IT’S NOW OR NEVER

For St. Augustine who knew about time until someone asked for him to explain ¹
For Albert Einstein who was worried about the problem of Now
For him who felt so sad that the experience of Now could not be grasped by science ²
For Eckhart Tolle who claimed of getting power from the Now ³

Also,… for Elvis Presley who used to sing the song

What is Time? What is Now?

The "now," the present time, is when everything is there
The past time is when everything was there but is not there anymore
The future time is when everything will be there but is not yet there

The present is when everything is present
The past is when everything was present but is not present anymore
The future is when everything will be present, but is not yet present

The present is when everything does exist
The past is when everything did exist but does not exist anymore
The future is when everything will exist but does not yet exist

Everything does exist simultaneously in a very brief moment of now ^a)

Nothing does exist in the past and the future

Everything does exist just only now, right now, in this very brief moment of now

When now becomes the past, everything is annihilated
When the future becomes now, everything is created ^b)
Nothing persists; everything is created and annihilated perpetually and orderly
Space is nothing but the simultaneous presence of everythingSpace is the totality of now
Now and space are indistinguishable, the two different aspects of the same thing ^c)

Now separates the past from the futureSpace separates the past from the future Space is there to establish cosmos out of chaos ^d).

Technical Notes:

a)    The relativity theory denies the existence of the absolute simultaneity of now. What we are talking about in this case is within the framework of multiple extra-temporal dimensions (as against the concept of curled extra-spatial dimensions), where the term of “now” here is similar but in a higher temporal dimension. We can always find a higher temporal dimensional where everything happens simultaneously (a completely flat higher-dimensional space).

b)   We view it from human perspectives and languages. It turns the reality entirely upside-down.  The perpetual creation and annihilation do not happen in time. On the contrary, the act of perpetual creation and annihilation which makes time appears to pass by. Enough for wishful time travel debates and no more chronology protection is required.

c)   The "now" and space is the smallest unit of [four-dimensional] time. Space, which can be regarded as a 3-hypersurface, having a thickness (in the direction of the fourth dimension) of 10^-33 cm. This thickness is also representing the duration of fundamental time unit (10^-44 second) which we call Now.

d)  The interplay between the positive and negative energies perpetually creates a dynamic ephemeral space. A spacetime without space (universal "now") is chaotic.  Under the current light-cones framework, we cannot single out the simultaneity of events from the chaos of coexistence and succession of things.

References:

1.   Russell, B.:” History of  Western Philosophy," Routledge, London, 1996, p. 352

2.   Barbour, J.:" The End of Time," Phoenix, London, 2001, p. 143

3.   Tolle, E.:" The Power of Now," New World Library, Novato, California, 1999

IT’S NOW OR NEVER

How does E = mc2 work at Planck level

We do not need to go to a faraway land only to get to the frontier of the material world we live in. We are indebted to Planck (1900) who enabled us to discover this frontier beyond which nothing exists but energy. Everybody can reach this boundary just right from where he or she stands on, going deep inward into the center of micro-realm, to the Planck level at the distance of 10^-33 cm or period of 10^-44 second below which neither space nor time has any meaning.

Planck himself was not aware of the broader physical meaning of his finding. In fact, we can derive those values from his constant, h = 6.6 x 10^-34 joule-seconds, the measure of a unit of action which is a little bit weird and uncommon. So, why then we are facing such an odd unit? What Planck had discovered was not merely a measure of a unit of action which is an abstract thing but the real size of four-dimensional discrete energy (quantum). Energy is like water phase consisting of discrete four-dimensional “molecules”, the smallest constituent of the underlying four-dimensional sea of energy.

"Shortly" after Planck momentous discovery, Minkowski (1908) revealed the four-dimensionality of the macro-world. The unification of these theories would lead us to conclude that the four-dimensionality of the spacetime is just the manifestation of the degree of freedom of energy which itself is four-dimensional. We have, then, a very consistent geometrical pattern of the four-dimensional world, both microscopically and macroscopically, from the tiniest thing like four-dimensional quanta to the largest ones such as the four-dimensional spacetime as a whole. 

But still, nobody grasps the important implication of this quanta’s four-dimensionality. The fundamental particles, the smallest building blocks of the universe, which are the derivative of these quanta as dictated by the energy equation E= mc² should be also four-dimensional. Being discrete both spatially and temporarily, this little stuff is short-living.  The persistence of everything we see around us is just the appearance of the underlying perpetual creation and annihilation of fundamental ephemeral things, an action that takes place at the Planck level. 

As the macro-world is made of these ephemeral kinds of stuff, the same thing happens in the macro-realm. At any instant, our physical space appears and disappears in the same rhythm with what happens in the micro-realm.   How could this happen? The notions of creation and annihilation are just the terms we use to describe the transformations of energy into matter and vice versa.  Down to the Planck level the energy equation, E= mc² is highly reversible in which matter and energy flashing to and fro at the pace equal to the speed of light.

