In my previous column I talked about change being a primary law of nature. I then said that nothing can be constant in nature because a constant will require a transcendence of space and time.
It is space and time that constitute the natural world of phenomena from the human perspective. This perspective may perhaps not apply to other species. Dr William A Roberts, professor emeritus in the department of psychology of the University of Western Ontario, is a world-renowned authority on metacognition, mental time travel and other cognitive processes in rats, pigeons, and dogs.
In an article titled Are Animals Stuck in TimeIJ he says in the introduction: “… The ability to assign points in time to events arises from human development of a sense of time and its accompanying time-keeping technology.
The hypothesis is advanced that animals are cognitively stuck in time; that is, they have no sense of time and thus, have no episodic memory or ability to anticipate long-range future events. Research on animals’ abilities to detect time of day, track short time intervals, remember the order of a sequence of events, and anticipate future events are considered, and it is concluded that the stuck-in-time hypothesis is largely supported by the current evidence.” Episodic memory is the ability to remember particular events in the past.
It appears then that while humans can volitionally go back and forth to the past and future, animals cannot. Research is afoot on this. There is ample indication as of now, though, that time and all its travails of yesterdays and tomorrows might purely be a human experience. Animals might be in the Zen state of ‘here and now’, the eternal present, without, however, knowing that they are there. lord Krishna says in The Gita that he is the present in the time trio of the past, present and future.
This is the same as Krishna saying that he is timeless. Even if just one of the three coordinates of the past, present and future is taken away, the remaining two coordinates also vanish. Yesterday, today and tomorrow constitute an ongoing triad for humans. This time triad dies if any of its constituents is gone. So while animals are not aware they are timeless, Krishna is aware that he is. Somewhere in between the worlds of animals and Krishna is the state of humans, a state of being aware of time. And space.
I come back to the prospect of a constant in the world of space and time that humans inhabit. A constant means being timeless, being the same at all times, not being bound by time, and, hence, going beyond time. And in thus, going beyond time, leave behind space too. For space and time are inextricably tied together. Every spatial reality is linked to time and time always has a spatial context. Space and time cannot be divorced from each other. They exist and perish together. This is my contention.
I did not study physics and mathematics beyond Class XII. And here I am, going beyond space and time.
I might look churlish talking about key themes of science like space and time and making outstanding statements about things that eminent scientists have not finished grappling with. I am stopping on holy soil — the sacrosanct pitch of science. What are my credentials to go and pitch my tent on that itIJ I failed so miserably in the IIT entrance exam that my stint with physics and mathematics can be considered to have never taken place.
So after talking about the tie-up of space and time, I looked up the web. I may be zilch but the physics and engineering departments of Stanford University have indisputable credentials to talk about space and time. They won’t need to prove like me that they are talking sense. About 66,200,000 results came in 0.37 seconds when I typed ‘space and time relation’ in Google search. The third result was of the Gravity Probe B website. The site says “…the collaboration between the Stanford Physics and Engineering departments (that) has been essential to the success of Gravity Probe B”. On the site is given an answer to the question “What is the relationship between space and timeIJ” by Dr Sten Odenwald.
Wikipedia says Dr Odenwald is a Ph.D in astronomy from Harvard University and has been an astronomer in the Washington, D.C. area, primarily at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. He says: “Mathematically, and in accordance with relativity, they (space and time) are in some sense interchangeable, but we do know that they form co-equal parts of a larger ‘thing’ called space-time, and it is only within space-time that the most complete understanding of the motion and properties of natural objects and phenomena can be rigorously understood by physicists.”
The Incas Andes thought of space and time as one. I seem to be in noble company and my contentious views may be forgiven as not being too rasping after all.
So there we are. As I said, if we go beyond space, we leave time behind too. And vice versa. A constant in space and time will take us beyond both. When we thus, go beyond space and time, we cannot even ask “where are weIJ” for ‘where’ is a space thing and we have relinquished it. Nor can we ask “how long will we be goneIJ” for ‘how long’ is a time thing. A constant, thus, is quite a tantalising prospect.
It gives us a leap out of the universe, our universe of space and time. It makes us other-worldly, if not plain divine.
Our world of space and time will keep changing and never have a constant. This is my independent view. Again the question of credentials arises. Who am I to say thatIJ So I will extend some dependence from the world of scientists to my independent view to not make it appear so wobbly.
The question at the end of this column is: “What does science say about the issue of constantsIJ” I will answer this in my next. Bear with me. This thing matters a lot. For if everything is changing all the time, then who are weIJ We then are not what we were a moment ago, for there is no constant in this world. So what we were even a moment ago is gone now.
Next moment we will not be whatever we are now. This columnist died as a child to become an adult and is dying and being born right now, as at all times in his 46-year-old life. And when we talk about the gap between the moment gone and the moment to come, which is the present moment, our life right now, how big or small is this time intervalIJ It can be made finer and finer to any limit, and that again takes us to infinity, something beyond time, beyond space. Oh, I am tired of all this. How are you doingIJ
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