What Is Time? Physics, Mysticism and the Fear We All Share


 

What is time, and why are we so afraid of it? This article explores time through physics, ancient traditions, the sun, consciousness and a personal story about my mother.

The short answer

Time is a dimension to physics, a cycle to the sun and stars, an illusion to mystics, a doorway to believers, and, to the human heart, the space we are given to love each other.

Is time a line or a circle?

Clocks don’t create time. They measure our agreement about it. Long before clocks, people watched the sun, moon and seasons and concluded that time moves in circles.

  • Cyclic views: Hindu and Buddhist traditions see a wheel of vast ages (yugas) and rebirth. The Maya tracked overlapping cycles. Many Aboriginal Australian traditions speak of the Dreaming as a reality that is still here.
  • Linear views: Judaism, Christianity and Islam often see time as a line with a beginning, a purpose and an end.

We feel both: we live in a line from birth to death, but we are surrounded by circles of days, seasons and generations.

Cycles of the sun and the solar system

  • The Earth spins once: one day.
  • The Earth circles the sun: one year.
  • The sun’s activity follows a cycle of about eleven years.
  • The solar system circles the Milky Way about once every 200 million years or more, a “galactic year.”

Ancient monuments like Stonehenge, the pyramids and Machu Picchu were aligned to such cycles.

How Einstein changed time

In 1905, Albert Einstein showed that time is not the same for everyone. Moving fast or standing near strong gravity slows a clock relative to another. GPS satellites correct for this every day. Time and space form one fabric, spacetime, and in that view past, present and future may all exist together. After the death of his friend Michele Besso, Einstein wrote to the family that the divide between past, present and future is a stubborn illusion.

The Higgs field and why anything exists

The Higgs field is an invisible field that fills space. Fundamental particles gain mass by interacting with it. Without it, there would be no atoms as we know them, no stars, no planets and no clocks. The world of change in which we experience time depends on it.

Consciousness: who feels time?

Equations describe time, but they don’t say who experiences it. An hour in pain feels endless; an hour with a loved one disappears. Meditation traditions such as Zen, Vedanta and Sufism teach that the past is memory, the future is imagination, and only the present is real. Many faiths add that something in us, the soul or atman, is not bound by the clock.

Why do we fear time?

Time is the one thing we cannot save. We can save money, food and photographs, but not a single second. Death is time’s final announcement: no more.

My story: fighting the clock

When my mother was diagnosed with cancer, the doctors said she had only a few months. We weren’t really fighting death. We were fighting the clock.

We waited fourteen days for one report, fourteen days of hope and fear mixed together. After that, we spent so much of the time she had left trying to buy more time, instead of making memories with the time we still had.

That’s when I understood: our tears are rarely about death. They are about running out of time, and about the time we wasted when we had plenty of it.

What to do with this

Call the person you’ve been meaning to call. Sit at the table. Put the phone down. Say the words today. The clock was never the enemy. Forgetting to live inside it was.

What does time mean to you? Tell me in the comments below.

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