R E S P I R O N O N - F I C T I O N

Hypertime and the Metachronon

by Paul Doru Mugur

Abstract Does the nature of time changes? How can we describe this change and avoid the traps of an infinite regression? My presentation will discuss a model of this metamorphosis of time (hypertime) and its meta-hystorical and post-human implications.

A. Before discussing about time we have to clarify what we mean by “time”.

We do not perceive time directly so where does the idea of time come from? Time is an abstraction inferred from the observation of movement, time is created by comparison, by analogical thinking, time is a mental image, a metaphor, a little poem that our mind creates. Movement is the background for the idea of time. For us humans, there is always something that moves, that changes outside or inside our body. Even when nothing moves outside the body, the thoughts come and go and the heart continues to beat so there is always movement and change associated with human existence. On further analysis, in order to perceive movement and change you need some kind of neurological devices to memorize and compare different sensory inputs. The perception of movement is build up from comparisons between sensory data and it needs a certain type of memory (immediate memory). We are born with the perceptual apparatus for movement and the sensation of movement, although not primary, it is innate. On the other side, what we call time, contrary to what Kant have thought is not aprioric, time is a psychological and social construct that is different between individual and between cultures.

We build up the meaning of time in a certain language from our direct experiences; time is like the elephant in Rumi`s poem: our sensations, our perceptions and our immediate, short or long term memory capture different aspects of it from which then we attempt to reconstruct the whole.

Time has a complex structure and if we would compare it to an animal it does not, in fact, resemble an elephant but looks more like a sphinx, a chimera, a combination of several animals in one being and if we continue this comparison we can think of the different parts of this chimerical being, time, as being linked to different neurological/mental systems.

-Time as present, as now. Linked to attention.

-Time as a fleeting process, as an ongoing action. Linked to attention and the perception of movement.

-Time as past. Linked to different types of memory.

-Time as duration. Linked to memory.

-Time as future. Linked to imagination.

-Time as simultaneity. Linked to memory and attention.

-Time as “as before and after”. Linked to memory and attention.

-Time as causality. Linked to our logical mind.

B. From the perception of the movement we build up the concept of a flow responsible for all the changes in our world and we attribute to this flow different characteristics:

unicity
continuity
universality
uniformity
order
direction

1. Unicity

Is time really unique? During their recent history as rational beings on Earth, humans have given very similar answers to phenomena that, on one hand they considered essential for their existence, on the other hand they did not understand.

It is interesting to note that man has a similar relationship with time as he does with God (in some old cultures like Iranian, for example, time, Zurvan, was in fact God) so I think we can borrow a religious terminology and talk about monochronistic, polichronistic, bichronistic, trichronistic, achronistic and agnostic answers to the question: is there a time out there and if the answer is yes: is this time unique?

In philosophy and physics the idea of different times with more than one dimensions/ directions has been around for a while.

There are several alternatives to the Kantian aprioric model of a unique time responsible for both change and causality.

-Since Parmenide (Julian Barbour, re-loaded) proposed the idea of a-temporality: no time. In this line of thought time is simply absent, change, motion and process are meaningless. There can be no interactions in this immobile, a-temporal world.

-If the now moves in time, there must be a second time, wrote John Dunne in1927 in his famous “An Experiment with Time” in which he describes several premonitions he had while he was dreaming. But in this second time, which presumably has the same characteristics as the first, we must have motion also, and hence there may be a third time, implying yet a fourth, and then a fifth, and so on, without limit. The philosopher C.D. Broad dismissed the existence of serial time, “We can hardly expect to reduce changes of Time to changes in Time,” and Gerald Whitrow wrote in “The Natural Philosophy of Time” that “Time is not itself a process in time.”

Then in 1951 H. A. C. Dobbs proposed also a two-dimensional time based on the distinction between its transitory and extensional aspects. His assumption of a second time-dimension implies that there exists a second way of ordering the constituents of a temporal process, by means of a relation similar in structure to the relation of “before (or after) “or “earlier (or later) than.” The two time-orders thus generated would have the same complete logical independence, or mutual orthogonality, as the three extensive aspects of space relations commonly described by three orthogonal Cartesian coordinate axes.” In order to avoid the infinite regression trap of Dunne, Dobbs carefully noted: “This does not entail that the “becoming” aspect of time is two-dimensional.”

In the theory of relativity there are countless times that vary in function of the observer but time itself has only one dimension.

