Time was never meant to be our enemy. We have turned it into one, by saying things like “I’m running out of time” or “Time’s up,” which implies that human beings are trapped in the prison of time with no chance of escape, at least not until death reveals if the hope of an afterlife is true. Einstein found a way to make peace with time, however, when he said that past and future are illusions; only the present moment exists. This is one of those brilliant moments when the world’s spiritual traditions and advanced science converged. Did an enlightened sage, a prophetic poet, or a famous physicist say the following: “For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end”?
The words are those of Erwin Schrödinger, who, like many quantum pioneers, drew closer to mysticism the more he understood the revolution he had helped to create. Since the “mystical” has fatal effects in science, what happens if we decide that Schrödinger was being completely literal? We would be left with a now-familiar mismatch. Time in everyday life definitely moves from past to present to future. How can it be that time stands still, or, even more incredible, that time was invented by the human mind?
Go back in your mind to the childhood image you had of Heaven. Whether you see angels playing their harps on clouds or green pastures with innocent lambs gamboling through them, every child is told that Heaven is eternal—it lasts forever. To a child’s mind—and the minds of many adults—eternity sounds boring and monotonous. Ultimately it might even be frightening, as time endlessly unfolds and harp playing and lambs lose their appeal.
But eternity doesn’t in fact last a long, long time. Eternity is timeless, and when any religious faith promises eternal life, two things are involved. One is the absence of time’s afflictions, such as growing old and dying. The second promise is much more abstract. After death we become timeless. Literally without time in the “zone of eternity” where souls abide. But why wait for an afterlife? If time is an illusion, we should be able to step out of it whenever we want, simply by living in the present moment—then the value of going to Heaven will be achieved.
Scientists don’t think this way—most of them, at least—but it was science that opened the door to seeing time in a new way. No one knew, for example, that time could stretch like a rubber band until Einstein pointed it out. Spiritual teachers had already told us that God’s time is infinite, and now some cosmologists are saying the same thing about the multiverse. In fact, modern physics is very greedy to capture more and more time. If there is literally infinite time, then infinite universes could spring up, and if you have infinite universes, there could be a mirror image of Earth “out there” somewhere, with mirror images of all the people alive today.
All of these speculations, including the religious ones, are fanciful until we know where time came from. There is no proof that the big bang took any time at all. That’s because when you dive into the pure chaos of the Planck era, time was just another ingredient in the quantum soup, swirling around with no properties like “before” and “after” or cause and effect. The universe was once a timeless place—perhaps it still is.
GRASPING THE MYSTERY
The most accurate atomic clocks are so precise that every few years a “leap second” must be thrown in—the newspapers insert a little story when this happens, the last occasion being June 30, 2015. The need to add an extra second arises because Earth’s rotation is gradually slowing down, and adding the extra second brings Coordinated Universal Time (clock time) back in sync with solar time (sunrise and sunset).
When clocks based on the vibration of atoms can slice time into millionths of a second, it would appear that time doesn’t have many mysteries left. Clocks are very useful for telling time. But they also conspire to keep us from knowing the truth about time. When asked to explain relativity, Einstein famously said, “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.” He was slyly referring to the personal aspect of time, and that is where the hidden mysteries begin. When someone is feeling blissfully contented, they often sigh, “I wish this moment could last forever.” Are they wishing for something that could already be real?
Because time has two faces, one relating to personal experience and one relating to the objective world described by scientific equations, the issue is a tangled one. No matter how time seems to drag in the dentist’s chair or in a traffic jam, the time registered by a clock isn’t affected. You can slice this fact two ways. You can claim that clock time is real, while personal time isn’t. Or you can point out that subtracting the personal aspect of time is possible only in theory. In the world of experience, all time is personal. We take the second position, even though it sounds radical and even peculiar at this point.
When time gets intensely personal, we notice the human element that typically hides out of sight, because we take it for granted. Shakespeare’s Macbeth is at his most despondent, having killed a king and setting his own tragic fate in motion, when he wearily declares, “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, / To the last syllable of recorded time.”
