I once asked, “What happens to time when the last clock on earth stops ticking?” I had tossed the question casually, thinking it whimsical and provocative, a brainteaser worthy of reflection but so thorny as to be ultimately unanswerable. I myself had made no effort to venture into a metaphorical labyrinth from which I might not escape. The question itself was a conundrum, circular and close-circuited and containing within it, I felt, its own enigmatic solution. It was one of those “AHA!” questions; a one-liner a stand-up comic might deliver to daze his audience before firing off other similarly baffling witticisms. And I left it at that.
As my expedition to Ein Sof began to unfold, and for reasons that became obvious when I discovered Gehenna, I wrote an old friend, a scientist, scholar and humanist, asking him if he could work out an answer.
Unruffled, my friend was neither scornful of my riddle nor stumped by it. Instead, he found an existential and ontological component to the question that could be probed and articulated, not in the arcane idiom of mysticism or the dizzying jargon of quantum mechanics but with the clarity of plain talk and with images that reveal the melancholy wit of a contemplative and deeply compassionate man. My friend responded with characteristic punctuality. He wrote:
“Clocks are simply a human means of measuring the passage of time. Yet, when the last clock (and I suppose the last human to worry about time) stops functioning, nature will still mark the passage of time. Water will still trickle then gush forward to cut its path and chisel canyons. The sun will shine upon the Earth as it slowly continues a countdown toward its own extinction. Perhaps other creatures will pick up the stress and worry of getting to work on time, eating dinner at the appointed hour, getting to bed and rising (so that they can eventually be wealthy, healthy and wise) -- but these creatures will perhaps have the benefit of four arms so that they are far superior typists.
“The universe is composed only of time -- space itself and our filling it with substance and meaning is only an elaborate illusion. Space-time, the creation of early nineteenth century visionaries is, unfortunately, only one more theological stake in the sand that is eventually uprooted by a mile-high glacier that moves a few meters in a decade. Time is a two-dimensional membrane and we, poor creatures, are cast as two dimensional waves of energy upon this surface, which is hurtling past at the speed of light (a process we call the passage of time). We move with this two-dimensional membrane as it expands at the speed of light and this movement provides the illusion of three-dimensional space. Think of a holographic projection on a sheet of paper -- an image that allows us to “see” a three dimensional world within a two-dimensional surface.
“As a clock ticks and then comes to rest, the universe experiences nothing gained and nothing lost. There are no means to emerge from time, to stop the world and get off, to separate ourselves from the moment. But when the clock stops ticking, something is forever lost -- both that moment in time and the content of that moment (this loss is what science calls an increase in entropy). The universe loses content and meaning, and burns to a crisp like the very stars around us. Time goes by and the universe does not weep for our passing. Our dust and remains are swept into space, blasted to kingdom come to coalesce with the galactic fireworks and the darkness that surrounds them. Strangely, energy and matter, from which we were created, never disappears, only the means to make them human.
“This year, my mother and father both passed away. I have their remains, a few pounds of dust. Within my mind I see my mother, running and laughing on the beach, forming the glue that once held my personal universe together and filled it with meaning and love. My father's gentle smile has passed from this world. His reassuring glance and his quiet presence is reduced and condensed into a can of ashes mailed to me and now resting on a shelf. When the last clock stops ticking, the world will go on, but the last smile and the last tear shall be gone.”
Was my friend echoing Turkish Sufi master, Abdülhamit Cakmut’s caveat: “Everything is meant to serve man. If people are gone from this cycle, nature itself will be over.” Or perhaps, as only a man of science can, did he concede with the cool fatalism of a pragmatist that all knowledge is inaccessible to man and that the bubble of ignorance in which we take refuge harbors us from lunacy and self-destruction?
Spacetime is the fulcrum of modern physics. But what does it really represent? Time seems little more than an allegory, a kind of omnipresent metaphor that permeates all of our earthly experiences. But do our experiences represent a fitting measure of ultimate reality? Perhaps the delusion that we are free in time, fools us into believing that we are free from time.
The more we probe within ourselves, the more certain we become of the unreality of temporal free will. The only freedom we really possess is the contemplation of untested ideas.