Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Value of Time

Time is the skeleton in the intellectual closet, the elephant in the scientific room, and the rogue gene of rationality. Time presents a series of paradoxes which Lightman presents as if they were dreams to be analysed - not to be resolved but merely to be appreciated. Perhaps that’s the limit of human capability, that is, merely to appreciate time as something unknowable. If so, then the purpose of time may well be to keep human beings humble, an unexpected consequence of eating from the tree of knowledge.

Time, of course, is an essential concept not just for the conduct of everyday life and the purported rationality of scientific thought, but also as a foundation for ethics, and for one’s fundamental feeling about the world and our place in it. So how we think about time, however unconsciously, matters. We wouldn’t be able to communicate without time since words come in a sequence. Yet single-celled animals appear to communicate and have no detectable sense of time. Time has been considered as a threat or a consolation; as objective or entirely subjective; as universal or merely local; as a fact of existence or a fantasy created by human beings to make our lives bearable; as something which gives or destroys meaning.

But no matter what view one takes on time, its paradoxes prevail. Lightman catalogues them in his witty vignettes of life in Berne. If time is circular, there can be no choice, no free will. If time-travel is possible, choice and free will could destroy the world. If there are dimensions in time as there are in space, then there could be an infinity of simultaneous worlds. If time is reversible, the relation between cause and effect is merely conventional, etc., etc. It seems that no matter where one turns philosophically, someone has already opened a door to understanding and someone else has closed the same door with a decisive bang.

Without time, there would be no regrets, no sense of loss. But there probably wouldn’t be anything like love either, certainly not anticipation or longing. Commitments and contracts would be meaningless. History, indeed memory of any kind except for the most unconsciously instinctive (including the false or distorted kind), could not exist. Greed would be eliminated; so would ambition. Neither progress nor deterioration would be noticeable. But entropy would be stopped in its tracks; so everything would be much tidier. Age would be a mythical fantasy. Ethics as a consideration of the consequences of one’s actions would be senseless. On the other hand, an ethical ideal of equality might well be a consequence of the absence of time. Does time even exist in a galactic black hole?

So Lightman is pretty comprehensive. But I think there is at least one theory of time, or Einsteinian dream, which he may have neglected: Time as metric of value. That time is a metric, a scale on which we measure and evaluate, is something fairly certain. Such a metric is neither subjective nor objective but inter-subjective and communal, quite a bit like language really. So it is something real but created by human beings for an evolutionary purpose, namely to be able to rank things - events, structures, traditions, words, and people - according to their importance. And, of course, this implies arguing about their importance. An agreement on something as the basis for disagreement, one might say.

How ironically fitting, therefore, that the nature of the thing agreed as a metric should be the subject of such intense disagreement and confusion. I am 72 years of age. I can prove it by both memory and birth certificate. But memory is uncertain, and documents can be forged. In any case, the literal meaning of my assertion is that I have experienced 72 Springtimes - a mere convention. Scientifically it means that the replicating tails of my bodily cells are running out of steam. Culturally, it means that I am either a carrier of wisdom or over the hill depending on whom you ask. Psychologically, that I am probably more filled with memories and suppressed memories than is good for me. All these are evaluations, judgments that require the metric of time.

As with all metrics of value, there is nothing beyond, under, or inside the metric of time. It stands on its own. It is its own substance. We place ourselves and everything else on that metric. The metric is not part of us or of anything else. Confusing the substance of the metric with something either ‘out there’ in the cosmos, or ‘in here’ in one’s mind, is a mistake. Just as Zeno created his paradoxes of movement in space by confusing the metric with the world to which it is applied, so we create similar paradoxes with time. The apparent contradictions of quantum mechanics is just one example.

There are, of course, not one metric of time but any number of them depending on our perspective on the world - just as Einstein showed. These metrics are not simply contraries, they may even be contradictories - uniformly increasing as others decline. Comparing them implies a difference in purpose which completely explains the difference in scales. Many of these purposes are strange: to prove that God exists... or that he doesn’t exist; to prove that the universe expanded rapidly... or that it didn’t. As if time itself doesn’t change with the intentions associated with it. Time is its own metric and nothing else, just like every other measure of value.

This theory of time as a metric of value may involve its own paradoxes. But it does have one signal advantage: by allowing purpose to determine what time is, the theory incorporates all of Lightman’s common-sense and philosophical conjectures, including Einstein’s, and allows each its place. None are incorrect, although some may be better than others depending on intention. Responses on a postcard, please.

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