I read a book a couple of years ago that told me time isn’t real.
The book opens with this: “Time moves faster in the mountains than it does at sea level.” Take that at face value and it’s a simple, slightly interesting fact – something you’ve already guessed if you’ve ever skimmed the Wikipedia page for black holes or seen a Christopher Nolan movie.
But dig deeper and things get weird.
Despite the fact that I’ve watched Interstellar four and a half times, I still have a subconscious mental model of something called “the present” that flows through the universe like a river, so that everything ticks along on the same timeline. This is why I can ask, “What time is it now in New York?” I assume that the place I am in and the place at which New York sits both exist in some shared timeline. They share a now.
Bad news: There is no now. The question, “What time is it now in New York?” is nonsense.
I’m not a scientist or particularly smart, so I can’t tell you in technical terms why this is the case. But we can both follow the logic: If time is faster in the mountains, slightly slower in the foothills, and slower still at sea level, then there’s no shared present. There’s only every single pinpoint prick of space, each spot moving at its own speed. Rather than a river which carries the universe smoothly along, picture instead billions and billions of marbles rolling at different rates.
It’s more chaotic and less comforting, right? But you might feel a little better if you know that at least the marbles always move in the same direction: forward. For some reason that I didn’t quite pick up while reading the book, you can never go back.
I used to think you could. I had an idea when I was a kid that the key to going backward in time was pure speed. Imagine you’re in the batter’s box on a baseball field, and you sprint from home plate to first base. If you’re really fast, maybe you can travel that distance in four seconds. Now imagine that you’re even faster, and you can get there in two seconds. Maybe even half a second.
So if you were fast enough, wouldn’t you be able to get to first base immediately?
And if you were even faster than that, wouldn’t you arrive at first base before you left?
The answer to both of those questions is no, unfortunately, so you can stop training for it.
It’s like that old mind trick where a runner is catching up to another runner, but they can only ever make up half of the distance. No matter how many times the trailing runner cuts the lead in half, they’ll never pass the runner ahead of them, because you can press down into the margins forever.
What’s the point of all this, you ask?
Well, there is no point. But don’t worry. If time isn’t real, then you haven’t wasted these past three minutes of your life thinking about it.
