The popular press makes money out of stories that pander to its readers’ prejudices and vanity. In the reporting of scientific research that has to do with people, the popular press invariably reports research that purports to show all children and young people are in great danger (obesity, alcohol, drugs) and/or the current generation of children and young people are ill-disciplined, lazy, greedy, selfish, ungrateful and are growing up too quickly, unlike the generation of readers who, as children, were obedient, well-behaved, and innocent of all aspects of adult life, and, as teenagers, were well-behaved, hard-working and respectful of their elders. These stories are all versions of the ‘I don’t know what the youth of today are coming to’ complaint.
The generation of readers are unique in a great many ways. The world they live in bears no similarity at all to the world that earlier generations lived in. History never repeats itself. Moreover, the readers’ generation suffers more than all earlier generations. These stories are versions of the myth of the Golden Age.
We derive such prejudices from our vanity that tells us that we are superior to other people. We are blinded to the truth more often by our vanity than we are by the lies that other people tell us.
Physicists and cosmologists, being human, are as truthful or not in their dealings with other people, but their subject matter is very difficult to manipulate to produce results that they can turn to their advantage. If their results are wrong, sooner or later further research will show that this is so. Physicists and cosmo logists are unlikely to lie to you about their research, but, if you want to see your world as controllable and predictable, they have naught for your comfort.
Did you know that on New Year’s Eve, 2009, time stopped? It stopped very briefly, so that the guardians of the atomic clocks around the world could synchronize their clocks with the rotation of the planet.10 It was not the clock running fast but the planet running slow.
Anthropologists tell us that our ancestors 30,000 years ago kept calendars. This was 25,000 years before the emergence of writing. The calendar is one of our earliest purely intellectual creations.11 Daily time was measured by the rising and setting of the sun. Sundials, hour glasses, and water clocks were not particu larly accurate, but this did not matter until the dawn of the Industrial Revolution when factory owners wanted their workers to arrive on time. The workers did not have clocks and watches because they were expensive, and remained so until well into the twentieth century. When I was a child in the 1930s a still-popular saying was, ‘If you want to know the time, ask a policeman.’ Now we look at our mobile phones, or we say to one another, ‘Do you know what time it is?’
This is the title of a BBC4 programme presented by the physicist Brian Cox.12 He described how time as we know it ‘is an illusion’. However, it does seem that time exists as a dimension in the universe much in the way that space exists as a dimension. The question that some of the best physicists in the world are asking is, ‘What is time?’ There is no definite answer to this question.
Our television news programmes often end with weather forecasters predicting at what time the sun will rise and set the next day. We say that the length of the day is twenty-four hours because the Earth takes twenty-four hours to rotate on its axis, but the actual time it takes the Earth to spin on its axis changes because the Earth’s speed is affected by the pull of the Moon on the Earth and by the power of the wind. World time is now determined by atomic clocks which are very accurate because they use the precise microwave signal that electrons in atoms emit when they change energy levels. However, these clocks need to be adjusted occasionally to the spin of the planet. Our time-keeping methods do not measure a time difference with some fixed point in time. They simply impose a pattern on events that has a regularity with which we can organize ourselves.
We experience time as a continuous present. The past is contained in our memory, and our future in our imagination. However, we are dependent on the light from the Sun, and that takes eight minutes to reach us. When we look up into the heavens, we see the past. When we look deeper and deeper into the heavens, we go further back into the past. Physicists have calculated that the universe began with a Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago. The orthodox view amongst cosmologists is that time began with the universe, but unorthodox cosmologists like Neil Turack use string theory to propose that time may have begun before the Big Bang. There could be, he says, additional parallel worlds.
Different cultures have different images of space and time. When American children draw maps, they usually use a bird’s-eye view in the way Google maps look down on the Earth, whereas Sherpa children in Nepal create an image of vertical distances so that they can show how much time it takes to go up and down from one place to another. Trekkers in Nepal use the same method measuring distance in time, not in linear units.13 Seconds, minutes and hours have been accepted as units of time, although there are cultural differences in how time and dates are written. The hour after noon can be written as 1 p.m. or 13.00. The Twin Towers collapse is dated as 9/11 in the USA, 11/9 in the UK.
Seconds, minutes and hours relate to how we experience the passing of the day, but now there are video cameras that record in units of time different from the units of time in which we see events. If a high-speed camera captures images, say, of a glass of water being thrown into Brian Cox’s face, and then the images slowed right down, hidden details are revealed. The world looks very different when time is broken down into chunks as small as 10-43 seconds. Our eyes and our brain operate like a kind of video camera. Our eyes, like a camera, take individual still pictures, and then our brain deals with each still so quickly that we see what seems to be a continuous film. Our eyes are not fast enough to take in everything that happens within the range we are looking. We see a glass of water being thrown and what we think is the recipient’s reaction, but we do not see how, under the onslaught of the water, a person’s face takes on shapes and movements that, when revealed to us by the camera, seem quite strange. However, at whatever speed we are viewing the world, what we see is not just a matter of visual acuity. We see what is meaningful to us. When my son Edward and I were watching an episode of the BBC series Spooks, we saw one of the central characters, Ros, who was disguised as an accountant working in high finance, get into a car and drive away. We saw the car very briefly, a matter of seconds. I saw a low-slung, black convertible, and asked Edward, ‘What make of car was that?’ He said, ‘An Aston Martin – James Bond’s car.’ Cars are Edward’s passion. When I was a child, time passed very slowly. I celebrated each passing year because I wanted to grow up. Now time passes at an extraordinary rate. A day passes in a blink of an eye. Why do we have to go into the future at the rate that we do? Time seems to slow down when we are bored, or in the midst of an accident or a sudden crisis, and it speeds up when we are busy. Why can’t the speed with which we go into the future be moderated by events, better still, by our wishes? The apparent slowing down or speeding up of time in certain circumstances are examples of how our interpretations or constructions of the time we are experi encing are dependent on our circumstances. They are what Brian Cox called ‘illusions’. According to Einstein, we cannot change the speed with which we go into the future because time is a dimension we pass along, just as we can pass along the dimension of space. We cannot move through space at the speed of light, but we move through time at the speed of light. Einstein showed that we each experience the passing of time in our own individual way. As Brian Cox said, no one has the right to claim that their time is the right time.
Einstein argued that all moments in time already exist. We are moving along time in the same way as we move along a road that has already been built. However, in the sub-atomic world of quantum mechanics, the future does not exist. Rather, it is a world of probabilities, where the future grows out of the past. Two different ways of looking at the world yield two different results.
When Brian Cox asked Neil Turack, ‘Do you know what time it is?’ Neil replied, ‘The time today is something we have no idea about.’
A butterfly fluttering its wings and causing a huge disaster in some distant place has become a cliché to which the word ‘chaos’ has become