“What is time?” Augustine of Hippo once remarked. “If nobody asks me, I know; but if I were desirous to explain it to one that should ask me, plainly I know not.” More than a millenium and a half after Augustine’s ponderings, science, technology, and, indeed, theology, have come little closer to answering this question, which – unlike so many of the compartmentalized issues that characterize modern learned discourse – touches every niche of human endeavor with impartial relevance. Who, from the most learned prelate or philosopher to the simplest child, has not pondered the meaning of time and its seemingly inexorable march towards – somewhen? Yet who among us could conceptualize time with any greater certitude than the august Augustine?
Our Latter-Day scriptures are replete with references – some of them appearing, perhaps, to be contradictory, at least upon casual inspection – to time and its role in the Great Plan. On the one hand, they seem to say, with Alma, speaking to his wayward son, that time is a mortal, not an eternal, concern (but mark it well: Alma is careful to say only that God does not measure time, at least in any sense comparable to earthly reckoning!). Yet elsewhere, the Prophet Joseph Smith answers in the affirmative to the question of whether “God’s time” (among other sorts of time) is reckoned according to the planet on which He (Deity) resides. One day with the Lord is as a thousand years, we are reliably informed – yet at the commencement of our own Millenium, the testimony of angels and mortal choristers alike will proclaim, incident to the binding of Satan, that “time is no longer.” And immediately following that proclamation by the seventh angel, the prophecy clarifies that “that old serpent ... shall not be loosed for the space of a thousand years”!
This question of time is of severest import. It lies very close to the question of what kind of universe we live in, both spiritually and physically. The physical part, at least, has drawn the attention of the world’s top scientific minds since the dawn of the modern era. One of science’s “best and brightest” accomplished the unthinkable, not so many years ago, when his book, purporting to be “a brief history of time,” rocketed to the top of bestseller lists and catapulted its author to lasting international celebrity. But in spite of the reverence with which Stephen Hawking’s musings on the subject were, and continue to be, received, the ultimate nature of time from a scientific standpoint is still very much in dispute.
It is not our purpose to dispense with such a topic in a single go. Like many of the most worthwhile objects of cognition, time is one of those things whose nature can be discerned only gradually, over many long years of contemplation. It is a topic I expect to revisit often.
But for now, a summary of at least a few points worth considering, which will undoubtedly pose more questions than answers. Time in the physical universe was for two centuries treated as perfectly reversible, that is to say, bereft of any directional bias. The original laws of dynamics, set forth by Newton and elaborated by the likes of Laplace and many other first-rate mathematical minds, conceived of the physical universe in terms of objects following trajectories, for which the direction of time is irrelevant. Take any body and give it a position and a momentum, and it will trace the same path irrespective of the direction of time. In the purely dynamical universe, no arrow of time is needed, or so it seemed at first.
It was Laplace, that quintessential product of the Age of Reason, who postulated a hypothetical imp with a perfect knowledge of the position and momentum of every body and particle in the universe at a given snapshot in time (“Laplace’s Demon”). Such an omniscient being could then predict any future state of the universe or derive any past state. He would in effect be outside the perceptual cocoon of time, and the universe would be revealed as completely deterministic, surface appearances of randomness being merely the illusions of imperfect perceptual capacity.
The notion of time-reversibility, of course, doesn’t square with the observed universe. The discovery by Boltzman and Clausius of the operation of entropy – the tendency for “disorder” to increase (or, more precisely, for physical systems to approach a state of equilibrium over time) – imposed a clear directional bias for the passage of time, namely, that low entropy in the past tends towards high entropy in the future. The choice of verb – “tends” – is a critical point, for entropy is a notion dependent not upon the deterministic trajectory but on the probabilistic ensemble. Therefore, while the dynamic universe as conceived by Newton and his many epigones is deterministic and time-reversible, the thermodynamic universe – the universe of real-world experience – is non-deterministic and time-irreversible. In the former universe, time becomes a parameter on equal footing with the three spatial dimensions, while in the latter, it is altogether different from space.
