Einstein’s attention cascades into a vast stillness … He is everywhere and nowhere.
Knowing, without thought or feeling, comes as a lover’s embrace, tempered by the black night of sky. His presence has no beginning nor ending. He is — all that is. He is love.
The essence of his soul… stirs… and there he is, standing on the edge of nowhere, next to what he knows to be… the Old One. She is more ancient and primal than he could have before known … He knows that her love… can not be possessed… only received… He opens…
In the next moment, Einstein is back with his companions. Godel has returned and is sitting in a chair next to him, with Schrodinger nearby. Langevin and Curie are talking together in tender of tone. They have no awareness that he has been elsewhere. They were not in his moment. It appears to him, though, that he may have continued to be in theirs.
Godel turns to Einstein:
May I join your conversation?
Einstein:
I missed you when you disappeared.
Godel:
I needed to be alone for a while. I could not talk. You said nothing wrong.
Godel’s words melt with Einstein into a sea of vulnerability, rippling in all directions at once.
Schrodinger senses the hush, but pushes through with curiosity:
Kurt, I am fascinated with your idea of reality having no real time. In 270 AD, in his sixth Ennead, Plotinus asked, “And we, who are we anyhow? <…> Perhaps we were there already before this creation came into existence… at one with the whole.”
Einstein:
I am also wondering about time, Kurt. It does seem to me that time, in the physical, is an illusion. I know that here, there is no ‘time’. Yet we can connect with the present, past, and future – in the physical realm, through our dreams… even as we are also in this afterlife. Are we here on this edge, for a reason? Maybe we are not finished with what we want to give and receive from life as it is expressing on earth?
Godel:
I agree, we do not intuit or create ‘time’… as we did in our lives.
Yes, Albert, I also have a clearer sense of how our physical realities were actually, in themselves, an illusion. We were continually creating them with our thoughts and feelings … choices and attitudes. We responded as though everything that happened, was real. I think ‘realness’ exists behind, within, and even between- what we tended to focus on. We hid it from ourselves… in our thoughts and feelings… in our choices. We can use our intuition and imagination to more easily connect with something more real. I can’t believe I am saying this.
Schrodinger:
We are creating through our intuition now, aren’t we? And what is intuition. Is it not intention? We are living our imagination… It is appearing here and there… as if out of nowhere. We actually lived in our past, present, or future, during our lifetimes… And we would experience our intention through our intuition and imagination – the resulting pasts, presents and futures were all happening… everywhere around us. So time was an illusion, we would line things up or put them in a circle… or play in other ways with our moments. [pause]
There is something more – that I can not yet know… I have a sense that some of my reoccurring dreams that I am having now, are picking up experiences from the current world of physics. Protons and electrons appear, and then disappear. They slip into a dark energy and then can not be detected. Out of the blue, they show themselves again. Maybe they are disappearing to gather information to bring back, and give, to the ‘light’ of ‘mattering’…
Einstein:
Erwin, I wonder if it is possible for you to find out who is currently studying this kind of phenomenon, on earth. I find your understanding of the physical realm refreshing.
Kurt, back to you… a metamorphosis occurred before my very eyes, during my later years, when you exposed time, as perceived and experienced by humans – to be an illusion. I was in shock from the dead silence of our colleagues, even though you had presented mathematical proof, using relativity theory, that time is not the objective linear progression, they had assumed.
Godel:
Our time on earth seemed to be dominated and almost ruled by the positivists. They confined their epistemology to direct sensory experience, rejecting any claims for ‘insight’. They diminished intuition… and conceptual thinking. They even rejected the abstract objects of the mathematician. They forced their axioms on us… as being absolutely true. I don’t see any reason why we should have had more confidence in this kind of sense perception than that of intuition… or imagination.
