How on earth can time not exist?

 

There’s even a famous song about it existing, from the movie Casablanca, and everyone knows the movie Casablanca.

We humans know that ‘time goes by’, time moves on, and space is where we park the car and hang our clothes. We see time and space as separate ‘things’. Always did.

Modern Physics suggests there is no such thing as Time and no such thing as Space separately like that, but only the-two-together as spacetime.

Can we really understand spacetime without getting into other mysteries of maths and geometry? Perhaps, if we don’t make the same mistake twice.

We need to think of spacetime as not some thing ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ something else, something we call the Universe, but of Time-and-Space together as a property of the Universe.

Now instead of getting all technical (as if I would or could!), Einstein is said to have got the idea for Special Relativity while going down in a lift somewhere.

Inside the lift, he intuited that if you were falling inside a lift that was falling, there would be no Space and Time anymore. Can we all imagine that happening? Just going on and on? Maybe we can, but not on Earth. Where then could it happen?

Only where there is no up and down, no left and right, no backwards and forwards. In spacetime infinite Universe. Where there is no Space and there is no Time.

 

How to understand why you're here, instead of making something up

 

Around 1620, a genius called Rene Descartes reasoned, 'I think, therefore I am'. He may have said it in French, 'Je pense, donc Je suis'. We know it famously in Latin, 'Cogito ergo sum'. But M Descartes would not say that today. Today, he would say, 'I am, therefore I think'.

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth" - Sherlock Holmes, 1890

*****

You can actually figure out the answer to this biggest question of all, from this simple experiment at home. 

Imagine you have 50 coins. You lay them all down 'heads'. (Easy enough to imagine. You don't actually have to do it.)

Now, toss each coin, one by one, carefully, in your mind. They won't all come down heads again, will they? You know that. You don't know how you know it, and you don't know how many will come down heads again. Or tails. But you know they won't all be heads again.

Now instead of with 50, you could do that experiment with 500 or 500,000 or 5 million coins. Imagine you do. You know the answer will be the same: not all heads (or tails), but of course not the actual numbers.

Okay. Now. After many, many experiments, experiment gives you not a definite number or 'answer' but a statistical probability. It's not a definite figure and it's definitely not 'true'. A statistical probability, by definition, is never certain.

And the really extraordinary thing that you know is that you know, in spite of however many experiments you do, it's still possible all the coins could come down heads again. You simply can't deny it. Whether 50 or 50 million. You know. You know that it's not absolutely and completely out of all possibility. You understand that it's not impossible.

That's Science. It's not certain. It's not the truth. But it's not making things up.

And it shows how and why you are here. There was some probability you’d be, in the Universe.

"In heaven's name, why on earth are we here?"

It's our call. There it is. If Heaven isn't the answer, we've got to find it on Earth. What have we got?

Three things are clear. The first is that you have a body and are 'here'. 

The second is we don't know how we got 'here'. No one does for sure.

The third is that we make things up. Ideas, theories and prophecies are what we come up with because we don't know something for sure. When we don't know something for sure, we make something up. Like we eat and breathe and walk and talk, we try to understand.

It's one of the things being here means. Trying to understand.

Then there's the deeply puzzling fourth thing: the 'here' outside our body. We'll never understand that. The best guess is that there's always been a 'here' outside our body, simply because no other idea, theory or prophecy is ever for sure. 

Here must have always been there.

It was just us that was missing.

From Here to Eternity: Science v Religion

"God doesn't exist."

"Yes, He does. He created everything."

"Watch your pronouns!  No, she didn't. Evolution did."

"Evolution's not true. Evolution doesn't explain how life started."

"Nor does God. Just saying God did it doesn't prove it."

"There's no proof of evolution - it's just a theory! Theories aren't facts." 

"The fact is religion's just a belief."

"So's your atheism - that's a religion."

You'll recognise some of that: the Science versus Religion argument. (Note the capitals: Science and Religion as different ways of knowing - not of any particular versions of each.) 

There you were, thinking that was over, that it was done and done with, and it's not over or done with at all. It's back. 

It's back because people have two different ways of explaining the same thing: the mystery of existence. That includes all of us. There's no getting away from it. The argument goes on and on as everyone argues that one of the other, Science or Religion, must be right, must be true.

One way out is to ignore it, but that's no answer. A better way is not to bother about what's true or not true and to think how the argument came about in the first place.

When did people start disagreeing like this? That is the question, because once upon a time the disagreement wasn't there on anything like the scale it is today. People argued all the time, but they argued about which religion was true, not whether Religion or Science was.

In the west, you can say it started around the beginning of the seventeenth century - 1600 and something. There's no firm or agreed date for it, and there was certainly not the remotest possibility of seeing how it would develop into what it is now. It was the beginning of the Scientific Revolution, of something that had not happened before.

People argue about the Scientific Revolution, of course, Nevertheless, that time period can be seen as the start of a fundamental change in thinking. Not sudden, not general; sporadic, scattered - not involving anything like the majority of people, who went on thinking as usual. (Just like today really. For heavens sake, what is a computer?) 

The coming of Science was the start of people thinking that there is another way of thinking.

They started thinking about and studying the natural world as the natural world; and slowly learned, to their confusion and unease, that the inquiry led inevitably to themselves; to what and who they were as a part of it. They had different answers.

"It leads back to God Who gave us everlasting life."

"That's a lovely story. But it looks like the Universe itself is just infinite and eternal."

And so on and so on. There's no end to Eternity.