And there are other phenomena that appear to be fundamentally time-irreversible. One of the most familiar is the propagation of waves, such as the radiating concentric rings of water that travel outwards from a splash; while in principle, they could travel inwards towards the point of disturbance, they never do in the real world. And, more mysteriously, the radiation of electromagnetic waves is similarly time-asymmetric (and in fact, radiation time-asymmetry was noticed first with electromagnetic phenomena, attesting to the all-too-typical removal of theoretical scientific discourse from the world of common experience!).
Now, as most of us know, Newtonian dynamics has been superseded by Einsteinian relativity on very large scales, and by quantum field theory on the very small. The view of time as invariant has not changed as a result of these more refined views of the physical universe, however. Space and time for cosmologists is now “spacetime,” in which time is a fourth coordinate alongside the three traditional spatial coordinates. In such a universe, the direction of time’s arrow is suppressed, and light cones are represented as bidirectional, in order to preserve temporal symmetry. From this, the “block universe” perspective, the totality of the universe is held to include time (instead of time being a background property in which the physical universe is immersed). Some cosmologists, like Hawking, have gone so far as to suggest that, in the very early, hot, dense universe, not only were mass and energy indistinguishable, but so too were space and time.
Such views are advanced in the name of so-called “eternalism,” the doctrine that past, present, and future are all equally real, and are best cognized from a temporally impartial frame of reference that Huw Price has described as “the view from Nowhen” (the notions of both [spatial] “here” and [temporal] “now” depending on the position of the observer). “On this view,” says Price, “there is no more an objective division of the world into the past, the present, and the future than there is an objective division of a region of space into here and there.”
The underlying assumption of this “Nowhen perspective” – that to frame a successful model, science must strive for absolute objectivity – is upheld with dogmatic consistency among most physicists and cosmologists. The vexing matter of entropy is dismissed by focusing on the physics of systems at or near equilibrium, which is held to be the default state of the universe.
But there’s a problem: the universe exists, and is populated with objects and systems – living organisms, for example – that are far too complex to be explained away, as they customarily are, as localized complexity brought about by the requirements of gravity (i.e., in the presence of a gravitational field, a cloud of gas and dust will tend to coalesce into stars and planets, such that, on a local scale at least, a gravitating universe is not homogeneous and isotropic, as the cosmologists insist it must be on a cosmic scale). And it turns out that living organisms aren’t the only examples of states of matter that possess the mysterious ability to maintain themselves far from states of thermodynamic equilibrium. The phenomenon of resonance is an example of a well-known dissipative physical process that engenders complexity in non-predictable ways, as is the famous Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction, reproducible in any Petri dish. The relatively new field of chaos studies suggests that most of the real world behaves in this way, that is, in a non-deterministic, time-reversible fashion, wherein the future is not uniquely and ineluctably determined by present and past conditions. It is a universe in which spontaneity, chance (Peirce’s tychism), and free will all hold sway, and where determinism is confined to heuristic models. Indeed, as Prigogine has observed, the random changes associated with the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction look very much like some sort of primordial choice-making, almost as though what we call free will is a property manifest, in some more rudimentary form, in non-organic matter (or, otherwise put, that free will is a special, highly-refined case of some more fundamental property of matter arising from its essentially non-deterministic nature).
From a Gospel perspective, there can scarcely be any debate as to which of these two views is correct, at least concerning the universe that we know. Men are endowed with free choice, and the future is not graven in stone. King David did not have to fall from his exalted station; he chose to do so. Joseph Smith did not have to accept the mantle of his calling, which is why the Lord on at least one occasion indicated that, should he fall, another would be raised up in his stead. Therefore, our world is not deterministic, and there is at the core of every intelligent being a mysterious element that is absolutely and irreducibly free – an element that we must freely choose to subordinate to the divine will, if we are to qualify for exaltation.
