THE THIRD WAVE
THE FUTURE OF TIME
Each emerging civilization brings with it not merely changes in how people handle time in daily life but also changes in their mental maps of time. The Third Wave is redrawing these temporal maps.
Second Wave civilization, from Newton on, assumed that time ran along a single line from the mists of the past into the most distant future. It pictured time as absolute, uniform throughout all parts of the universe, and independent of matter and space. It assumed that each moment, or chunk of tune, was the same as the next.
Today, according to John Gribbin, an astrophysicist-turned-science-writer, “Sober scientists with impeccable academic credentials and years of research experience calmly inform us that. . . time isn’t something that flows inexorably forward at the steady pace indicated by our clocks and calendars, but that it can be warped and distorted in nature, with the end product being different depending on just where you are measuring it from. At the ultimate extreme, supercol-lapsed objects—black holes—can negate time altogether, making it stand still in their vicinity.”
By the turn of the century Einstein had already proved that time could be compressed and stretched, and had dynamited the notion that time is absolute. He put forth the now classic case of the two observers and the railroad track, which went more or less like this:
A man standing alongside a railroad track sees two bolts of lightning strike at the same time—one at the far north end of the track, the other at the south. The observer is mid-Way between the two. A second fellow is sitting in a high-speed train rocketing northward along the track. As he passes the observer outside he, too, sees the bolts of lightning. But to him the two flashes do not appear as simultaneous.Because the train is speeding him away from one and toward the other, the light from one reaches him sooner than the light from the other. To the man on the moving train it appears that the northern flash occurs first.
While in daily life the distances are so small and the speed of light so fast that the difference would be unnoticeable, the example dramatized Einstein’s point: that the chronological order of events—what comes first, second, or later in time—depends upon the velocity of the observer. Time is not absolute, but relative.
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