes, well that seems so. As far as I know anyway.

     K: Now we have said belief, attachment to all that is out, finished. That is all part of the `I'. Now when there is that absolute cleansing of the mind from the accumulation of time, which is the essence of the `me', what takes place?

Re: Krishnamurti on the Ending of Time

Wed, 24 Jan 2007 10:47:02 -0000

If the beginning and end of everything is enmeshed in time then is there anything that exists beyond the tentacles of time? In order to understand time we may have to grow beyond time and watch it from a distance. So long as we are immersed in time and are dissolved in it how can we know in what way it is different from our existence?
"Kalatita" is a word in Sanskrit which means "Beyond time". It naturally gives rise to an idea that there exists something beyond the ubiquitous phenomenon called time.

Re: Krishnamurti on the Ending of Time

Wed, 24 Jan 2007 15:52:37 -0000

In Krishnamurti's teachings, 'time' is used in a specialized way and refers to the psychological movement of 'becoming' based on memory and projection. He contends that we can move beyond this particular psychological orientation -- e.g., identification with images. I believe this is possible. But it appears to be another question altogether, whether we can move beyond time in all its forms -- not just as psychological projection, but as that dimension of being that allows for the creative unfolding of events.

It is very difficult to imagine moving beyond time altogether -- even if one has had 'timeless' experiences in which experiencing ceases and there is a kind of 'void' or gap, or a presence beyond form and motion. These experiences may first appear to be bounded on either side by the normal sense of time, but then you may find that that 'presence' is the background or even the abiding flavor of all experiencing.

Because of this intimacy of timeless presence and time, I prefer words such as the Fourth Time (Nyingma Buddhism) or Great Time (TSK) to refer to that dimension of being traditionally called 'the timeless.'

A big rip, crunch & bang.

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 07:44:55 -0000

Life on earth has been going on for about three-and-a-half billion years. John Gribbin offers fresh and important insights into how life may have been seeded from space with organic molecules carried on cometary dust.
Astronomers have good reason to believe that the universe is about 13.7 billion years old. The Hubble space telescope has captured images of galaxies that formed just a billion years after the Big Bang. But it is what happened immediately after the Big Bang that has captured the imagination of cosmologists.
Cosmologists think they know that a period of rapid expansion, known as inflation, occured in the first few fractions of an instant after the universe began. We are not talking microseconds here, but unimaginably tinier fractions of time. Take for example the first point after the Big Bang when the strong force of gravity becomes a distinct entity- 10-35 seconds after the birth of the universe. (This number has 34 zeros between the decimal point on the left and the first digit on the right). Quarks, the family of fundamental subatomic particles, came into their own in about 10-10 seconds after the universe began. For the briefest moment they existed as a plasma- a cloud - but this free living phase ended at 10-4 secods.
It was at this point that the universe entered the era of baryons, the visible matter that comprises the galaxies, stars and planets of today. Everything we see around us- including our own bodies- is composed of baryonic matter.
It is almost impossible to conceptualise these minute timescales.
The era of inflation that led to the establishment of gravity was as remote from the era of quark plasma as we ourselves are from the era of quark plasma- but of course in the other direction.
Cosmologists think they know that quantum fluctuations affected matter during this critical periodof inflation. these fluctuations seeded the process that ultimately led to the creation of a "clumpy" universe of stars, galaxies, planets and life. This belief forms one of the central tenets of the New Standard Cosmology, whichexplains how the universe evolved.
About 80 per cent of the universe does not exist as visible, baryonic matter, but something invisible and mysterious so called cold dark matter. Experiments are on to trap the ghostly sub-atomic particles that are thought tocomprise this dark matter. they have never been detected because they pass straight through ordinary matter.
There is the weird hidden power called dark energy, which was revealed only a few years ago when astronomers realised that something was accelerating the rate of the universe's expansion. it is believed that dark energy holds the universe together today, but, paradoxically, it seems that if the acceleration of the expansion continues, then it will also be responsible for blowing it apart- a Big Rip as opposed to the Big Crunch of a universe that implodes in on itself.
Cosmologists describe the universe as "flat", meaning that it is balanced on a knife-edge between runaway expansion and precipitate collapse. They can explain our presence by the anthropic principle of cosmology, which simply states that we find ourselves living in a universe uniquely designed for life because we wouldn't be able to live in any other kind of universe.
Life on earth has been going for about three and a half billion years. Life may have been seeded from space with organic molecules carried on cometary dust. The vital elements of Carbon, Nitrogen and Phosphorus were forged in the nuclear furnaces of the stars, but more complicated organic molecules essential for life are known to be synthesised in interstellar clouds.

