Time
is a concept that depends totally on our perceptions and the
comparison we make between our perceptions. For example, at
this moment you are reading this article. Suppose that,
before reading this article, you were eating something in the
kitchen. You think that there is a period between the time
when you were eating in the kitchen and this moment, and you call
it "time". In fact, the moment you were eating in
the kitchen is a piece of information in your memory, and you
compare this moment with the information in your memory and call
it time. If you do not make this comparison, the concept of
time disappears and the only moment that exists for you will be
the present moment.
Renowned
physicist Julian Barbour defines time in this way:
"Time
is nothing but a measure of the changing positions of objects.
A pendulum swings, the hands on a clock advance."[1]
In
short, time is composed of a few pieces of information hidden as a
memory in the brain; it arises from the comparison of images.
If a person did not have a memory, that person would live only in
the present moment; his brain would not be able to make these
interpretations and therefore, he would not have any perception of
time.
Today
it has been scientifically accepted that time is a concept that
arises from our making a definite sequential arrangement among
movements and changes. We will try to make this clearer by
giving examples from those thinkers and scientists who have
established this view. The physicist Julian Barbour caused a
great stir in the scientific world with his book entitled The End
of Time in which he examined the ideas of timelessness and
eternity. In an interview with Barbour, he said that any
idea we have of time being absolute is false, and that research
done in modern physics has confirmed this.
Time
is not absolute; it is a variously perceived, subjective concept
depending on events. François Jacob, thinker, Nobel
laureate and famous professor of genetics, in his book entitled Le
Jeu des Possibles (The Possible and the Actual) says this about
the possibility that time can move backwards:
Films
played backwards make it possible for us to imagine a world in
which time flows backwards. A world in which milk separates
itself from the coffee and jumps out of the cup to reach the
milk-pan; a world in which light rays are emitted from the walls
to be collected in a trap (gravity center) instead of gushing out
from a light source; a world in which a stone slopes
to the palm of a man by the astonishing cooperation of innumerable
drops of water which enable the stone to jump out of water.
Yet, in such a world in which time has such opposite features, the
processes of our brain and the way our memory compiles
information, would similarly be functioning backwards. The
same is true for the past and future and the world will appear to
us exactly as it currently appears.[2]
Because
our brain works by arranging things in a sequence, we do not
believe that the world works as described above; we think that
time always moves forward. However, this is a decision our
brain makes and is therefore totally relative. If the
information in our brains were arranged like a film being
projected backwards, time would be for us like a film being
projected backwards. In this situation, we would start to
perceive that the past was the future and the future was the past
and we would experience life in a way totally opposite to that we
do now.
The
fact that time is a perception was proved by the greatest
physicist of the 20th century, Albert Einstein, in his
"General Theory of Relativity". In his book, The
Universe and Dr. Einstein, Lincoln Barnett says this:
"Along
with absolute space, Einstein discarded the concept of absolute
time – of a steady, unvarying inexorable universal time flow,
streaming from the infinite past to the infinite future.
Much of the obscurity that has surrounded the Theory of Relativity
stems from man's reluctance to recognize that sense of time, like
sense of color, is a form of perception. Just as space is
simply a possible order of material objects, so time is simply a
possible order of events. The subjectivity of time is best
explained in Einstein's own words. "The experiences of
an individual" he says, "appear to us arranged in a
series of events; in this series the single events which we
remember appear to be ordered according to the criterion of
'earlier' and 'later'. There exists, therefore, for the individual
an I-time, or subjective time. This in itself is not
measurable. I can, indeed, associate numbers with the
events, in such a way that a greater number is associated with the
later event than with an earlier one."[3]
From
these words of Einstein, we can understand that the idea that time
moves forward is totally a conditioned response. Einstein
scientifically established the following fact in his "General
Theory of Relativity": The rate at which time passes changes
according to the speed of a body and its distance from the center
of gravity. If the speed increases, time decreases,
contracts, moves slower and seems that the point of inertia
approaches.
The
Relativity Of Time Explains The Reality Of Fate
As
we see from the account of the relativity of time, time is not a
concrete concept, but one that varies depending on perceptions.
For example, a space of time conceived by us as millions of years
long is one moment in God's sight. A period of 50 thousand
years for us is only a day for Gabriel and the angels. This
reality is very important for an understanding of the idea of
fate.
Fate
is the idea that God creates every single event, past, present,
and future in "a single moment". This means that
every event, from the creation of the universe until doomsday, has
already occurred and ended in God's sight. A significant
number of people cannot grasp the reality of fate. They
cannot understand how God can know events that have not yet
happened, or how past and future events have already happened in
God's sight. From our point of view, things that have not
happened are events that have not occurred. This is because
we live our lives in relation to the time that God has created,
and we could not know anything without the information in our
memories. Because we dwell in the testing place of this
world, God has not given us memories of the things we call
"future" events.
Consequently,
we cannot know what the future holds. But God is not bound
to time or space; it is He who has already created all these
things from nothing. For this reason, past, present and
future are all the same to God. From His point of view,
everything has already occurred; He does not need to wait to see
the result of an action. The beginning and the end of an
event are both experienced in His sight in a single moment.
Besides, for God there is no such thing as remembering the past;
past and future are always present to God; everything exists in
the same moment.
If
we think of our life as a filmstrip, we watch it as if we were
viewing a videocassette with no possibility to speed up the film.
But God sees the whole film all at once at the same moment; it is
He who created it and determined all its details. As we are
able to see the beginning, middle and end of a ruler all at once,
so God encompasses in one moment, from beginning to end, the time
to which we are subject. However, human beings experience
these events only when the time comes to witness the fate that God
has created for them. This is the way it is for the fates of
everyone in the world.
The
lives of everyone who has ever been created and whoever will be
created, in this world and the next, are present in the sight of
God in all their details. The fates of all living
things—planets, plants and things—are written together with
the fates of millions of human beings in God's eternal memory.
They will remain written without being lost or diminished.
The reality of fate is one of the manifestations of God's eternal
greatness, power and might. This is why He is called the
Preserver (al-Hafiz).
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[1]
From Here to Eternity", Discover, December 2000, p.54
[2]
François Jacob, Le Jeu des Possibles, p. 111
[3]
Lincoln Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein, p. 52-53
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The author, who writes under the pen-name Harun Yahya, has published many books on political, faith-related and scientific issues. Some of the books of the author have been translated into English, German, French, Spanish, Itallian, Portuguese, Albanian, Arabic, Polish, Russian, Bosnian, Indonesian, Turki, Tatar, Urdu and Malay and published in the countries
concerned.
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