THE MENTAL MAELSTROM
This is a long way from the kind of time on which classical physics andindust-reality were based. Both took for granted that “before” or “after” had a fixed meaning hide-pendent of any observer.
Today physics is both exploding and imploding. Every day its practitioners hypothesize—or find—new elementary particles or astrophysical phenomena, from quarks to quasars, with amazing implications, some of which are forcing additional changes in our conceptions of time.
At one end of the scale, for example, black holes appear to punctuate the skies, sucking into themselves everything, including light itself, straining—if not smashing—the laws of physics. These dark maelstroms, we are told, terminate in “singularities” into which energy and matter simply vanish. Physicist Roger Penrose has even posited the existence of “wormholes” and “white holes” through which the lost energy and matter are spewed into another universe—whatever that might mean.
A single moment in the vicinity of a black hole, it is believed, might be the equivalent of eons on earth. Thus if some Interstellar Mission Control were to send a spaceship to explore a black hole, we might have to wait a million years for the ship to arrive. Yet because of gravitational distortion In the vicinity of the black hole, not to mention the effects of velocity, the ship’s clock would show the passage of only a few minutes or seconds.
When we leave the vast heavens and enter the world of microscopic particles or waves, we find similarly puzzling phenomena. At Columbia University Dr. Gerald Feinberg has oven hypothesized particles called tachyons that move faster ihan light and for which—according to some of his colleagues—time moves backward.
The British physicist J. G. Taylor tells us: “The microscopic notion of time is very different from the macroscopic.” An-oihcr physicist, Fritjof Capra, puts it more simply. Time, he wiys, is “flowing at different rates in different parts of the universe.” Increasingly, therefore, we cannot even speak of “lime” in the singular; there appear to be alternative and plural “times” operating under different rules in different parts of the universe or universes we inhabit. All of which knocks the props from under the Second Wave idea of uni-;l linear time—without substituting ancient notions of cy-< heal time.
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