This is a classic expression about the personal aspect of time. One day inexorably follows after another, bringing us closer and closer to the moment of death. But time’s “petty pace” is actually an illusion. Time doesn’t “flow” in the quantum field, where all of reality exists as pure potential. The quantum field is outside our commonsense notion of time, and when a particle emerges from the field, it has no history. Particles are tied to an on/off switch, not to the past.
In a quantum reality, Macbeth would say, “Now and now and now. Nothing else exists but the present.” If the flow of time is no longer credible, the only time that can possibly exist is the present moment. The present moment is the measure of “real” time, while the “flow” of time, which produces the birth of babies and the death of old people, is an illusion. There’s the rub. We see babies being born and old people dying, among many other things that happen in the flow of time. No one can tell us that these things are illusory.
Naturally, this illusion is very convincing if you happen to be alive on Earth. But to a physicist, the timeless quantum field is being filtered through a human nervous system, which cuts eternity into neat, practical slices for our own benefit. “Out there,” time is a dimension of reality totally detached from human concerns. Macbeth may be afraid to die, but a magnet isn’t. It exists in the electromagnetic field, which for all practical purposes never ages. For as long as the present universe endures, the electromagnetic field remains intact, never growing old. A lightbulb burns out after a certain number of hours, but light itself doesn’t burn out. Even if the cosmos should reach an endpoint billions of years from now, and every source of light goes dark, it would be wrong to say that light got old. It would simply shut off.
COSMIC CHICKEN OR COSMIC EGG?
To a working scientist, this position seems so self-evident that you’d think it couldn’t be challenged. But almost immediately we run into a “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” dilemma. You can’t have time without the universe, and you can’t have the universe without time. The two depend upon each other. The same is true for the atoms, which didn’t appear until 300,000 years after the big bang, when bare protons and electrons combined; before then, only ionized matter existed. Without time, there would be no atoms. But without atoms, there would be no human brain to perceive time. How did the two get linked? No one knows. The illusion created by clocks can’t be trusted, which casts doubt on objective time itself. Something insurmountable, a Chinese wall, prevents us from peering beyond the Planck era into the pre-created state and seeing what came before the big bang. The same wall exists with respect to time, but this hasn’t stopped physicists from reaching for an explanation of how time operates in the created universe. Time brings change, and change implies motion, which can be observed everywhere in creation. But strangely enough, motion doesn’t mean that we are observing something moving. This, too, could be an illusion.
The fact that atoms and molecules move around is part of the clock illusion. When you watch a car chase in the movies, the cars aren’t actually moving. Instead, frames of still photos spool through the projector (when projectors used film) at twenty-four frames a second to create the illusion of motion. Our brains also operate by taking snapshots—fixed images—and stringing them together so quickly that we see the world in motion.
At the level of the quantum field, all motion is deceptive. Subatomic particles wink in and out of the quantum vacuum, reappearing each time in a slightly different place. Essentially they don’t move, because the different places are just changes of state. Think of how a TV screen works. If a red balloon needs to pass across the screen, nothing inside the TV has to move. Instead, the phosphors (in an old-fashioned cathode ray tube) or the LCD lights (in a digital screen) wink on and off. By doing that in sequence (first red LCD number one, then red LCD number two, red LCD number three, and so on), the balloon appears to float from left to right, from up to down, or any way you choose.
Sitting at the movies, we may know how the trick is done, but we give in to the illusion. Any time we want, we can get up and walk out of the cinema, returning to the real world. But how do you walk out of the real world? If everyday time is just as illusory as movie time, there’s a problem. The human nervous system is constructed of tiny clocks that regulate other tiny clocks all around the body. Besides the really big rhythms the body follows (sleeping and waking, eating, digesting, and excreting wastes), there are medium rhythms (breathing), short rhythms (heartbeat), and very short rhythms (chemical reactions inside our cells).
