Amateur Astronomers Association of Princeton

by John Church

Time, in and of itself, flows equably without relation to any external thing.
– Isaac Newton

My granddaughter Nora once asked her mother where time comes from. Hmm! No one has ever been able to really answer this question. Poets and essayists have debated it for as long as we have had written languages.

Some maintain that there is no such thing as time; it’s all in our minds, a strictly psychological effect. For example, how can we decide whether we pass through time, or whether time passes through us? What is the duration of a moment? Metaphysics 101: does time pass more quickly when we’re having fun? These and similar questions are variants of the old “egocentric predicament,” or the problem of deciding if a reality external to our own perception actually does exist. Questions like this continue to provide employment for philosophers.

I’m prepared to allow that psychological or subjective time does have an inner if somewhat tenuous reality. On the other hand, as a physical chemist specializing in kinetics, I’ve studied the objective effects of time many “times” in the laboratory. Time does have a real and independent existence there. With physical objects, Newtonian mechanics works very well, even with space probes; but things can be much different under extreme conditions, such as in or near black holes.

We all know about the one-way passage of time from daily experience. My morning coffee can’t be unbrewed, my toast untoasted, or my scrambled eggs unscrambled. These are everyday examples of irreversible events, accompanied by an increase in disorder (entropy) and a decrease in “free energy,” to use the chemical term. Unusual word choice – we all know that energy isn’t free in the economic sense.

But it doesn’t work that way with living things, at least not for a while. Children grow, learn how to speak and read and write and ask hard questions, and maybe even invent calculus. Life temporarily defeats the destructive effects of time, in apparent if not real contradiction of the laws of thermodynamics. I say apparent, because living things create order within themselves only at the expense of creating more disorder in the environment. Yet there is a pervasive, organizing life force – on Earth anyway – that temporarily cancels the general tendency of things to become more disorganized and go to lower “free energy” states as time passes.

Regarding this, I have a personal anecdote. A bumblebee was caught in my bedroom window in the space between the inner sash and the storm sash, both of which were closed. I must have accidentally trapped it. I wanted to release the poor creature, but how could I do this safely? If I lifted up the inner sash in order to get at the storm sash and open it, the bee might sting me or fly into the house before I could get the storm sash open. So I did nothing for a couple of days. The bee gradually got weaker, and finally just sat lethargically on the inner window sill, shrunken and nearly dead. An idea came to me. I made up a little sugar water and got a medicine dropper. I lifted up the inner sash, ready to close it again if the bee stirred. (It didn’t.) I opened the storm sash several inches, placed a little pool of the sugar water right under the bee’s face, quickly closed the inner sash, and watched. The surprised bee tasted the sugar water. Then it began to lap it up, very slowly at first. After a few seconds it rested. Then it began to breathe deeply through its abdomen, which swelled and contracted. It eagerly lapped up more sugar water, faster now. Spurred on by rapid enzymatic reactions, the bee quickly came back to life. It lifted its wings off its back and began to tremble with anticipation. It gathered strength. It buzzed. It lifted off. It flew around inside the window for a few seconds, then found the opening and sped off into my front yard as if nothing had ever happened. Life had won again.

We know that time cannot be shielded against, stopped, or made to go backwards. Neither can gravitation. Time and gravitation must be deeply connected, not just near the Earth of course but throughout all of space. Is this a coincidence? Does one possibly cause the other, or are they completely independent?

Edgar Allan Poe’s theory, expounded in his 1848 essay Eureka, is that gravitation is simply the reaction of matter to having been thrown out (“radiated” he called it, drawing a parallel with light) from a primordial particle at the beginning of time. Cosmologists and physicists have never yet succeeded in explaining why gravitation exists; they usually just say “it is” and stop there, rarely if ever referencing Poe’s anticipation of the Big Bang and what, to him, seemed its logical consequence. Poe’s additional theory as to why the night sky is dark (the “Olbers paradox”) may have been the first correct explanation: light from the farthest reaches simply hasn’t had enough time to reach us yet.

People have been looking for antigravity devices about as long as they have been trying to stop time or make it go backwards. We can freeze light rays in a photograph, but we can’t freeze gravitation. It is a slow unforgiving force which might eventually collapse the entire universe. The first person who invents a way to stop or reverse time will probably also have invented a way to stop or reverse its alter ego, gravitation. And vice versa. Let the games begin. Down to the workshop! I’ve got a prototype of an
antigravity machine (not a helicopter). Would you like to buy some of my stock?