Begin again
I enjoy reading books about science, about the history of science, about elementary particles and relativity, about stars and galaxies, black holes and the like. I marvel at the creativity, imagination and doggedness of scientists, and their ability to keep working away at what sometimes seem quite trivial discrepancies, seeking to make sense of what they observe. I love those writers who leave us up in the air, whether it is over the properties of dark matter or the behaviour of single photons of light. Part of the reason I enjoy such books is that they stretch my mind, make me think, and even make me attempt to grapple with ideas that are sometimes simply too big for me to understand. I love understanding the breakthroughs achieved by individuals and teams (as far as I can, of course), and I revel in learning about puzzles yet to be resolved. I also find myself getting lost: there are several books I have read which seem to make sense as I go along, but by the end I realise I simply didn’t grasp what was being explained. This seems to be a common problem I face when I try to understand more recent theories, especially those about the very small, the behaviour of elementary particles, and the very large, cosmology and the history of the universe.
In part I enjoy books about science because I still retain some of my childhood love of physics, chemistry and astronomy. However, I also enjoy them because they engage my mind, while at the same time I have an advantage over many of the people whose brilliant thinking I reflect on. What is that one advantage? It’s simple: I read many books about science and scientific discovery as if I am reading a detective novel. In both cases, I am willing to accept the explanations of the world the author offers, but when I close the covers of a book, suspension of disbelief stops, and I can readily comfort myself with the view that it’s likely to be fiction! I enjoy reading great detective novels, like those cases sorted out by Adam Dalgleish in the series of PD James books, but I know he and his investigations are clever inventions. When I read about sub-atomic particles or quantum states, I treat them as clever inventions too, stories made up to make sense of what is fundamentally unknowable.
Oh dear, I can already imagine what you are thinking: is he mad, perverse or simply silly? Clearly, I need to offer an example. There are many to hand, but one topic that gives me no end of delight is time. On my bookcase is a copy of The Arrow of Time by Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield. It is a great introduction to how scientists over hundreds of years have battled with the concept of time. It isn’t an easy read, as they work their way through the last two hundred years of physics in particular, but it is as fascinating as it is engaging. The core of the book examines an age-old problem in physics, which is that many theories lead to mathematical explanations that are reversible: the equations that explain their theories do not involve a unidirectional time dimension, even though they are about real events. This is an issue with Schrodinger’s equations: apply them to the status of an electron, and they predict all the possible states that electron might be in the future, and all the possible states that might have been in the past. If that sounds confusing, it certainly is to me, without doubt!
Sufficient to say reversibility is a conundrum in several areas in physics. Coveney and Highfield end their book exploring ways in which irreversibility is being introduced into some analytical frameworks, and by the end, many readers are likely to share my view that “I don’t care, I know time goes in one direction only”. It appears the whole book I’ve just completed is concerned with explaining that time has a direction, always moving forward: but didn’t I know that before I started reading?
I wonder if this yet another example of the issue that arises in many areas when scientists take things to pieces to find out what makes them tick: the bits are never the same as the whole. What was that Kevin Gilbert poem I quoted in an earlier blog? Here are the last few lines of Aboriginal Query:
What do you seek?
Why do you destroy me
Whiteman?
Why do you destroy that
Which you cannot hope to understand…
As I see it, it is impossible to understand time because time doesn’t exist. You can’t pick it up, measure it and test it. All there is is now. Before now is the past, and that can only be accessed through traces of what had happened, memories, photographs, written accounts, paintings and the like. They don’t embody time, of course, they are not now, and to put them in order we have used the convenience of a strange tape measure that runs backwards, and on to which we attach those items we wish to recall. Clock and calendar time was a wonderful invention, imposing a framework on recollections to give them sequence: ‘that was then, and that was before then’ becomes ‘that was on Tuesday morning, at 11 am, and that was on Sunday afternoon, at 2.30pm’. In the immediate past, those clocks and calendars give a nice solidity to events. However, we know all too well, especially when we get older, that the multitude of events going further and further back before now become hazier, the ‘timing’ uncertain. Authors love playing with past time: how much fun is made by murder mystery writers tangling the reader and the characters into knots over what happened when!