I do remember how much I loved my Disney movies. I think I preferred to use some of my imagination to escape uncomfortable feelings, including the humiliation I experienced from their dismissals. According to Wittgenstein, mathematics was something to be manipulated by his system of techniques. It had no value of its own. Even worse, I still have nightmares about the Vienna Circle, with the whole group continually idolizing Wittgenstein. They were condescending to anyone who believed anything that they could not prove in the linear progression of visionless solutions.
Einstein:
Oh how I detested when Wittgenstein would come to Princeton! He was my nemesis and reminded me of those places in myself, where I would resist opening to ideas that threatened my sense of self and life, as I was currently defining it all.
Remember when Karl Schwarzschild discovered, in 1916, that if a star began an extreme gravitational collapse into itself, its mass would eventually reach a critical point after which space-time would be so severely curved that nothing inside the ‘event horizon’, including light, would be able to escape. I dismissed the Schwarzschild singularity as a mathematical anomaly with no physical significance, but I was wrong. I now know that those singularities are called ‘black holes’ in physical reality … and astronomers have found them at the center of every galaxy.
Schrodinger:
Albert, how do you know what they call that now? And how do you know that you were wrong? You have been gone from that world, a long time.
Einstein:
I met a man, who was called William Marsh in his last lifetime. He found his way to me. We had been working together several years before he died. I learned a lot about how things had evolved since my death. And together, we were working with some new ideas. He seemed to be able to open to other dimensions.
But back to you, Kurt. You made a significant discovery about the nature of time. I did not know what that discovery meant during my lifetime. But I knew you had been up to something beautiful and mysterious… as we talked about during our many walks. And from what I have gathered, physicists never did further explore your discovery – that time is an illusion. Yet, you were using my own relativity theory as the basis for your proof; and relativity theory continues to be valid. They simply tried to disprove you, and failed at their attempts. It is amazing how people, even the most intellectually advanced, in our human experience, tried to dismiss our very essence, as we would conceive ideas beyond their limited vision. Perhaps that is part of the reason we are here at this edge? They considered you to be an outsider because you did not play by their rules. You swam against the intellectual tide! And I thank you for your courage here. I’m sorry that you had to suffer that level of alienation.
There is a pause. Godel looks down and tears undulate their way down his illusory bony face.
Godel:
You told me earlier that there was nothing wrong with my innate ability or willingness to trust, and that my trust of myself and life… would return. I had been deeply wounded in my soul, and you let me know that I would find the lost parts of my soul, here… Being with you gives me hope. You give me hope that I can be more than I know myself to be. I have never known one such as you. (Pause … silent tears …) I could not put myself together in my life. I was so paranoid that someone would hurt me .. more than that – destroy or annihilate me. I think I provoked some people to dismiss me, because of this. But you would not dismiss me. You respected and honored me. I am different than I would have been, because you were there with me, in those years before you left. I was too full of emotion to express this to you, earlier.
Einstein:
I am different because you were there with me, in those last 15 years of my life. I was also changed by you.
Schrodinger:
I am more. in this moment, because the two of you are here, sharing the tender of your souls…(Schrodinger pauses and then cannot help himself from continuing.)
Is it OK, if we continue talking about time and mattering ?
Einstein:
So, the question is – how closely does this concept of relative time, fit with how time was thought to be? This issue is the leitmotif of your work, Kurt – formal versus intuitive time – the time of everyday life that is sensed by our familiar senses… or something that is intuited in an illusion that we actually create moment by moment.In my relativistic space-time, space and time are no longer to be considered independent beings, but rather two inextricably intertwined components of a single new kind of being.
