in the universe. It happened because, for the first time, rationality competed with magic. Observation and logic were prized at long last.
Logic involves cause-and-effect sequences. A causes B, which then causes C. Everyone comes running from the fields after a goat shed collapses because an olive tree fell on it. The tree was knocked over by the wind. This happened at midday when the wind usually blows strongest. One of the village’s smarter men connected A with C and wondered aloud: Might the hot overhead Sun be the wind’s instigator? Hey, this was fun—uncovering a possible link between the Sun and a dead goat. The Greeks fell in love with this newfound tool of logic.
They were on the right track, but the very early Greeks— the first true practitioners of science—reached stumbling points fairly quickly. Two thousand years later, in the early seventeenth century, Italian physicist Evangelista Torricelli did indeed explain why the wind blows, and it did involve the Sun. But the ancient Greeks were hampered by their need to keep their gods in the picture. So, why did the god of the west wind, Zephyrus, choose to blow at some times but not others? The villagers would shrug; the gods had their own inscrutable reasons.
If the goat was dead, Zephyrus was apparently punishing the goat herder for some transgression. Guessing the crime even became a favorite neighborhood gossip topic. Infidelity was always a good bet, although hubris could often be suspected. You couldn’t understand divine motives, so why bother trying to figure out anything? In particular, a “first cause”—what starts the ball rolling—was vexingly impossible to pin down.
Yet even if cause-and-effect rationality reached blank walls quickly, the early Greeks admirably didn’t quit. And like science even today, especially the quantum theory experiments we will explore later, the ancients had to deal with verisimilitude, a wonderful word that means “the appearance of truth.”
Something that appears true may indeed be true. Or it may not be. The Sun crossing the sky while Earth remains motionless is a verisimilitude, an appearance. It seems true. It still appears true today, which is why we say “the Sun is setting” and not “the horizon is rising.” It was an amazing leap for Aristarchus on the island of Samos, fully eighteen hundred years before Galileo, to insist that you’d observe the same effect if it was Earth that was spinning while the Sun was stationary—and that this made more sense because the smaller body should logically revolve around the larger one.1
We will try to remember this idea of verisimilitude later, when we, too, are faced with alternative ways of interpreting everyday observations.
Meanwhile, Aristotle, in his groundbreaking Physics, held the view that the universe is a single entity with a fundamental connectedness between all things, and that the cosmos is eternal. You needn’t get hung up in the cause-and-effect business, he argued in the fourth century b.c.e., because everything has always been animated and has a kind of innate life or energy to it. There is no starting point. Actually, Aristotle hardly went out on a limb to say these things, as this solipsistic view had many adherents before he arrived on the scene.
Aristotle didn’t quit there. In Book IV of Physics, he argued that time has no independent existence on its own. It only subsists when people are around; we bring it into existence through our observations. This is very much in line with modern quantum experiments. No physicist today thinks that time has an independent reality as any sort of “absolute” or universal constant.
Still, neither Aristotle, nor Plato, nor Aristarchus, could abandon the dichotomy of us mortals existing here below while above us dwelled a parallel heavenly realm inhabited by the gods.
But things were very different in the East. Even before the Roman Empire, which retained the Greek gods (albeit with new names), a main branch of South Asian thought was being codified in texts such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Vedas. Their model of reality, soon known as Advaita Vedanta, was astonishingly unlike the Western worldview.
In common with Aristotle, Advaita taught that the universe is a single entity, which it called Brahmin. But unlike the Greeks, this “One” included the divine, as well as each person’s individual sense of self. All appearances of dichotomy or separateness, it insisted, are mere illusions, like a rope being mistaken for a snake. Advaita Vedānta went on to characterize this One as birthless and deathless, and essentially experienced as consciousness, a sense of being, and bliss.
Moreover, the Advaita teachers averred, realization of this was the goal of life. Not appeasement of gods, nor contributions to clergy, nor even any concern for an afterlife, but merely awakening to a full grasp of reality. Later spin-off religions such as Buddhism and Jainism retained these fundamentals. Today, the world still remains essentially divided into these basic two views of reality, Western and Eastern, dualistic and non-dualistic, that existed over a millennium ago.
The Eastern religions maintain that some individuals through the centuries have periodically enjoyed the “enlightenment” experience. That is, they awoke and saw the truth, and were swept into ecstasy and a sense of freedom.
A fascination with such Eastern views arrived in Western countries in the late nineteenth century, abetted by visits of a succession of influential, articulate Indian teachers such as Paramahansa Yogananda, Swami Vivekananda, and more recently Deepak Chopra. In the 1940s, Yogananda, through books such as his best-seller Autobiography of a Yogi, attempted to justify the Eastern view of the cosmos through science. By most accounts, such efforts sounded forced and the science arguments were less than compelling. They probably persuaded only those who were already on board.
But the quest itself was noble. If a person seeks knowledge of reality and one’s nature and one’s place in the universe, what if she has no spiritual calling? What if she solely demands fact-based evidence? Can these deep issues be tackled decisively by science alone?
That is our sixty-four-thousand-dollar question—and the real starting point for our journey.
1 Being far ahead of everyone else in the world, especially concerning some fundamental facet of life, has rarely bestowed any benefit. Who knows the name Aristarchus today? We checked; there isn’t a single high school named for him in the United States. At least he wasn’t put to death, unlike many other pioneers in thinking.
IN THE BEGINNING . . .
3
All is change; all yields its place and goes.
—Euripides (c. 416 b.c.e.)
No matter what picture of the universe one embraces, time seems to play a key role. Indeed, our existing models are so thoroughly time based, they can neither be understood nor disproved without also understanding time itself. Thus we must tackle it before anything else.
This is no mere philosophical matter. It goes to the heart of our perceptions and lies at the fulcrum between the observer and nature. Certainly, we use time constantly. We make appointments and look forward to vacation plans, and some of us fret about the afterlife. If there is one big difference between people and animals, it is not that we are unafraid of vacuum cleaners. It is that we are time obsessed.
On one level, what we commonly mean by time is inarguably real. Our car’s GPS announces that if we stay on this highway we will reach Cleveland in 3 hours and 48 minutes. And we do. Moreover, while we do that, countless other events unfold in our bodies and elsewhere on the Earth.
Yet this agreed-upon interval is, on closer inspection, as fishy and intangible as the question of what exactly happened at midnight on New Year’s Eve.
The question of time has tormented philosophers for millennia, and this torture shows no signs of abating. Happily, unlike the intricacies of, say, Middle East politics, here we have only two contrasting viewpoints.
One is the opinion held by such noted smart people as Isaac Newton, who saw time as part of the fundamental structure of the universe. He believed it to be inherently real. If so, time constitutes