At the present time there are several scientific and philosophical models of multi-dimensional time (2 or more).

First there are the 6 dimensions= 4 space+2 time models of Merab Gogberashvili and Itzhak Bars. A 6-dimesnional surface looks like a Calabi-Yau manifold.

Calabi-Yau manifold

Then there is the model of Xiaodong Chen(1999) that continues the ideas of G. Ziino(1985) of a three dimensional time.

And then there are several philosophical models of many time dimensions: J.T. Fraser , G. C. Goddu and (2003), Jack W. Meiland (1974),etc.

To note that in all this models the extra-dimensions of time are independent of each other.

2. Continuity: Is time continuous or discontinuous?

In the theory of relativity Einstein postulated a continuous space-time manifold but in the quantum world space and time may be discrete. Chronons have been proposed By Paul Davies and K. J. Hsu as theoretical particles or atoms of indivisible intervals of time. More recently, Smolin in his loop-quantum gravity searches for a non-string TOE has also been speculating about a digital nature of space-time. But the model of chronons is difficult to support. As the paradoxes of Zenon point out, if chronons existed, physical continuity, motion and time (relative interval) would not be possible. But, maybe, as Whitrow suggested, the chronons are like beads on a string that touch each other and thus maintain continuous contact with each other.

Or maybe, the structure of time is similar to an ourobouros, the mythic serpent biting its tail and resemble a Klein bottle and beyond the chronon, the shortest time structure there is the largest time time-structure that I called a metachronon, beyond the chronon, maybe the chronon is like a portal towards the metachronon, which contains all the time that ever existed and will ever exist. Such a closed structure kindly suggested by my friend, Dr. Florin Popescu in one of our discussions, may resemble aKlein bottle and has been used in different attempts to describe the structure of the universe. (see for example the work of V.N. Yershov, a physicist from Pulkovo Observatory in St. Petersburg, Russia)

Klein bottle(exterior)

3. Universality

In the theory of relativity, both special and generalized, there is no universal time. In the early 30`s in several papers, the cosmologist Edward Arthur Milne introduced two different times, one cosmic, one local. Also in the model of J.T. Fraser, the president of the International Society for the Study of Time (1966) and the Founding Editor of KronoScope - Journal, there are different times at different levels of organization of matter. According to Fraser, time has different strata, or time scales, rather than a single cosmic time or universal clock. This model, with six levels, was proposed by J. T. Fraser in 1975 in Chapter 12 of “Of Time, Passion, and Knowledge”. The first three levels in Fraser`s hierarchical theory of time are atemporality, prototemporality and eotemporality all of which deal with physical reality: the absolute chaos of electromagnetic radiation at the time of the Big Bang, the realm of particle waves and massive objects such as planets and stars, respectively. The fourth level is biotemporality, which is the time associated with living organisms, and among the characteristics of which are short-term time horizons. Following biotemporality in this hierarchy is nootemporality, which is the time of the human mind with longer, open-ended time horizons. Atop the hierarchy is sociotemporality, the time of a society produced by social consensus. This theoretical model is described in a set of eight propositions (J.T.Fraser 99, pp26-43) the elaboration of which provide many of the model`s details, including the points that the hierarchy is a nested hierarchy and that the hierarchy is open-ended, meaning that there is no necessary logic that indicates the time of human societies is the final temporal form that will evolve with the universe.” (“The human organization of time” by Allen C. Bluedorn, p.24). In an extreme version of this hierarchical model of time, there might be an infinity of strata, with self-similarity across scales. Such a model was proposed in 1975 by the McKenna brothers in “The Invisible Landscape”. Thus, zooming into the microstructure of time one gets lost, as each new view is much like the last. This is the structure of the mathematical objects called fractals, which abound in the mathematical theory of dynamics.

4. Uniformity

Is there a uniform time that flows continuously like a metronome? As Einstein mentioned in his book “Relativity, The Special and the General Theory” we take for granted that “clocks go at the same rate if they are of identical construction”, and, also, clocks are build up with the assumption that indeed there is a uniform and monotonous flow. In reality, each entity in the universe may have its own time-flow and for some of these entities time does not flow monotonously. In fact, each moment of time is new and we take for granted that all moments are of the same duration regardless of their position on the timeline but is this assumption correct? Can we build up a model of non-uniform, non-monotonous time? I am a physician and I can certify that not all 80 years old are the same: biologically some of them are 65 others are 90 and psychologically some of them may be younger than 20 so nature build up this model for us already!