It’s a miracle that the human nervous system can synchronize all of these rhythms, and more. There are the twitches of muscle fibers, the flow of hormones, the division of DNA, the production of new cells—all these processes have their own clocks. DNA activity also controls long-range rhythms, from the emergence of baby teeth, the start of menstruation, and other aspects of puberty to more distant events like male balding, menopause, and the onset of chronic illnesses that take years to develop, such as many cancers and Alzheimer’s disease. How our genes manage to span timescales as short as a millisecond (the time a chemical reaction inside a cell might take) and as long as seventy years or more remains a mystery.
At this point, if you are practical-minded, you might be tempted to say, “The mystery of time is too abstract. As long as my brain is running things by the clock, that’s good enough.” But it isn’t. Imagine that you are in bed, dreaming. In your dream you’re a soldier fighting on the battlefield. You charge across the field, your heart pounding. All around you, bombs are going off; artillery shells whiz overhead. The spectacle rivets you even in your terror—and then you wake up. At that instant, everything in your dream is revealed to be an illusion, but most especially time. In our dreams, long spans of time can pass, but neurologists know that the episodes of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, where almost all dreams occur, take no more than a few seconds or minutes.
In other words, there is no relation between “brain time” as measured by neural activity and the experiences inside a dream. The same is true when you’re awake, however. See yourself sitting by a window in a dream watching people and cars go by. When you wake up, a dream researcher tells you that your dream, which felt like half a day, in fact took twenty-three seconds of brain time. If you sit by a window watching the passing world while you are awake, that experience is also created by the same brain cells that create dreams. The firing of a few neurons, which takes only a few hundredths of a second, can cause you to see a bright flash in your eyes that lasts a long time (seeing such lights is common in conditions like migraine and epilepsy). You have a choice whether to call brain time the real thing or your experience the real thing. But in actuality neither is more real than the other, for the simple reason that we can’t step outside our brains in order to capture real time. Walking out of a movie is easy. Walking out of this waking dream isn’t.
So, how does the brain learn to keep time? We could look to the chemical reactions taking place inside brain cells, which like all other cells are chemical factories. These reactions, along with the electrical activity that “lights up” on an fMRI scan, are precisely timed. One crucial activity is the exchange of sodium and potassium ions across the outer membrane of a brain cell. (An ion is an electrically charged atom or molecule, either positive or negative.) The time this takes is infinitesimally small, but it’s not instantaneous. So there’s your basic brain clock, or a key part of it.
Unfortunately, the brain’s clock isn’t attached to the experience of time. While all those ions are clicking away, time can be behaving any way it wants in dreams, hallucinations, under disease conditions, in moments of inspiration, or other uncanny moments when time stands still. Clicking ions tell us nothing about the behavior of time, and anyway, there would be no ions in the first place without the big bang. We are at the same dead end where the mystery began. The cosmic chicken-and-egg question is still up for grabs.
OR MAYBE NOT…
The so-called dead end has actually revealed an important clue. Time is springing into existence with every firing of a neuron in the brain. Its creation is constant. For as long as a person is alive, he or she is “creating” time; we never run out. (When someone says, “I ran out of time,” of course they really mean that they didn’t meet a deadline.) Therefore, we don’t have to go back to the big bang. To ask where time came from isn’t really about the universe. It’s about our experience here and now. There is no other time. Solving the mystery of time will tell us if humans are the creators of time or its unwitting victims, the pawns of brain activity. There seems to be no other choice. If time depends on the brain and vice versa, we are talking about one of the most important ways that every person participates in the universe. Before relativity, the belief that everyone shares the same experience of time formed a kind of cosmic democracy. We were all equal in how time operated. This condition can be called a Galilean democracy (after the great Italian Renaissance scientist Galileo Galilei), because of some crucial observations by Galileo that reinforced commonsense reality. For example, if someone going past you in a car throws a ball moving in the same direction, the speed of the ball can be reliably calculated, and the result will always be the same. A car moving at 60 miles per hour might have a Major League pitcher as a passenger. If he throws a fast ball at the record speed of 105.1 mph (set in 2010 by Aroldis Chapman of the Cincinnati Reds), the actual speed of the ball will be 165.1 mph, which is arrived at by adding the speed of the car to the speed of the ball.
