I happened on an article today in which Peter Lynds’ revolutionary and hotly-contested theories of time appear to be quite similar to mine.

Newton described motion as a change in position over time. (In the process of figuring that out, he invented calculus.) That allowed for infinite series of infinitesimal steps, which polishes off Zeno. But for his model to make sense, Newton needed what he described as “absolute, true and mathematical time, which of itself flows equably without relation to anything external.” It’s a God clock, ticking out discrete instants, or, if you prefer, a universal CPU, doling out reality one cycle at a time, a series of static instants giving only the appearance of motion like the successive frames of a movie.

But Einstein didn’t buy it. The heart of relativity is that everything depends on your point of view - if you’re traveling at close to the speed of light (a constant), then time moves differently for you than for your slowpoke friends back home. Einstein died before he had worked out the implications of his own brilliant ideas. Among the problems left unsolved: Time could go faster or slower (or even backward), but was it divisible? And were there irreducible “atoms” of time, quantum flecks now called chronons?

Enter Lynds. In his theory, reality is merely sequences of events that happen relative to one another; time is an illusion. There’s no chronon, no direction for time’s arrow to fly, no “imaginary time” flowing 90 degrees off the axis of normal time…

…And that means a fundamental indeterminacy connects the blurry probabilities of the quantum universe with the seemingly stable macroverse where you and I live. Uniting those two seemingly incompatible worldviews dogged Einstein until his death; Lynds is happy to help the great man out. A further realization: The human perception of time as a sequence of moments is just a neurological artifact, an outgrowth of the chunk-by-chunk way our brains perceive reality. As the famous geneticist J. B. S. Haldane said: The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it’s stranger than we can imagine.

I’ve been saying something similar for 6 months. Especially with regard to the spiritual, my growing belief is that “God is outside time” means really that he experiences all time as a single moment. In fact, all that occurs is happening in a single moment. We sense time only because we are mortal. We use it to explain the sequence of events around us.

I’ve also noticed that our experiences of stress-free pleasure are when time seems to ‘stop’ for us. We let go of the concept, if you will, and like a freeze-frame in a movie, or a photograph of memories, find ourselves wrapped in joy.

~Jason