Also, the perception of time is non-uniform for people of different ages. As the poet Guy Pentreath wrote:

“For when I was a babe and wept and slept
Time crept;
When I was a boy and laughed and talked,
Time walked;
Then when the years saw me a man,
Time ran,
But as I older grew, Time flew.”

and there are several very interesting mathematical models describing the variation of subjective time with the chronological age. In one of these models, the variation of the psychological age is proportional with the square root of the chronological age (In “Time, Quality of Life and Social Development”: “A Mathematical Approach to the Psychological Age”, Jose Leniz, & Gonzalo Alcaino and “Speculation of Factors Concerning the Influence of Time on Well Being”, Mihai Dinu, 1982).

The presupposition of the uniformity of time definitively needs further investigation. In the theory of relativity Einstein implicitly assumes that the rate of time flow is constant in a clock that is not accelerated and is not influenced by a gravitational field and this postulate needs to be revisited. If the structure of the universe itself changes continuously with time it is possible that each moment in time is in fact not only irreversible but also unique.

5. Order

In our experience time is ordered, the “before” always precedes the “after” and the “cause” always precedes the “effect”. Apparently, every sequence of events has a determined temporal order. We experimentally verify that specific events occur before others and not vice-versa. Certain events (effects) are triggered off by others (causes), providing us with the notion of causality. Fundamentally, the concept of time is strongly related to the idea of order of events, for Leibnitz, in fact, time was the order of events. But can we imagine a different order or multiple orders of events? The radical reformulation of physics conjecture, in which one abandons the causal structure of the laws of physics and allows, without restriction, time travel, reformulating physics from the ground up is, in fact, possible. (Visser, M. Lorentzian Wormholes: From Einstein to Hawking, American Institute of Physics, New York, 1995).

As suggested by Frederick Turner, “time itself may contain two directions of causality, a strong forward one and a weak backward one (or, more precisely, forward causes and backward “correspondences” or “evidential constraints”), then a feedback loop can be completed and time itself may be considered to be nonlinear and perhaps self-organizing, as nonlinear systems tend to be”. So, in a certain sense, time itself may be alive.

6. Direction

Universe, in latin Universum, from latin uni, one, + versum, derivative of versus, “turned toward” so universe means turned toward one. But does the universe have a temporal orientation? Does time have a preferential direction? Is time irreversible and if this is the case, why, how did the arrows of time came into being in the first place? Does time at quantum levels have also a direction? In Wikipedia are cited no less than seven arrows of time:

-Thermodynamic arrow of time, determined by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that in an isolated system, entropy tends to increase with time. –Cosmological arrow of time, the universe expands - rather than shrinks - by definition. –Radiative arrow of time, waves expand outward from their source. -Causal arrow of time. A cause precedes its effect. -The particle physics (weak) arrow of time. Certain subatomic interactions involving the weak nuclear force rarely violate the conservation of both parity and charge conjugation. An example is the kaon decay. Such processes could have been responsible for matter creation in the early universe. -The quantum arrow of time. In quantum physics the wave function collapse is irreversible in time. -The psychological/perceptual arrow of time. We remember the past but not the future.

To these arrows Roger Penrose added the “black hole” arrow of time: there are no white whole around and Stephen J. Gould added the “biological aging” arrow of time.

Finally, all these arrows seem to be reducible to two: the thermodynamic arrow of time and the particle physics (weak) arrow of time. These two arrows are thought to be a direct consequence of the initial conditions in the early universe.

Is gravity the cause of this arrow of time? Lawrence Schulman of Clarkson University in New York State argued that after 380,000 years of existence the universe switched from a chaotic high-entropy ball of fire to a highly ordered state - the first time it became cool enough for the constituents of atoms to combine due to gravity. "What was a high-entropy, typical, state in the earlier regime became a low-entropy, special state in the later regime," says Schulman. Did an arrow of time exist before gravity came into play and pulled matter together to create galaxies, stars and planets? We don`t know yet.

Competing Arrows of Time

Courtesy Physics News Graphics

The same Lawrence Schulman (1999) imagined the possibility that in the universe there may be areas with a reversed time arrow. Above there is a schematic diagram showing the birth of the universe amid the Big Bang, the subsequent expansion of the universe, and an eventual re-contraction ending in a "Big Crunch." The white circles represent matter in our universe subject to the "arrow of time," according to which a wineglass, after it falls off a table, will never reassemble itself and jump back up on the table. The black circles represent matter associated with a hypothetical inverse arrow of time.