The Galilean democracy was good enough as long as there was a fixed point to stand on. To the pitcher in the car, the ball only travels 105.1 mph, because he is already moving as fast as the car is. However, Einstein pointed out that there is actually no fixed spot in the universe for measuring time. Every observer is in motion relative to every other observer. (No one can prove for sure who is moving and who is not moving, at least for constant motions.) Therefore, all measurements are relative, depending on how fast two things are moving past each other.
Relativity toppled the Galilean democracy. A reality equal for all participants in it was no longer a reliable possibility. If you are in a spaceship traveling at the speed of light, and you shoot a ray gun off your port bow, the photons from your gun would also travel at the speed of light. Unlike the baseball pitcher in a speeding car, you can’t add the speed of your spaceship to the speed of the photons you’re firing. By traveling at the speed of light, you are already at the absolute limit for all observers in all moving frames of reference. Einstein showed that the rate of time passing would depend on the frame of reference one is in. Thus relativity dismantled forever the assumption that everyone’s experience of time is the same. Time is not universally the same for every observer. We are like free-floating points in space where only local time applies.
But if you look at it another way, every observer defines the time frame he is experiencing and can change that time frame by moving faster or slower, in a sharper curve, or by approaching a strong gravitational field. The Galilean democracy has turned into an Einsteinian democracy.
In fact, it’s a universal democracy, which has brought with it more freedom of participation. The constants are still there. The speed of light will impose the same limitation on how fast an object can move through space-time. But instead of acting like a prison wall hemming us in, the constants are like the rules of a game. You must play by the rules, but as long as you do, you can make any move you want, whether the game is chess, football, or mah-jongg. Science has a tendency to lean too far toward the rules. Since electromagnetic waves travel at the speed of light in empty space, for example, they won’t change speed anywhere in the cosmos. Fixing the speed of light as an absolute was a desirable achievement from the standpoint of making calculations, because it removed the unreliability of subjective time.
The scientific viewpoint, which says that the brain is bound by the speed of electric currents, is just that, a viewpoint. In Einstein’s democracy, each person is free to put the rules first or freedom first. There is no absolute place to stand. The constant speed of electromagnetic waves is a boundary our brains must respect, but our minds are allowed freedom of thought; we can play any mental game we choose—and in the end, all games are mental. The speed of light doesn’t constrict our humanity, only our neurons.
When relativity toppled absolute time, it also toppled space. As with time, space looks distorted when measured at different moving frames of reference. According to relativity, a stationary observer watching a spaceship approaching the speed of light would see its length being shortened in the direction of its forward motion. In everyday life we don’t subjectively perceive these relativistic effects in space and time, because the speeds we’re accustomed to are tiny compared with the speed of light. In particle accelerators, however, such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland, where the Higgs boson was discovered, it’s routine to accelerate subatomic particles to speeds approaching the speed of light. That’s one place on Earth where relativistic effects are measurable and totally accepted as a fact of nature by the experimenters.
In a word, we can visualize what time could be like as it enters creation. Think of pop-up books, which lie flat like ordinary books but when opened, suddenly open up into a house, animals, an elaborate landscape, and even have moving parts. Creation is like that, when viewed at the quantum level. There’s flatness, and suddenly there are objects in space-time. Everything pops up at once. Therefore, the isolated behavior of particles isn’t really indicative of reality. In order for a tree, a cloud, a planet, or the human body to exist, there isn’t really a piling up of subatomic particles, atoms, and molecules the way bricks are assembled to build a house. Instead, the subatomic particles bring space and time with them.