Re: Krishnamurti on the Ending of Time

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 14:41:10 -0000

The problem of the direction of time arises directly from two contradictory facts. Firstly, the law of nature, i.e., our fundamental physics are time-reversal invariant. In other words the laws of physics are such that anything that can happen moving forward through time is just as possible moving backwards in time. Or, put in another way, through the eyesof physics, there will be no distinction, in terms of possibility, between what happens in a movie if the film is run forward, or if the film is run backwards.
The second fact is that our experience of time, at the macroscopic level, is not time-reversal invariant. Glasses fall and break all the time, but shards of glass do not put themselves back together and fly up on tables. We have memories of the past, and none of the future. We feel we can't change the past but can affect the future.

Dark matter and time.

Sat, 10 Feb 2007 17:33:34 -0000

Since time cannot exist without space or matter, the question of the exploration of dark matter, which occupies the major portion of the universe is of paramount importance. The mystery of dark matter which is one of the greatest mysteries of the Universe is on the verge of being solved thanks to research by astronomers. They have apparently achieved a breakthrough of building up a picture of dark matter whose existence was first postulated in 1933.

Scientists knew that there was more to the universe than could be detected through telescopes. But it is only now that 3D image of this invisible dark matter could be captured. No body has seen dark matter but it is calculated to occupy six times larger space than visible matter.

More than 70 astronomers from Europe, America and Japan, using the Hubble telescope could build up an image of dark matter in a region of space that dates back to 7 billion years. the principle of gravitational lensing was used for this purpose.

More details will follow.

Re: Dark matter and time.

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 12:07:32 -0000

I read recently that the search for dark matter is also going on underground, in giant particle accelerators. The race is on!

Re: Dark matter and time.

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 14:50:50 -0000

The astronomers used a phenomenon "gravitational lensing", predicted by Albert Einstein to probe an area of the sky nine times the size of the full moon. This phenomenon of gravitational lensing occurs when light from far away galaxies is bent by the gravitational influence of matter en route.
The astronomers exploited the technique by observing the distorted light from the far away galaxies to reconstruct the missing mass which remained hidden from the probing conventional telescopes.
Dr Richard Massey of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, one of the lead scientists in the team said: "We have, for the first time, mapped the large scale distribution of dark matter in the universe."
"Dark matter is a mysterious and invisible form of matter, about which we know very little, yet it dominates the mass of the universe," Dr Massey said. One of the most important findings of this study is that dark matter appears to form an invisible skeleton around which the visible universe is superimposed. all this proves the theoretical calculations made so far.
"A filamentary web of dark matter is threaded through the entire universe, and acts as scaffolding within which the ordinary matter- including stars, galaxies and planets - can later be built. Dr Massey said. "The most surprising aspect of our map is how unsurprising it is. Overall, we seem to understand really well what happens during the formation of structure and the evolution of the universe," he said.
Further research would reveal the intricacies of matter and thereby of time. We have to wait till that.

time???

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 06:35:25 -0000

I allways have wanted to tell and say ,as I allways have been feeling about it ,I mean time, it is an unvolantary ,uncontrolled and wandering type of, some strangely make-up of an engine which will every single fraction of the unending journey will take us some where we never want to get there!. love, Farid

Re: time???

Mon, 09 Apr 2007 15:31:21 -0000

Time is involuntary and uncontrolled from the apparent human perception. but in reality what is time? This question has bothered the human mind from time immemorial without any tangible theory conceived till now.