After reading Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams, I think that time is my new religion. I didn’t really have a religion to begin with, so it’s comforting to have that void in my life finally filled after twenty years absent of god, ritual, and mysticism. Time can provide all of those things, and more, thanks to the theory of relativity.
The Dreams are thirty very short stories telling tales of alternate worlds in which time operates differently from ours, most of which are compelling enough to be considered possible consequences of relativistic thought. Consider one such world in which time loops over and over infinitely. All of the events of human history, of each of our lives, and even this paper, have all been done before and will be done again in the exact same fashion once time reaches its end and restarts. Despite not having believed in the Christian conception of afterlife since my youth, I still strangely feel comforted to consider the idea that after my death, it won’t be the end of me – I’ll simply redo this life, with no memory of the previous one. It’s quite a bit closer to reincarnation (even if without the ideas of reward and punishment determining how I come back), so my new religion is already adopting some of the better ideas of the belief systems from the East.
Taking another token from Eastern thought, thanks to relativity, equilibrium always exists. Consider the world in which time flows more slowly as one gets further from the center of the earth. Soon, entire populations will live in mountains, in houses on stilts on the tops of the mountains, to gain a few precious seconds each day. But once everyone lives at such heights, they all live longer lives relative to nothing, and within a generation nobody even remembers why they live so high above the earth. Perhaps this is scientifically called symmetry, but in my new timely religion, this maintenance of constants is best called balance.
All modern religion can do is encourage people not to live in excess and hope for the best. But when following the guidelines of time, a life of excess is much more dangerous. Consider the world where in a very specific place, time slows down to a complete standstill, and in the area surrounding it, time moves, but much more slowly. It’s a tourist trap for lovers who want an eternal embrace and parents who want their children to stay young forever. But those foolish lovers and jealous parents forget that the local slowing down of time will not be apparent to them. They’ll return from their tourist trap only to find their friends and family dead for decades, all in the name of a kiss or embrace that to them only lasted a few seconds.
Perhaps best of all is the connection between quantum physics and the necessity of not worshipping time. Consider the world in which all people make one pilgrimage in their life to the Great Clock, the one true timekeeper for the whole world. The Great Clock cancels out the possibilities of time flowing differently in different places, whether in the tops of mountains, or in tourist traps far from home, or just erroneously in random places. Much like quantum physics, making an absolute measurement (in this case, by building the Great Clock) makes the result unusable and defeats the spirit of the entire system. Many people have faith in an invisible God in part due to an inherent mysticism; they know that through their natural lives, they will never see God himself. While I’ve never been attracted to believe in something I can’t see, I’d be more inclined to believe in Time if I was given a logical reason why I would never fully understand it.
Yet still, I would have to believe in Time, because without Time, causation could not exist. Consider the world in which time flows so erroneously that effects happen before causes. Guns are banned days before a wave of terrorist strikes occurs. Here, scientists are baffled as to why things happen and cannot begin to figure out how to begin proving things. No one longer attends university in the hopes of landing a high-paying job. Causation is broken, and it renders the population useless, clinging to the present like a shipwrecked man floating on a wooden plank in the middle of the ocean. Without time, there is no causation and no society. Time is necessary to existence, much like most religious people today believe God is.
Time is, quite obviously, something to be appreciated and awed, but not understood. It can be taken by faith alone, but skeptics will find that they too must accept its reign over the universe. By causation and consequence, it forces people to take a path through life. And when that life is over, we will never know what happens. Time may start over, speed up, reverse itself, slow down, or any number of possible actions. It may even take all of those actions at once. But thanks to Albert Einstein, I might have to start numbering my years beginning with 1905, because without him I would never have come to accept Time as my lord and ruler.