Another deep mystery is the incongruence between the quantum evolution, governed by the Schrödinger equation, which is time-symmetric and the macroscopic asymmetry of time. Solving this enigma may be synonymous with finding the Holy-Grail of Physics, the TOE.

C. We are not born with an innate sense of time, we build up the meaning of time in a certain language from our experiences.

Given the fact that we do not have a special organ to see time as we have eyes to see space and, so, we do not perceive time directly we can let our imagination fly freely and dream about what time could be in some fantastic dream-like scenarios.

I. First dream: the idea of the rhythm as a cosmic glue.

I work as a physician I deal also with patients of different ages and I realize that age itself is not only chronological (Mr Smith is 75 years old) but also biological and psychological.

Also, as a physician and I deal with human beings and in the human beings there is a symphony of co-dependent biorhythms.

In medicine and biology we deal all the time with periodic phenomena: the metabolical reactions inside the cells, the cell division cycle, the heart, the breathing, the brain. Inside the brain there is the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or nuclei, (SCN), a tiny region on the brain's midline in a shallow impression of the optic chiasm, is responsible for controlling endogenous circadian rhythms like a master clock that binds many rhythms together. The circadian rhythm in the SCN is generated by a gene expression cycle in individual SCN neurons. The circadian rhythm in the first place originated in the rhythmic alternance of night and day.

So we can see on one hand the fact that in the human body there is a relationship of all these different rhythms at different levels and that the body is connected with the universe through these rhythms.

The idea of rhythm as a glue has been developed by Francisco Varella on his work on neuronal synchrony via coupled oscillators. The neuronal synchronization hypothesis that “a specific cell assembly of neurons emerge through a kind of temporal resonance or "glue" and postulates that it is the precise “coincidence of the firing of the cells that brings about unity in mental-cognitive experience”. Also different aspects of time as for example the perception of the now, the lived present, emerge as a consequence of this “frame or window of simultaneity” of activation of synchronized neurons.

We can extrapolate the model of Varella to the entire universe seen as a rhythmic structure in which the connection of the different parts is realized through through temporal resonance.

This vision of time and rhythm as a cosmic glue is not original. In the Chinese culture, as shown by Francois Julien, (Du "temps". Elements d'une philosophie du vivre, 2001) there are words for “moment” and “duration” but there is no word for time as an abstraction that contains both these aspects. The word “time” as we know it in the Western Culture appeared in China only in 1908 imported from Japan and it has been translated as shijian “between moments”. On another hand the ideas of rhythm and the synchronization between the human world and the cosmos has been extensively studied in China.

Also in the Ancient Greece, for Pytagora and his fellow searchers of the hidden harmony of the spheres, time was some type of cosmic glue. In fact, harmonia the key word of the Pythagoreans and meant primarily the joining or fitting of things together. Aristotle characterizes the Pythagorean as having reduced all things to numbers or elements of numbers, and described the whole universe as "a Harmonia and a number". Aristotle continued: "They said too that the whole universe is constructed according to a musical scale. This is what he (Pytagora) means to indicate by the words "and that the whole universe is a number", because it is both composed of numbers and organized numerically and musically. For the distances between the bodies revolving round the center are mathematically proportionate; some moves faster and some more slowly; the sound made by the slower bodies in their movement is lower in pitch, and that of the faster is higher; hence these separate notes, corresponding to the ratios of the distances, make the resultant sound concordant. Now number, they said, is the source of this harmony, and so they naturally put number as the principle on which the heaven and the whole universe depended."

We can imagine a model of the cosmos in which all the events are bound harmoniously together through rhythmicity in a vast temporal network and in which the entire universe participates in the occurrence of a local event. In this model the whole cosmos pushes the minutest event to happen and the law of causality is replaced by a law of cosmic co-dependence.

For Plato “time was the image of inifinity”; it was cyclical and it did not evolve. Recently, Garret Lisi built-up an ingenious model of TOE useing the exceptional simple Lie group E8. As Plutarch mentioned, harmonia also meant "octave", the scale of eight and, maybe, E8 is indeed a graphical representation of the structure of the universe.

E8 pattern

II. Second dream: the idea of metamorphosis and evolution of time itself.

In biology we have the Haeckel law, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” and I think we can also add “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny recapitulates cosmogony”. There is a striking similarity between the genesis of the universe and the development of the living beings and we can imagine that time itself has a fractal nature and contains self-similar structures on different time-scales.

