Time

[Eliahad]

Alright, I need help. I write the program notes for our concerts. Instead of writing about the pieces, which we talk about from stage anyway so we don't need to write that stuff down, I focus on a concept that we're exploring in the concert. Last year, for example, I talked about musical evolution over 40,000 years and how little it has, or hasn't changed.

So this concert is about Time. From seasons, to memories, to musical time. All sorts of things that involve time, the passage of time, or time in all of its definitions.

Why do I need help? Well, let us see if I can explain what I'm wrapping my head around.

Did time exist before we created it? Hot and cold existed before we created a scale to measure how much hot and how much cold. The concept of temperature was around before the measurement. Cycles existed before we had time. Night and day. But that cycle in itself is not time. Time is linear, not cyclical, time does not repeat, the numbers we use do, but the day and year change, so, no, time does not repeat. But after created time, we found that time goes back billions of years to a distinct starting point. So...if it does, does that mean it started there? Has time always existed since that moment? Or do we notice that moment because of the construct that we made that is time?

See? I'm even talking in circles. I know there's something simple that I'm overlooking, but I'll be damned if I can figure it out right now.

[Eliahad]

Is it that causality implies time? Because this then this?

[Elle]

Oh Jesus that sounds suspiciously like philosophy. I always liked Parmenides, who seems to think there is really no such thing as the passage of time. And nothing quite beats Nietzsche and the stoics before him with the idea of the eternal return.

[Eliahad]

Oh it's totes philosophy! Whenever I've read program notes while attending other orchestra concerts they're always talking about the pieces like they're the best thing EVAR! Which may or may not be true depending on the perspective of the listener. I've always felt that it's my job as a performer to make you excited about a piece while I'm playing it, not just tell you that you should be excited about it. Just by letting them be in charge of whether or not they like something gives them more freedom to enjoy the piece in their own way. Sure, they still might not like it at the end, but at least I didn't tell them upfront that they must like this thing because it's a masterwork of x, y and z. Then they're not spending all that energy trying to like it because they're supposed to, and can enjoy the things they do like in a piece of music even if they don't like the whole thing.)

So instead of dwelling on the pieces, I try and dwell on the concepts that brought this particular concert together or the concept the piece is exploring. And yeah, we give some of the history and background from stage, so it's not like we're ignoring that part. I haven't gotten a ton of feedback about them so I'm not sure how they're being received. I do know that the musician board member who reads them think they're an interesting way to get people interested in the music that isn't so dry.

*shrug* I'm trying a thing!

[Elle]

I am just going to tell you that your thing you are doing here is awesome and you should continue to do more of it even if everyone else hates it. Which they will not, OBVIOUSLY. But even if they did.

[Elle]

OMG YOUR AVATAR I JUST SAW IT.

[Cazmonster]

Time exists, and we can prove it exists now, I think. There's been a twin up in the ISS and they can prove that he is now ever so slightly younger than his planet-bound brother.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/sc ... apr_twins/


Aside from the science, yes, the passage of time has been something we sentient humans have been aware of since long before Stonehenge or any of the other megalithic structures went up. I'm not going to run down all the articles now, but they were built to take advantage of specific days of the calendar.

[Mike]

[Mike]

Adding to what Caz has said...

Yes, time has always existed. Which is circular, because "always" means "at every time" and so if you can speak of any particular time, then by definition, time existed there. But that leaves open the possibility that there is something outside of time where time does not exist as we know it. Or for that matter, we assume that OUR time begins at the Big Bang, but was there something "before" that? Does time exist outside of the time-space continuum that we see as arising from the Big Bang?

First off... your "perceptual time". As you seem to be defining it, that would have arisen with the rise of hominid culture. Animals have a concept of cause and effect and of cycles of day/night and seasons. The concept of a "past" though would have come (in my best uneducated guess) through the advent of language and culture and the ability to transmit stories. Giving the sense of your parents' lives before you. And their parents. And their parents. This is maybe better as "a sense of history"? But yes, long before we became literate, we had the ability to preserve the past, no matter how imperfectly, through stories. And I'm betting that Homo sapiens in all its varieties has always had this sense of history. So maybe for the last 100,000 to 200,000 years?

But then... our time-space continuum. We have overwhelming evidence that time exists for us and that it is continuous and that it extends backwards nearly 14 billion years to the Big Bang. But the problem with the Big Bang is that according to general relativity, all laws of physics break down at the point of singularity. The Big Bang would have been a singularity, but also so are black holes. Time as we know it essentially stops existing at a singularity. If that's true, then that means time was created/started at the Big Bang, and that the concept of time outside of that is meaningless. And it also implies that time ends at a black hole--that a black hole is also a "hole in time".

But we're getting more and more evidence indicating that maybe that's not exactly true. Maybe physics doesn't break down at a black hole. Maybe information isn't entirely lost on entering a singularity. Because black holes do some interesting stuff like radiate and thus lose mass over time, and interact with the rest of the universe in some very interesting ways. But even if it's true that there is something apart from our own space-time, it is currently unknown and unknowable.

There's lots of theories about what caused our Big Bang and what might exist outside our space-time, but my favorite comes from Stephen Hawking way back in A Brief History of Time: What if there's more than one time dimension? What if there's more time than just our single, linear, one-directional time. He proposes that maybe time exists in two dimensions. The first is the time that we're familiar with... real time. The second is imaginary time; similar to imaginary numbers that go off at right angles to real numbers. In this model, time (real + imaginary) forms a bent surface of some sort, like a sphere or a saddle shape or whatever. As you go backwards in real time, it appears to start at the Big Bang, because we can't perceive imaginary time. But what if the Big Bang is just the top of a sphere? Then asking "What came before the Big Bang?" is the same as asking "What's north of the North Pole?" The land doesn't end at the North Pole, but if all you can see is north and south, then it looks like it does. So in that case, time doesn't end (begin) at the Big Bang. Instead it's a continuous sheet that moves off in directions we can't see.

In a lecture in the late 90's, Hawking was still stating that current observations were consistent with the idea of multiple time dimensions.

On the other hand, Neil deGrasse Tyson recently was asked that very question about the possibility of multiple time dimensions and he said, essentially, "Wow, that would be SO cool, and I would love for that to be true, but in the current state of physics, there's nothing compelling us to think that it should be true or needs to be true."

[Eliahad]

I'm processing all of these things, but in the meantime (<--- there it is again) let me offer this pickle:

We say springtime, summertime and wintertime, but not autumntime or falltime. Weird!

[Eliahad]

Oh look, Harvesttime was a thing.