I re-created special relativity in a four-dimensional geometric framework, thanks to Minkowski, my math teacher. So, I then could produce a new geometry for the laws of gravity – as a space-time curvature… Special relativity introduced the discovery that matter is equivalent to energy. And then my general theory of relativity, announced the identity of gravity with space-time curvature. Matter-in-motion determined the shape of space-time. This made time ripe for your beautiful birthday gift to me… “A remark About the Relationship Between Relativity Theory and Idealistic Philosophy”. You must have re-awakened all those great thinkers like Parmenides, Plato, and Kant, who questioned whether our subjective experience of the flow of time had any real objective correlation…
The consensus in our world considered time to be a one-dimensional manifold that provided a complete linear ordering of all events in nature… that could be directly experienced. But intuitive time for you, Kurt, showed that reality consists of infinity of layers of ‘now’, which come into existence, seemingly, in succession. You showed that the time of space-time, can not be identified with time as it is now perceived in everyday experience by most humans.
Godel:
In one of my Godel universes, I showed how… ‘closed time-like curves’- exist, such that if you travel fast enough, you can (as you are heading toward your local future) actually arrive in your past. Because of these closed loops in which the geometry of this world is so extreme, there are space-time paths unthinkable in more familiar universes like the one in which we existed as humans. My point was – that if it is possible to return to your past, then what was considered a past – never really ‘passed’ at all. A time that never truly passes, cannot be an objective time. And time, as an entity in itself, as we knew it to be … disappeared. In my theory, our existence was relativized. In other words, in general relativity theory… if we existed, then time could not exist as a separate entity… So, we could have a world in which there was only time or a world in which there was existence, but not both. And the only rational choice: a world without time.
Einstein:
Relativity theory contained a universal theory of motion, including acceleration due to gravity. But this hope you also quash, don’t you?
Godel:
There are solutions to the equations of general relativity that provide world models in which all matter is rotating … and there is a certain inertial field that determines the motions of bodies upon which no forces act. This universal rotation is determined by the behavior of the axis of a completely free gyroscope. Albert, you helped improve the design for U-boats during WWI by improving the design of gyroscopes. I proved that in these rotating universes – no single objective cosmic time can be defined.
Einstein turns to Schrodinger:
And if this gets to you, just wait to hear his next discovery. Kurt showed that in a subclass of the rotating universes, those that are not expanding, the large-scale geometry of the world is so warped that there exist space-time curves that bend back on themselves so far that they close, and return to their starting point. So a highly accelerated spaceship journey along a closed path or world line where you are travelling into your future, actually takes you to your current past. For Kurt, time travel does not mean that there is ‘time’. If one followed the logic of relativity further than I was willing to venture in my lifetime, the results did not just illuminate, but they eliminated the reality of time existing on its own! What once was hidden … was revealed.
Einstein continues, as the three of them appear to be entranced:
In one of my recent dreams, I read in a book, that there are physicists and mathematicians alive in the current world, who have tried to introduce a modification of general relativity so that they could rule out the possibility of world models like yours, Kurt. Someone called Bertrand Russell described the actions of one physicist, who was still alive in 2013, who attempted to do this and failed. Russell defined his attempt as – “having all the advantages of theft over honest toil… but still its own ad hoc character betrayed itself… and no one bit.” I found this in a book that is in the current world, called A World Without Time by Palle Yourgrau. It is shocking that such a profound insight into the philosophical implications of the theory of relativity… has had so little impact on physicists of all times… our own and all times following!
Why do modern day physicists run from what you discovered, Kurt, that time, as experienced by people in reality — is an illusion. They may be so terrified of that level of discovery because they would have to redefine the very nature of how they envision and perceive – life. Only a rare few are courageous enough to rebel against the consensus. And yet this is the very action that has guided the evolution of the human animals to become human beings … and beyond …
Schrodinger:
Yes, this kind of daring can guide the evolution of humans… to become daring enough to reach beyond what they know… to sit at the boundary… to leap into the unknown, into the mysteries of life… to become spiritual beings who can sense the eternity of whom they Are. Can you imagine such a world ?
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Copyright © 2013-2021, Lyn Marsh,PhD, all rights reserved. You may not reproduce materials without permission from Lyn Marsh,PhD. References: A World Without Time by Palle Yourgrau