Category: Is Time Real?

Past, present, and future form a convenient segmenting of our thoughts about time. But three more dissimilar ideas would be hard to find. The past, where things are forever static, the future, where things are yet to be, the two linked by the fleeting present moment.

We know of the past from our recollections and from what we surmise from what we observe around us. But recollections are notoriously fickle and books interpret what the author may or may not have observed. Geology, archeology, and the stories known only through oral history are all interpreted and reinterpreted to form a picture of the past.

We know the future not at all, but spend a lot of time speculating on what it might be. Our fascination with the future is pathological for there we find fear, avarice, lust and ambition. This is the stock in trade of those who would be politically influential, as they attempt to control the future.

And we glimpse the present only fleetingly as it emerges and quickly moves into the past. In that glimpse we can experience Jesus’ “freedom and actuality,” or we can miss it as we speculate on the future.

I wrote about this freedom in my book The Boiler Room Boys in chapter 14, drawing on the Greek work parrhesia that was translated “openly” to convey Jesus’ freedom: “I have spoken openly to the world” (John 18:19). This freedom requires that you live in the present moment; its something you can see in the past, as Jesus’ used the past tense “have spoken”, and you might hope to use in the future, but which you can only actually experience in the present moment.

This was drawn from

The Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis, chapter 15.

The 2001 movie “Kate and Leopold” opens at a dedication in 1876 of the Brooklyn Bridge. The bewiskered orator begins:

Time, it has been proposed, is the fourth dimension.

And yet, for mortal man, time has no dimension at all.

We are like horses with blinders, seeing only what lies before us.

Hear Hear!

Forever guessing the future and fabricating the past.

The orator is referring to the idea then-becoming-popular idea that time forms a continuum with the physical dimensions of height, width, and length. We know how to move ourselves and objects around in the 3 physical dimensions: around the house, around the solar system, or recently beyond the solar system. For example, by 1990 we had moved Voyager 1 to the edge of our solar system, where it took this picture of us.

However, contrary to the premise of that movie, we do not know how to move either backward or forward in time. In the movie “All one had to do was to develop formulae to forecast portals . . . natural windows in the fabric of time.” Given a formula, entering a portal still was not easy, requiring the characters to leap from high on the Brooklyn Bridge at a precise moment and achieve a velocity of “the speed of gravity.” And further, moving in time could have possibly catastrophic effects: what if you interrupted an ancestor at the instant of your conception, possibly affecting which Y chromosome was successful?

Contrary to our attraction to time travel movies and novels, there is no evidence at all that we can move backward or sideways in time, or move forward faster than the cadence of an atomic clock adjusted for relativistic effects of velocity. Neimroff and Wilson (2014) attempted to find evidence for time travel to the past, searching for records from actual time travelers, which we might expect to turn up now and then if time travel eventually proved possible. Sufficient to say that they found no such evidence.

Despite our limited access to time, it is an extremely powerful dimension and we use most of our limited instants of time to thinking outside those instants. For example, there is an impeachment trial of our president happening now and although the outcome appears all but certain, an enormous amount of energy is going into predicting various steps along the way.

Some of that energy is aimed not just at predicting the future, but also at influencing how what will actually happen, and more importantly, how the events will be remembered. For example, the National Archive recently admitted that in documenting a political rally shortly after the recent election, it “blurred references to the President’s name on some posters, so as not to engage in current political controversy.” But engage they did.

We stand precariously on the fine edge of the past and future, and like the blindered horses of the orator of “Kate and Leopold,” we are left to be “Forever guessing the future and fabricating the past.”

• Robert Nemiroff, Teresa Wilson, Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers. The Winnower 2:e140984.46096 , 2014 , DOI:10.15200/winn.140984.46096