Time the predator, what is it?

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Paulos Yrgaw
Aug 27, 2006

Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade is a Vietnam veteran. "The day we stop looking, the day we die", he says to Charlie Simms. Charlie senses a tone of desperation and agony in Frank Slade’s voice. Charlie Simms had come to help Frank Slade out in a long week-end where other students went back to spend some time with their affluent parents. Charlie a brilliant student who hails from a modest family with a humble beginning can not afford to miss out three days of an idle time. He responded to an add at the school to give a guiding hand to a certain Lieutenant Colonel who had been sight-challenged for quite sometime.

In the movie, "Scent of a Woman", where Al Pacino plays a vexed and pushed to the edge Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade with an almost perverted knack for the scent of women, the audience gets captivated with a particular scene. In this particular scene, Frank Slade in his three piece suit dines out with Charlie in a five star restaurant. Despite being sight-challenged, Frank Slade describes to Charlie the physical appearance of a young woman (only by the perfume that she was wearing that is) who happened to be sitting right behind them.

Frank asks Charlie to walk him to her table and as he approached the table, he asks her if him and Charlie can join her. She says to him, "My boyfriend will be here in a minute." Frank says back to her, "Some people live a life time in a minute." The line of course being far and in between from the gist of the film, it carries however a mantra of a philosophical baggage if you will. Can we live a life time in a minute? Perhaps, in Lorentz contraction we can.

Since time immemorial, human beings have been grumbling with the idea or essence of time where it drove virtually some great thinkers into the verge of insanity. Some notable men and women find a solace in the notion that, our brain was designed not to understand itself but to survive, hence it is rather futile and at times detrimental to delve into an abstract museum of events. However, the gravity towards the realm of time has not been successfully thwarted. Simply because time the predator is there chasing us relentlessly like a vulture in to a place where our life is defined by a hyphen between numbers.

In Zeno’s paradox we are led to see the enigma of infinity where the then Achilles equivalent of our Haile Gebresellasie or Kenesisa Bekele is beaten by a Tortoise. In the writings of the high-priests of Christianity, the likes of St. Augustine as well time is defined as a segment of the divine figure with out a beginning and an end. In the Eastern wisdom, the Hindu myth puts the problem of time by their belief in cycles–cycles of birth, death, and rebirth of the individual, and cycles of the society as well. For them the problem of Origin was dissolved: there was no Origin, and there never was Beginning. Instead, as the great historian Daniel Broostin put it in his book, "The Seekers", they dramatized the never-ending cycle in their myth of the Four Ages of Man, of deep and vague antiquity.

Hegel as well who had become preoccupied and obsessed with history and by the wholeness of experience believed that the separateness of events in the world was illusory. This led him to doubt the reality of time and space–the modes of separation. And of course, we have Newtonian mechanistic world view where time was treated with a crowning privilege as an absolute entity for circa three hundred and fifty years till it got "demoted" to a rank of a relativistic niche by Albert Einstein.

Albert Einstein who added a new dimension to the world we know told us that, the space-time continuum is a tangible reality of life per se where gravity is manifested as the curvature of space-time continuum in macro-molecular objects or heavenly bodies in a thesis otherwise known as General Theory of Relativity. In one of the cultural hypes, Einstein is reputed to have asked one of his tutors when he was in grade six on how light and time would have appeared to him if he was able to travel along side light.

In the last decade or so there have been a voluminous interest in the isle of Theoretical Physics to bring itself in synch with Philosophy which had been shaky over the last century or so. In his run-away best seller book (A book that made us feel at ease with the aggressive, intimidating and uncompromising nature of Science), "The Brief History of Time", the man who is holding the Lucasian Chair which was once held by Isaac Newton at Cambridge, Stephen Hawking compartmentalises time into three arrows. Psychological arrow of time (we remember the past not the future); Cosmological arrow of time (the universe is expanding); and Thermodynamic arrow of time (a tendency towards disorder).

As Jedediah Leland, the character in the movie "Citizen Kane" put it, man is cursed with the greatest infliction of them all. Memory. However, the first described arrow of time is not significantly crucial in the issue at hand even though it has more relevance in the study of memory.

The expansion of the universe first came to light, Hawking tells us, when the astronomer Edmond Hubble gazed into the distant stars through his telescope and observed a phenomena which he later dubbed the "Red shift effect" or "Doppler effect".

It is said that, when white light is subjected into a glass prism (an invention of Newton), it is diffracted into myriad colours. Red light being with a long wavelength and small frequency and in contrast Blue light being with a short wavelength and high frequency.

The phenomena can be easily understood when we take a daily experience. Suppose you hear a police car coming from afar and approaches you with a fast speed. As the sound of the siren reaches a high peak, the wavelength of the sound shifts from long to short wavelength. Equally as the sound, light as well, as it approaches you, the colour changes from Red to Blue and the wavelength becomes shorter as well. That is exactly what Hubble observed when he was gazing at the night sky. As the stars receded from him, the colour of the stars changed from Blue to Red and he came into conclusion that, the Universe must have been expanding.

The Thermodynamic arrow of time is based of course, on the Second Law of Thermodynamics also know as Law of Entropy, which states that, in the universe there is a tendency towards disorder. In fact, if one looks at it, the theory seems to be pervasive in all aspects of life, in social aspects of life as well. For instance, it is easy to be poor than rich; it is to be a loser than successful; it is easy to destroy than build; it is easy to decompose glucose molecule into carbondioxide and water than to make glucose of carbondioxide and water through the process of photosynthesis.

However, the Second Law of Thermodynamics runs into a scientific glitch. Charles Darwin in his sometimes over-rated theory of Evolution states that, life evolves from simple structured life forms (less ordered) into more complex organisms (more ordered). And evidently, The Law of Entropy states otherwise. Is there a way out from the conundrum? Perhaps. More on this next time. Paulos Yrgaw
Ottawa, Canada.
Comments: asimov107@yahoo.ca

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