Biological time flows with different rates at different stages of development The human development starts with an embryonic stage in which a single cell clones itself rapidly into billions of non-identical copies followed by a progressive deceleration of this fast growth through the end of the childhood until and a plateau is reached and the rate between growth and programmed death is maintained constant in the adult.

Similarly in the Weinberg Big Bang model we find also that the cosmic time has different rates at different times of development of the universe with an initial period of extremely fast growing followed by a progressive slowing down. Initially, at the beginning as Weinberg wrote “it was light that then formed the dominant constituent of the universe, and ordinary matter played only the role of a negligible contaminant” then, subsequently, the elementary particles were created from light, and finally only when the universe cooled enough for them to exist, atoms and molecules appeared on the world stage.

Also, when the universe cooled sufficiently to permit the collapse of energy into matter, that collapse included a change from temporal symmetry into temporal asymmetry, and, thus, the nature of time itself changed from, borrowing J.T.Fraser terminology, atemporality to prototemporality and then progressed to eotemporality.

I called this evolution of the nature of time itself hypertime. The structure of time itself mutates, evolves, changes gradually moment after moment in hypertime. Time moves in a non-random way on a hyper-timeline. Hypertime is the continuous metamorphosis of time.

Due to hypertime, every single moment in time is unique and has a different duration then the preceding and the following moments. Because of these continous changes, clocks can never be 100% accurate and they are unable to indicate even their own time with absolute precision. These differences are, of course, extremely subtle in the macroscopic world and do not preclude us from using clocks in our day to day life but they become extremely important at the Planck level.

On the other hand there are also abrupt time-structure shifts, sudden temporal singularities in which the nature of time changes abruptly at all the levels of reality, like, for example, the apparition of gravity 380,000 years after the Big Bang

What are the consequences of this perpetual metamorphosis for us? An interesting possibility is that as we approach what several philosophers called the post-humans our constructs of time may change and time for the post-human beings may be something very different then it is for us now. Maybe even the notions of now, passage du temps, duration, past, present and future will change in the future and new neurological subroutines dealing with different time aspects will emerge. Maybe in the future, the sphinx that we call now time will spread its wings and start to fly!

Far from being a science-fiction speculation this shift in the human experience of time may be already present in certain special states. Ten years ago, Metod Saniga from the Slovak Academy of Science studied several patients with a distortion of the sense of time and discovered that their brains seemed to be hard-wired to perceive space and time as interconnected. "Pathology in time is always accompanied with a pathology of space, in a sense that space either loses dimensions or acquires other dimensions," Saniga said. "When time seems to stop, people often feel as if space becomes two-dimensional. On the other hand, when the subject feels they perceive the past, present and future (all at once), they simultaneously have the impression that space has infinite dimensions." In 1999 Saniga described these states as two forms of what he calls a "pure present" experience. In one case the present is indefinitely frozen, while in the other the present seems to encompass both past and future events as well. Interestingly, he gathered similar reports from people that have near-death experiences. For that brief moment of near-death, time loses or maybe gains its meaning.

As announced by Ray Kurzweil and other singularity prophets another possibility is that due to the recent advances in the technology a new temporal level, an etemporality akin to that described in the Matrix movie series will suddenly appear with profound consequences for the human history.

Finally, is this hypertime, this process of evolution of time, is it itself evolving or not? How can we avoid an infinite regression? How many hypertimes are out there? In the Indian culture there is the notion of kalpas, “a day of Brahma”, equal to one thousand mahayugas or 4.32 billion years, so are there any mega-kalpas or terra-giga-exa-zetta-yotta-kalpas or whatever-kalpas? Where do we stop? How many levels, how many different rhythms are out there? Before Big Bang and after Big Crunch can there still be time? Can time or hypertime cross the ocean of nothingness?

We can imagine that the structure of hypertime is a closed surface with a fixed geometry that does not itself evolve in time and it resembles the same Klein bottle we mentioned before. By using this ouroboros-like geometrical shape we may avoid the logical trap of an infinite regression, but this analogy is by no means a demonstration that beyond hypertime there are no other superior temporal levels that regulate it.

In the hope that you enjoyed my dreams I invite you to have even more colorful dreams than mine, and, who knows, maybe someday one of us will wake up and remember what time really is.

Tuba Mirum - the innards of a Klein Bottle Klein bottle (interior)