We know what preceded this moment, the one we are in right now, as I am typing, or as you are reading. It is very comforting to have what was before put into order. There’s more, of course. If we think that there is this mysterious thing called time, and if we accept that it has a direction (it’s not reversible), then ‘time’ must go forward. Now we can take the same constructions of hours and days and years and project onto a screen about the future. Just like the past, the future isn’t there, but it just as comforting to think about it as when we recollect the past, as if it too has dimension and predictability. However, it isn’t time we are imagining. Time is merely an invention to keep our anticipations in order, to allow us to plan; as I see it, time is a construct with no apparent basis in the physical world.
Let’s change the frame of reference. There are two themes that are important in making use of the notion of time: circularity and decay. Gardeners and farmers know about changing seasons and their consequences, their planning based on their knowledge of what is likely to follow what, what can be got ready, and what will soon end, never to reappear Hours and calendars are so very helpful in putting all that knowledge and expectations into a framework. “What’s the time?” isn’t a question about time, it is a question about the moment on the clock, the day of the year. Both assume this mysterious ineffable thing called time will continue to operate, even though it seems it’s never been there!? Clocks and calendars are essential to modern living, and so is the underlying assumption that they measure time, which continues going forward, evenly, untroubled, constantly flowing, yet unseen and untouchable.
In terms of our lived experience, however, it’s cyclicity which is central, although that may be changing. There are daily cycles, and most people still schedule meals and sleep and work using a 24-hour framework. Today that’s proving harder as more people live in mixed modes: some employed two or three days a week, others on complicated shift cycles. Despite this and other irregularities in daily lives, as human beings there is no doubt that we need regular and sufficient sleep and to the extent our diurnal life ignores that, our health, physical, mental and emotional, suffers. There are longer cycles. Many years ago, I carried out some research on these. For most people there are several somewhere around 23-33 days in length, largely dictated by physiological changes, but they also appear to be linked to emotional and cognitive patterns. Finally, the year itself is a cycle, from Spring and new growth through to Winter and the death of many plants. That yearly cycle is not just agricultural: it is also a reminder that all living things have a finite life. We will all die.
This is one part of the association between this strange thing called time and inevitability. If you live in the country, if you are farmer, a grower, then you directly confront the reality of an unknowable future. Chances are trees will sprout new leaves, crops will grow, lambs will be born. That’s happened before, and we expect it to happen again. However, trees age and limbs fall off and die. Crops deteriorate, through pest invasions, genetic accidents, and new strains pushing out the old. Diseases appear to ravage livestock. If you live in a city, you no longer see much of this: it’s as if the metropolitan experience is designed to shelter you from both cyclicity and that annoying time’s arrow constantly moving towards decay and death.
Does this matter? Many people have written about the ways in which modern urban dwellers have become increasingly isolated from the natural environment. Instead of living ‘in’ nature, we seem to want to deny it, push it away, and even reconfigure how we produce crops and foods through various technology-based new systems. In some ways, it seems the city is a denial of time as we used to experience it, life structured around cycles with a steady, regular beat, and instead we have replaced it with a new form of space-time, in which we are in control. Einstein would be proud of us: well, he would be pleased we’ve made a rather inadequate attempt to understand the universe in four dimensions, with time as one of them!
My reason for this meandering analysis is that I think it is possible, just possible, that we are reaching a point of real change. Perhaps I am succumbing to the deluge of articles and books telling us the post-COVID-19 world is going to be different, that we are going to pull back from a commercialised and individualised experience and reconnect with people and with communities. I have read so many articles on that theme in the past few months, it’s rather easy to agree with the view so many have expressed that ‘everything has changed’ and that they are correct in claiming we won’t go back to a life in the way it was before.
