For use: December 16, 2000

Future Shoes: "For Instants"

by Michael Finley

Computer User Columnist

"Time flies like arrows.

Fruit flies like bananas".

                                -- Wittgenstein

One of the great intellectual controversies of our time is now swirling around an eccentric British physicist named Julian Barbour. Barbour, who neither teaches physics at a university nor does physics at a corporate think-tank, is a freelancer who has come up with a whole new notion of what time is.

His worldview, in a nutshell, is that there is no such thing as time, there are only instants that we record, and reconnect in our minds, like the frames of a movie, into a chain of instants that we give meaning to.

All our cultural values, all our hopes for the future, reflect our Newtonian desire to transform the chaotic order of being into stories that make sense to our still-arboreal brains. What we call the universe is not the same big fellow experiencing lots of changes, going backward to the Big Bang and forward to the Prospective Whimper -- but a lengthy series of configurations of a universe.

Barbour's goal is not to suck all the marrow from the chicken bones of culture, but to point out that science so far (odd phrase noted) hasn't been able to handle the idea of time, so maybe time is like the aether of the pre-Einsteinian era that underlies all reality -- a handy, maybe even a psychologically necessary concept, but a false one because it has no reality outside our heads.

I know what you are thinking -- if time doesn’t exist, your boss won't mind if you are late tomorrow.

And I know what you are smoking, if you have already lapsed into a cross-eyed consideration of Salvador Dali's melting pocket-watches. Physics is hard enough when it’s about falling objects, but it gets really slippery when it crosses over and becomes the dream police.

For me, I like that Julian Barbour is spending his time -- or whatever you want to call it -- pondering this matter. Other physicists have greeted his book The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics (Oxford University) as an occasion for physics to look tweedy, the universe's very own cottage industry. I see it as a stimulating possibility -- but not necessarily a relevancy.

We all come to this topic in different ways -- each one to his taste. The conventional view is that time is like an evolutionary arrow, shooting from the left, the past, to the right, the future. In this scheme, cavemen start at the left side dragging their knuckles, and mutate gradually into bubble-brained meta-humans on the right. Ptolemaically, we are smack dab in the middle of this arrow -- still lacking a few essentials to become truly superhuman, but we're a-gettin' there.

I have put forth what I call the dismalist position, that "reality" in the sense that physicists use is much less important than the meaning people assign to it anyway. Most people believe in evolution, but few of us have plaques on the mantle honoring our trilobite ancestors. Just as a practical matter, we go with our gut, and imagine ourselves forming from the warm spit of divinity.

I like the arrow idea, only instead of pointing rightward to progress, it should point downward, to death. Because death is the one thing we absolutely know we are marching downhill toward in our future shoes, pulled by time's gravitational force. We are not rising like helium cake in the oven, we are dropping like ripe fruit into our graves.

When I state this at a party, you should see the smiles vanish from people's faces, leaving something smile-like in its place, only broken, like a bombed Colombian airfield.

But it's not only true, it's good news. Knowing we're going to die -- probably not today, but possibly today -- puts a wonderful onus on us to get our affairs in order, and to make that a constant priority. I'm not talking about insurance policies and annuities, I'm talking about speaking and working as if our lives mattered.

Which is what I think Barbour is doing -- against a host of academic physicists, he is uttering his odd yawp about a universe of fractured instants. He's going for the gusto, even if it ticks a few people off.

Likewise, let the next keys we type on our keyboards be our yawp. From this instant on, everything matters.