As mortals, we experience the flow of time, and the asymmetry between past and future, because of the operation of the second law of thermodynamics – because of entropy. That is, every act of perception involves the burning of biochemical energy, and a corresponding increase of entropy as that energy is dissipated. This is at least partly why we perceive time to flow in the same direction as the arrow of entropy – why, for instance, we could not perceive the world like a film running in reverse, with broken plates jumping back on shelves to reassemble themselves.
Such arguments are frequently adduced by the eternalists to justify the view from Nowhen, and so we must pose a provocative question of our own which, as far as I know, has not been posed elsewhere. It is this: Given that time as we experience it is bound up with the increase of entropy, would it be possible to experience time in any other way? That is, can we conceptually dissociate time from entropy, and redefine the former as mere duration? And if so, would we then end up with the time-reversible universe the cosmologists enjoin on us? Or might there be something inherent in the notion of duration that guarantees irreversibility, even in the absence of the second law of thermodynamics?
This, I think, is the proper approach to the matter within the framework of the revealed Gospel. For while, as we have already seen, the scriptures seem to suggest that God experiences time as duration in some sense, it has a very different character than it does on earth. Consider, for example, the revelation that the place where God (and also the angels) reside is a “globe like a sea of glass and fire, where all things for their glory are manifest, past, present, and future, and are continually before the Lord.” Such a set of conditions is utterly inconceivable to the mortal, entropy-bound mind, as is the notion that “he [God] sitteth upon his throne ... in the bosom of eternity ... in the midst of all things.” That God possesses these traits appears to be bound up with his being filled with light and being able thereby to comprehend all things – even, we must suppose, the totality of Everywhen as well as Everything and Everywhere.
We cannot, I repeat, comprehend how this could be so, except perhaps to posit that such a Being, being filled with light, is not subject to the dissipative effects of entropy, whereby heat and light are constantly lost and in need of active replenishment, as we mortals are. But from the divine perspective, at least, the block universe view appears to be vindicated by Section 88.
Even with God, we suppose, there must be duration in some form, which, in the absence of more precise terminology, we must style time. Were it otherwise, thought, planning, and action, all of which are cardinal attributes of Deity as well as of his mortal offspring, would be nullities. But we suggest that he may not experience duration (and neither, by this line of reasoning, could any other immortal or premortal being) as a result of entropic processes. In this way, the thermodynamic trappings of time (or, we might say, the temporality of duration) can be conceptually stripped away.
What are we left with? Duration, or sequentiality, as a representational phenomenon. That is, any conceivable intelligence – mortal or immortal, material or immaterial, angel, man, or “Boltzmann brain” – will experience sequential duration, and, hence, a past-future asymmetry, because of the way in which thought is representative. It is, after all, the aim of every act of full-fledged cognition to reduce to conceptual unity some array of perceptions. They are at first disparate, until the mind draws them into a meaningful relationship of some kind. This unity, of course, has the character of a symbol, and that symbol becomes the basis for another, and so forth. The semiotic progression that is thought must entail a dialogic splitting of the self, whereby the present self represents something to the past self; beyond this present-past threshold lies the yet-uncognized, the future to be determined by thought and action. And each of these three categories, present, past, and future, as we have noted elsewhere, is the correlate, in the context of cognitive sequentiality, of the three universal Peircean categories, Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness.
Thus we cannot conceive of a state of being without these three correlates, because conception itself is unavoidably conditioned by them. And because intelligence is a property of the universe as well, we cannot find any rational basis (pace the unceasing labors of the physicists to somehow eliminate the role of the observer and invalidate the Copenhagen Interpretation!) for attempting to conceptualize a universe devoid of observers, or Observer. Truly, as Peirce insisted, there is no reality that has not the life of a sign, and that extends to time, or duration, or whatever we ultimately choose to call it.