The appearance and disappearance of the whole thing from the space as a whole down to the minuscule particles at the deepest level of reality give us a feeling that something passes by. And this something is what we call time.   The past, present, and future are just a series of continuous process of formation and dissolution just like a single water wave moves across the surface of the water; the peak of the wave is the now, the flat horizon behind it is the past and ahead is the future. This is the true nature of time that people are searching for a long time. Had everything persisted there would be no time at all.

Now what we perceive as one and the same persistent particle is, in fact, a series of similar but different particles appear and disappear rapidly at the speed of light. The constant c is nothing but the rate of the perpetual creation and annihilation of the quanta, the building blocks of the universe. Among this process what we can directly measure is the rate of the perpetual creation and annihilation of the photon which is equal to the speed of light. This is the underlying fact why nothing can move faster than the light, otherwise, there would be something running ahead of its very own existence.

How this creation and annihilation physically take place? The relativity energy equation E² = m²c⁴ + p²c² implicitly shows that the energy inherently consists of the opposites: the positive and negative energies. As they are repulsive they both tend to segregate separating from each other. At Planck level, the interplays of these two (the exchange of 4D-electric currents?) across the interface (thin 3D-surface) create quantum sparks (“quarks”), analogous to the sparks appear and disappear on our TV screen. These quantum sparks are what we perceive as fundamental particles perpetually appear and disappear at a gigantic 3D- TV screen -- our dear physical space.

The Nature of Time Revisited

“I know what time is until someone asks me about it,” said St. Augustine (400 AD). Many philosophers and scientists have tried to explore about the nature of time and relate it with the solar time, biological or atomic time, but nobody has given a clear explanation about the mechanism on how the time has taken place.

For that purpose, I wish to take a simple idea from the basic characteristic of time which consists of the past, present, and future. If we consider time passage as a line, then we can imagine an instant as a point in that line representing the present (now). This point splits the timeline into two parts: the past on one side of that point and the future on the other side (Fig. B)

Now, imagine that we remove the point. Then, what will we get? We have time without now and consequently without the past and the future. We, thus, have the eternity, a timeless world (Fig. A). We see that time is created from eternity through the act of separation. This is the deepest philosophy about the nature of time.

The point that separates the past from the future in this structure of time (Fig. B) is a mathematical point abstractly put in on a straight line. Actually, the end of the past is almost immediately linked to the beginning of the future, as though the point that separates them exists just about in an imaginary way (“maya”). Our feeling about the passage of time can be described as though the present time (now)  is sliding linearly along the timeline. In accordance with the principle of relativity, such a linear timeline should form, on a grander scale, a grand circle (Fig. C). As such the past and future times become completely relative analogous to the notion of above and below for people inhabiting a spherical globe.

The aforementioned point does not move forward displacing all the other points lying all the way down the line, instead, the movement is similar to that of a water wave in which different particles subsequently move up and down on the way down the line.

Now, since we do live in an expanse (space), it is, therefore, more appropriate if we designate the now as a three-dimensional geometrical unit (space) instead of a point (zero dimension). Consequently, the time which we metamorphically describe as a line should be more appropriately described as a four-dimensional continuum, in which space (the now) is embedded in such a continuum (Fig. E).

The relativity theory confirms that space and time are, indeed, inextricable and completely merge into what we call spacetime, a four-dimensional continuum. As such, the spacetime represents the eternity, a timeless world, in the sense that there is no clear cut between the past, present, and future. It is also spaceless in the sense that there is no locality for events to take place. Space and time have yet no physical reality. Not even a single matter could exist; the darkness covers the whole (Fig. D). Alas, the mainstream physics has adopted this embryonic spacetime (eon?) to represent the actual world which leads us the crisis as we know today.

To have a proper time as we perceive it, the four-dimensional spacetime should be split into two parts. The interface between the two halves represents universal now which is nothing but the three-dimensional space (the slice of 4D-space is 3D-surface). The one side of the spacetime represents the past and the other side the future (Fig. E). Similarly to the point that separates the past and the future, this interface exists just about in an imaginary way, its thickness is only 10-³³ cm below which there will be no separation at all.

Such a system is obviously dynamic; the 3-interface is rotating at the speed of light in the direction normal to its surface (Fig. F). We may assign a full cycle of such a rotation as one cosmic day. In Hindu belief, such cosmic cycle is called Kalpa whose duration is equal to 4.32 billion years, the day of Brahman.

Similarly to what we described previously, the interface (our space) does not move ahead but different spaces appear and disappear subsequently all the way down in time. This is the big secret underlying the quantum phenomena which have puzzled physicists for so long time. The next question is naturally on how and what makes the spacetime split and why does the 3-interface rotate? (to get the answer please refer to The Unfinished Relativity Theory).

LINKS:
Multidimensional worlds: http://multidimensionalworlds.com

The Nature of Time Revisited