This fact has astonishing implications. For example, a particle moving close to the speed of light may decay in a short amount of time, measured in millionths of a second, but it will last longer as observed by physicists in a laboratory that’s stationary with respect to the moving particle. A particle that moves exactly at the speed of light lasts forever, because for it time doesn’t pass. It seems to stand still. As far as light is concerned, time doesn’t exist, while from our perspective, in a world cordoned off by the speed of light, the lifetime of a photon is infinitely long. Photons, the particles of light, have zero mass. If a particle (any particle) has a finite mass, it can never reach the speed of light.
Now we have proof for one of the seemingly impossible ideas this chapter started with: eternity is at our doorstep. Light, which is timeless, gave rise to life on Earth and continues to sustain it. Therefore, the real question is how two opposites, time and the timeless, relate to each other. Time, space, and matter spring out of flatness all at once, and when solid objects get dragged into the Einstein democracy, they become relative. According to relativity, the mass of an object isn’t constant. Matter is constantly being transformed into energy and vice versa, as E = mc2 verified. But here our ability to visualize breaks down. We are limited by the slowness of the brain, just because it is made out of matter. The electrical impulses inside the brain travel at great speed, but the thoughts they trigger are “stepped down,” like the enormous voltage in power lines being stepped down for household use. The only particles that move at exactly the speed of light are photons and other particles that have zero mass, such as the elusive neutrino, if indeed it has zero mass. If one could magically exceed the speed of light, time would run backward, a theoretical doorway back to the beginning of time.
Einstein reasoned that this couldn’t happen in a classical world, even one with relativistic effects. However, it may happen in a quantum world. All the permutations of time are quantum possibilities, which offers another valuable clue. If the quantum domain allows for time to stand still, move backward, or follow the arrow that moves from past to present to future, then there is no reason why the big bang favored any of these possibilities over the others. Asking why we happen to live in clock time is very much like asking why the universe fits together so perfectly. Clock time benefits human beings, just as the fine-tuned universe does.
As with all life forms, humans cannot exist without birth and death, creation and destruction, ripeness and decay. These are the gifts of clock time, and although stars and galaxies also undergo birth and death, their life cycles are only a matter of shuffling matter and energy around on the cosmic game board. The human situation is much more complex, because unlike physical objects, we have mind, which creates new ideas born in a field of possibilities that seems infinite. The mystery of time somehow must be linked to how the human mind works. Let’s see if the quantum revolution brought time and mind closer together.
ARE QUANTA ON THE CLOCK?
Going faster than the speed of light would be very embarrassing for relativity, and now it has happened. Recently experimenters have found a way to move photons from one position to another without passing through the space in between, the first example of true teleportation. Because the photons skip from point A to point B instantaneously, no time elapses. The speed of light isn’t actually exceeded; it’s made irrelevant. We may say that time is bypassed. In fact, teleportation unravels the neat pop-up picture of space, time, and matter.
Teleporting photons have enormous implications. Einstein’s thinking, as we’ve been discovering, remained rooted in a classical world, and such a world is bound by the speed of light. Like wild horses released from a corral, if quantum objects can go beyond the speed of light—not by traveling faster but through instantaneous action—something unknown lies ahead.
One unknown has to do with how many dimensions actually exist. Clock time is one-dimensional. It travels in a straight line that occupies one dimension, as all straight lines do—they can only connect point A and point B. But in quantum theory there is no limit to how many dimensions there are, since they exist as purely mathematical constructs. For example, a number of quantum theories require us to go beyond gravity to the field of supergravity, which posits eleven dimensions. The pre-created state before the big bang could be dimensionless (occupying zero dimensions, mathematically speaking), or it could have infinite dimensions. The possibilities are head-spinning, being so far removed from everyday experience.
We have to add our universe’s three dimensions to the pile of dismantled absolutes, and time, the fourth dimension, may have to go with it. In mathematical terms it already has. It is generally accepted that every particle is emerging here and now from a place of zero dimensions, namely the quantum vacuum. Some radical physicists even theorize that the only two numbers with any reality are zero and infinity. Zero is where the trick of turning nothing into something occurs. Infinity is how many possibilities can emerge on an absolute scale. Every number in between has the reality only of soap bubbles and smoke.
