Imbolc                                               Woodpecker Moon

In case you feel confident, assured, certain about your worldview, I invite you to read the current Scientific American special issue on Time.

You know all those hard working physicists whose thought power smells like burning transistors in your really fast computer?  Yeah.  Those guys.  Einstein.  Feynman.  Hawking.  Turns out they can’t find time.  Nope.  Not there.

Turns Xeno and that arrow business was right.  You know, you shoot an arrow and it covers half the distance to the target, then half that distance, and then half that distance and so on?  Ad infinitum. Yep.  That’s right.  Stuff happens.

Time has fascinated me for, well, a long time.  Or not.  Western folks, you and me, got stuck on chronos, or linear time, while the pagans and many Asians stayed with cyclical time.  Like the Great Wheel.  Both, according to current thinking, are conventions we use to order our sensory experience.

I haven’t seen in these pages yet a response to Kant’s idea that both time and space are a priori categories, that is, they are part of the way the mind functions and are, as a result, prior to experience, not inherent in experience.  Still makes sense to me.

This may seem like a so-what problem since we already think we know how time works.  Now is now and will be past in a moment when the now now becomes what was future reality only a moment ago.  Yet it turns out that time stands between quantum mechanics and the theories of relativity, frustrating their unification.  Time is relative in Einstein’s constructs and probabilistic in quantum mechanics.  Trust me.  It’s a big deal.

Well, that’s all for this time.