However, those articles became less frequent when the end of 2021 approached. The new, relentless theme turned to ‘save our businesses’. Time to go out and shop, eat out, use all the services on offer. Alongside this, companies have been encouraging staff to return to working in the building. It’s back to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the festive season, holiday breaks, getting together with people who’ve been missed. The pressures to return to the ‘old normal’, as opposed to all that stuff about a ‘new normal’, seem to be mounting.
Is this a reaction to what we have learnt during the pandemic? In my more sanguine moments, I think we have gained greatly. We appreciate our families and friends more than we used to when work was dominating, and we have welcomed the lifelines they have thrown out to keep us in contact, safely linked together. We have viewed our working time with more measured consideration: asking questions as to whether we want to continue doing what we did before, or whether we would get more satisfaction from changing. Companies are reporting resistance to returning to the office, traditional unemployment numbers have dropped in many sectors, and more and more people are exploring new careers and new businesses. That glimpse of a better, more satisfying life may propel change in many areas.
Against what we have learnt, we have also witnessed a lot of totally nutty behaviour. Many commentators have spent column inches on reporting the spread of bizarre and often pernicious beliefs. A lot of this has centred around the pandemic, as crazy theories circulated to be taken up by millions. We are a long way past Trump and his unhinged ideas, such as his recommendation back in March 2020, to use chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. As I was writing, the latest sign of deranged thinking was the promotion of ‘de-vaccination’. This ludicrous idea went from the extremes of applying electrodes, a strong magnet and ‘55 percent Montana whiskey’ to a US veteran in the hope of removing a COVID-19 vaccine, to others promoting the toxic bleach chlorine dioxide as a de-vaccination miracle cure. Not only do neither of these ludicrous ideas have any merit, but chlorine dioxide is a bleach used to treat paper products and has been fatal when it’s been used as a ‘miracle cure’. The use of electrodes was based on the widely accepted but utterly crazy view vaccines are magnetic. Do you think people are gullible? It appears there have been many credulous people who believe a magnetic substance is being implanted via the vaccines to transform humans into machine-like entities so that the government can control us!
Despite behaviour like this, why do I think that things are going to change and get better. An insight into this was given to me by a close friend, who sent me a YouTube link to an educational video about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer had witnessed increasingly frightening and vicious behaviour as the Nazis began to attack more and more people in the early years of the Second World War. He couldn’t understand why so many people accepted what was happening, and concluded they were stupid, and that the challenge to change stupidity was huge. To be clear, he saw stupidity as a sociological issue, not one of intellectual ability. He suggested that whenever there is a strong upsurge of power, political or religious, people abandon their independent thinking and go along with the crowd, a kind of social hysteria, in which millions can be swept along by slogans and simplistic nostrums.
In the face of what is happening today, history is reassuring. If we are currently surrounded by swathes of people believing in anti-vaccination stories, anti-government stories, anti-minorities stories and more, the world has seen mass hysteria before. It was only two decades ago that many people believed the world was going to come to an end as millennial panic swept through communities and countries. Bonhoeffer was clear that “only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity. Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it. Until then we must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person.” External liberation is when events contradict beliefs. It was easy when the date changed to 1 January 2000, and, against widespread fears, the world continued!
Are we getting to a point when events will contradict beliefs? I have kept on believing that more deaths from COVID-19 would convince many people the pandemic is real and vaccination matters, and on that, time and again, I’ve been proved wrong. No, the events that are going to contradict many delusions are going to be the consequences of climate change. Inevitably and unstoppably, we are going to see more huge fires, more floods and more massive storms. The evidence these will begin to change thinking can be seen in emerging comments being made by business leaders. Companies previously opposed to environmental sustainability and the banning of fossil fuels are waking up, fast. Not because their CEOs are changing, so much as a real concern their businesses will be unprofitable or unsustainable unless they make changes. As more and more businesses begin to change, so people will follow, largely because we have no choice. Coming to terms with what’s happening will help us see we are ‘running out of time’, and it’s time for us to ‘begin again’. That time is now.