Zero dimensions cannot be visualized—and even the mathematics can seem like a parlor trick, because so many variables are either unknown or sheer guesswork—but surely all of us exist because the timeless, which has no beginning or end, expresses itself as time in the present moment. This transformation defies logic, which should come as no surprise by now.
Since the quantum realm isn’t on the clock, why not accept the truth—that time is totally malleable? In that case, it’s no great leap to seeing any version of time itself as artificial. To make this easier to comprehend, we need to explore a basic term in quantum physics that also applies to everyday reality: state. When you see a tree, its state is that of a tangible object you can locate in space-time and experience with your five senses. A floating cloud is vaporous and more elusive than a tree, but it exists in the same state of physicality.
When physics delves into the quantum domain, another state is involved, the virtual state. It is invisible and intangible but nevertheless real. In fact, we visit the virtual state every waking moment. Think of a word, any word. We’ll pick avocado. When you think or say “avocado,” it exists as a mental object. Before you think or say the word, where is it? Words aren’t stored in a physical state in brain cells; instead, they exist invisibly but ready at hand—in a virtual state. You can pluck them out at will, an ability that deteriorates when the brain’s memory retrieval gets physically weakened or damaged. A faulty radio can’t retrieve radio waves, either; without a working receiver, radio signals exist, invisible and unsensed, all around us.
Likewise, the brain is a receiving device for the words we use, and not only that; the rules for using language are also in the virtual domain. When you see the sentence “Are house need wind?” you instantly know that it doesn’t obey the rules of language. You use no energy inside your brain to tell the difference between sense and nonsense. The rules are invisibly embedded in a place that is, for all intents and purposes, nonphysical. Subatomic particles also come from a place that is nonphysical, and there’s no reason to believe that where you go to fetch the word rose isn’t the same place from which galaxies spring.
The virtual state lies outside the manifest creation. When a wave turns into a particle, which is the basic step that brings photons, electrons, and other particles into the world of our experience, the virtual state is left behind. The virtual state is also why physics computes that every cubic centimeter of empty space isn’t actually empty. At the quantum level, it contains a huge amount of virtual energy.
All things in the universe can change states. In everyday experience, no one is mystified to see water turn into ice or steam, which are other states of H2O. At the quantum level, changes of state reach their limits, poised between existence and nonexistence. A kitchen table is transiting from the virtual to the manifest state thousands of times a second, too fast for anyone to observe. This is the winking in and out, or on/off switch, that we’ve mentioned several times. A quantum change of state is the basic act of creation. The multiverse gained enormous popularity for this very reason, when it was realized that a universe popping into existence was no more eventful than an electron popping into existence. The same fluctuations in the quantum field were at work. To the naked eye the universe looks very, very big, while an electron is very, very small, but this difference doesn’t matter in the act of creation.
A quantum popping into existence doesn’t come from somewhere “else,” nor does it go anywhere. It is only a change in state. Therefore, instead of using time as the measure of change, we must think in terms of states. Think of a volleyball tethered to a pole. When you hit it, the ball starts revolving around the pole, but at a certain point it runs out of energy and comes closer and closer to the pole, finally reaching a state of rest. (Planets orbiting the sun would fall into it if they lost energy and momentum over time, except for the fact that they travel in the vacuum of outer space. Unlike a volleyball, they meet no air resistance and thus can keep spinning round for eons.)
Now imagine an electron orbiting around the nucleus of an atom, an image that appears very similar to a volleyball circling a pole. With atoms, each electron orbit is called a shell, and electrons stay inside their assigned shell unless a quantum event occurs, in which case they jump a shell closer or a shell farther out. The word quantum was assigned because, as a “packet” of energy, the quantum travels from one definite state to another, carrying its energy with it. Electrons don’t slide from one location to another, nor do they slow down. They pop out of one orbit (shell) and appear in another.
