“Even the words that we are speaking now, thieving time has stolen away, and nothing can return” — Carlo Rovelli.
I first wondered about the nature of time as a child watching cartoons and all the botched versions of Hollywood time travel movies that came my way. In reality, I wondered about time over and over. Eventually, philosophical connotations of the “now”; of the illusion of the future and past created by the mind also came to my thoughts as questions.
I come to this topic from the unique non-technical perspective of an architect, artist, designer, and simple reader - I say, hoping to be relatable. I have not investigated time as a scientist studying general relativity, quantum mechanics or anything so complicated. I did read this particular book that felt like it lifted a veil. Being me, I was instantly excited, and how could I not share? If you are similar, I hope this serves some function of parsing this extraordinary device we call time; maybe this short insight will tell you that this book is worth reading or this story worth questioning your world for.
So you’re a young Artist - you’re a young explorer. You are always searching for new and exciting ways to explore and understand the world around you. The nature of time is a mystery that has captivated minds for centuries, and now its elusive yet intuitive nature has captivated your curiosity.
When I want to think of the Order of Time in terms I can relate to, I Imagine a canvas where the strokes of the past, present and future are painted, just as you use different colours and brushstrokes to create any painting. Time's canvas is constantly changing; the past, present, and future are continually blending.
Like great works of art, the canvas of time is not just something to be passively observed but something to be actively explored and understood. Like you might plan and design a building, the nature of time must be studied and analyzed.
As you delve deeper into the subject, you come to realize that the traditional understanding of time as an absolute and unchanging thing can fall apart. Time is relative to the observer; It is woven into space, creating the space-time continuum, different everywhere, like gravity is different everywhere. "Time that is intolerant of the brave and innocent and indifferent in a week to a beautiful physique." In my head, I like to picture the planetary bodies like little marbles dropped into jelly - suspended. The stuff of this jelly is space and time stretching and shifting around each body, interacting very physically all about them. Gravity bends around the worlds; time bends around the worlds. There is a position suggesting in quantum mechanics, where things are at the smallest - the absolute smallest; time can be understood even better. It has been revealed that the universe is not made up of discrete, unchanging objects but is instead a seething cauldron of probability and uncertainty.
Everything is buzzing when you look at the most minor scale. All the particles and Bodies that make up your entire world, all the forces at that scale, are unfixed. It’s as if everything is a cluster of suggestions - like a series of pictures skipped through so fast that we can’t tell the difference. People are not things; they are events.
Time is not a smooth and continuous flow but is made up of small, discrete moments. Our experience of the passage of time is subjective, depending on the physical and mental abilities we have. We have the minds we have. Powerful as they are, you can feel an itch at the extremes.
You come to understand that the direction of time's flow is not an inherent property of the universe but is a result of the increase of entropy, just like buildings have a natural wear and tear over time; W.B Yeats wrote, "The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper."
The question of whether time has a beginning or an end and whether the universe has a finite or infinite duration remains a mystery.
No matter what you do, you will always be looking at the past. Light hits every object we see and is reflected into our eyes, they’ve found. It is not always so fortunately instantaneous. On earth, in your room, your brush sets or books or flowers send the light to you immediately, but when you look at the stars, the light they send you has travelled too many years of a human’s life to meet you.
From those light years away, the star may have died. You look now into the night sky and see ghosts that lived before your world; how strange is time? The concept of now falls apart at the grandest and the smallest scales. Where is "now" in the context of the entire galaxy? Where is now for the most minute length where events can occur?
More practically, maybe you are not interested in theories of time and quantum mechanics. You want a morning, noon, and evening with the natural flow your mind has intuitively designed. Things that happened before are happening now and will happen later. Maybe this is the only way we can understand this very real “social construct”; perhaps this is the only way we can survive here.
Just like a work of art, the beauty of time is in its complexity and the way it seamlessly blends the past, present and future together. "The past is the push of you. The present is the push of me."
The ultimate nature of time may remain a mystery, but that doesn't mean that the quest to understand it is not worth pursuing. In fact, it is through this pursuit that you might hope to one day add to the rich tapestry of human understanding of this elusive concept.
You continue to study and analyze time, just as you might with films and books. Time is not for fearing or wasting. Embrace it; cherish it. Like the great poets and philosophers before you, maybe understand that time is not a thing, it is a relationship among things, and it is through this understanding that you can one day add your own brushstroke to the canvas of time.