When you grasp the importance of “state,” you see why quanta aren’t on clock time. Clock time is like ticker tape spooling out of the tape machine continuously, while the quantum domain is full of gaps, sudden changes of state, simultaneous events, reversals of cause and effect. So, if the basis of creation is quantum, how did physical objects get tied to clock time in the first place? The simplest answer is to say that clock time is merely another state. Once the universe matured, around a billion years after the big bang, every gross physical object (i.e., bigger than an atom) was locked into the same state of manifestation. Advanced mathematics, using probability theory, can compute the very, very remote chance that a kitchen table might totally disappear into the virtual domain, only to reappear three feet away. But that’s not a practical consideration. Being locked into manifestation, gross objects in the everyday world are reliable in their subjugation to space-time. Despite the quantum’s vanishing act as it winks in and out of existence, kitchen tables aren’t going anywhere soon on their own.
So the real question is, how do changes of state occur? The big bang, which caused the entire universe to emerge instantaneously, was a change of state that can’t be explained as happening in one place or at one specific time. During the Planck era, everywhere and nowhere were the same, as were before and after. Despite the wall that prevents us from witnessing the Planck era, we could call it a phase transition whereby one state transformed into another and the virtual became manifest. It’s quite peculiar, sitting here where the clocks tick, to realize that, just like an electron popping into a new shell, the entire creation did the same almost 14 billion years ago. But if we can imagine it, at least this tells us how something as tiny as an electron and something as large as the cosmos are linked. Neither one is on clock time; therefore, entirely new ways of thinking must be adopted.
PSYCHOLOGY MAKES AN ENTRANCE
Now we’re ready to take you, personally, out of the prison of time. Your body participates in the universe through changes of state. Let’s say a stranger knocks on your door one day. You open it, and he introduces himself. If he says, “I’m your long-lost brother, and I’ve spent years trying to find you,” you will go into a different state than if you hear him say, “I’m from the IRS and we are confiscating your house.” Your body will react instantly and dramatically in both cases. Simply by hearing a few words, your heart rate, respiration, blood pressure, and the brain’s chemical balance turn on a dime.
In human life, a change of state is holistic; like an electron, you can jump to a new level of excitation. A stranger introducing himself might turn your life upside down. Even as you undergo a dramatic change of state, however, you can’t observe the microscopic physical processes taking place in your cells. The particular areas of the brain that create joy or anxiety will light up on a brain scan, but subjectively we experience only the final outcome, not the mechanics of getting there.
But one thing stands out: the triggering event—a stranger knocking on your door—is what begins the change of state. It’s not the case that the quantum, although often called the basic building block of nature, is actually building the experience. The chain of command, as it were, moves from top to bottom. First comes the stranger at the door, then the words he speaks, your mental reaction, and all the physical stuff. In short, mind comes before matter. Only in the human world are we certain that this is true, despite the grumbling of materialists, who believe that every event, including mental ones, are caused by bits of matter exchanging bits of energy. Words are mental events first and foremost, because their purpose is the exchange of meaning, not the exchange of physical energy. If someone utters the phrase “I love you,” the physical stuff of the body reacts one way; if instead one hears “I want a divorce,” the physical stuff reacts another way.
This fact wasn’t lost on some quantum physicists, including John von Neumann, a brilliant theorist who took the bold step of declaring that the quantum domain, and reality itself, has a psychological component. Nature is dual, both subjective and objective. That’s why we humans can see any situation from either perspective. Meeting a stranger at the door, you can measure his height, weight, hair color, and so on (objective) or listen to what he has to say (subjective). Eyewitness reports of crime are notoriously unreliable in court because all of us mix up our viewpoints. Someone who threatens us grows larger in our minds, making it hard to give an objective account of how tall he is.
Von Neumann took the dual nature of reality quite far, to the very essence of how nature operates. He described a reality where quantum particles make choices and where the observer changes the thing he observes. Quantum physics has been swamped with subjective effects for over a century, largely thanks to the uncertainty principle, which holds that the properties of a quantum can’t all be known. The observer selects a property, and suddenly that’s what the quantum displays. At the same time, its other properties slip away and are even changed simply by being observed.
Though this sounds abstract, here’s an everyday example. You are standing on the north shore of Oahu in Hawaii, a place famous for its massive waves and a mecca for high-risk surfing. As a wave rolls in, you take a snapshot to show your friends. The snapshot stops the motion of the wave, which means you can see how big it is but not how fast it was moving. You’ve selected one property only. When a physicist observes a subatomic particle, he’s taking a sort of snapshot that reveals something he wants to measure, while excluding the other properties. It’s not satisfactory to look at reality this way, however, since reality is all-embracing. To compensate for the properties that vanish into thin air when a single property is observed, the other properties of a subatomic particle are calculated as probabilities.
In our everyday example, as you are showing around your snapshot of a huge wave in Oahu, someone might ask, “How fast was it moving?” You vaguely reply, “Real fast.” If asked to pin down your answer, you know that the wave was moving faster than a snail but slower than a jet plane. Its actual speed is probably between 20 and 60 miles per hour. Since the wave has long since disappeared, all you can work with is this probability. Quantum physics finds itself in much the same position, leaving open a basic question. How much does an observer change the “real” facts?
Von Neumann didn’t conjecture on this point. His breakthrough was that reality has a psychological component (the mind-like behavior of subatomic particles) that is essential. Some physicists, such as Schrödinger, have held that the psychological component is paramount. Schrödinger declared as an “absolute essential” that we “surrender the notion of the real external world, alien as it seems to everyday thinking.” But materialism, which traces all phenomena to the existence of the external world, hasn’t budged. Either the psychological component is denied altogether or it is extracted from the equation.
How does the psychological side of reality affect time? It’s well known that traumatic experiences cause time to slow down. Subjects report that in the midst of battle or during a car crash, everything moved in slow motion. In sports, the concept of “being in the zone” is an altered state where the player can do no wrong, where everything meshes perfectly, and in addition, the world grows silent and time slows down. Athletes report being in a kind of dream state divorced from everyday reality.
It’s hard to see how these reports can be sorted out to remove the subjective component. However, experiments have been successfully done in a more controlled environment. In one study, subjects took an amusement park ride that dropped them from a high tower. They experienced free fall before a parachute opened and gently lowered them to the ground. When asked how long they were in free fall, subjects always exaggerated the time, the same way people do in any traumatic situation. The actual time they were falling can be measured, and it becomes a simple matter to extract the subjective element of distortion.
Is this good enough? If von Neumann was right, the psychological component isn’t separate from how we experience the world at every moment. Maybe the “real” reality is waiting out there for someone who can do a better job finding it. Materialists—who prefer to be called physicalists, since their worldview includes energy as well as matter—insist that no psychological component is needed, but the history of quantum physics points the other way. Schrödinger has been dismissed as a mystic, but he knew, based on empirical evidence, that at the basic level a subatomic particle doesn’t behave like a tiny planet but like a smear of possibilities. The observer determines which possibility will undergo a change of state, manifesting as an object that can be measured.
So the best answer to the mystery of “Where did time come from?” turns out to be a human answer. We didn’t have to be present at the big bang for it to have a psychological component. The only version of the big bang anyone will ever know is the story told by human beings using our mind and brain. The same mechanism is producing reality at this very moment. Therefore, the mystery of time exists before our eyes. Without a human answer, it will remain a riddle forever.
In this chapter we’ve given you a preview of the benefits of a human universe where time is on your side because you participate in creating it. At the moment, however, physics is still struggling to keep objective time intact, preserving it as the only “real time” that science has to worry about. But what if the only real time is the present moment? That would bring down the wall dividing personal time and objective time. Once that happens, everyday life could be transformed into eternal life, here and now. This startling possibility makes the mystery of time important to everyone. Each of us creates a unique relationship with time, and yet our source is timeless. If we can look past the illusion created by clocks, the race against time comes to an end, and the fear of death is erased once and for all.