Being and time

Being and Time

 

1 / Begin with the idea that the proper ‘speed’ of time equals zero.  For a photon, time does not pass.  If a photon were "aware," its birth at a distant star and its arrival at your eye would happen at the same exact instant.  Relativity predicts that time dilation and length contraction run parallel.  That is: the speed of time is zero, and so is its distance.  The distance the light travels at its own speed is zero.

So, from the “perspective" of light (if such a thing could exist), this perspective does not move, because there is no time for it to move in, and no distance for it to cover. It simply exists at every point along its path simultaneously. We (humans  ) see it "moving" at speed c because we are stuck observing it from within spacetime.

Our result is: time does not flow.  Then what we call "the past" isn't a place we could in principle revisit, but rather a set of invariants that constrain the configuration of the present. The information isn't back there, it's encoded here, in the current state of the universe — in photons, in neural patterns, in physical traces – just as the present is vanishing.  Time (as it were) isn’t going anywhere. 

Let us rethink being and time in the light of these new results – new, i.e., since 1905 –with c set as a constant.  Einstein gives us being and time – one tensor equal to another – not broken up into spatial vs. temporal dimensions, but as a four-dimensional state – quasi-steady, actually, since it is expanding, roughly doubling in size every ten billion years. One tensor describes the geometry of spacetime – now merged together – a second tensor expresses universal stresses and energies – these equalize, with Lambda, expansion, added to geometry. 

The Jacobian of a transformation encodes how one set of variables maps to another. The inverse (or backward) Jacobian tells you what the original configuration must have been, given the current one. Memory, physical records, traveling photons — these are all partial backward Jacobians. They constrain what transformations could have produced the present state.

This remakes our ontology.  Instead of "time flows from A to B," you have "a universe is characterized by a succession of invariant sets," and what we call temporal experience is the relationship between them.

This invites the odd reflection that our loved ones are not really gone.  They exist just as we do.  Not in some weird fourth dimension – which after Einstein must be discarded.  Our loved ones still exist even after they have passed away, because their invariant traces are genuinely, physically encoded in the present structure of everything they touched. This is perhaps a more austere comfort than usual, but it is a real one.

One way of investigating this problem is to study the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, which is a world-equation, and which notably has no time parameter. 

The story behind this equation is that Bryce DeWitt first published the equation in 1967 under the name "the Einstein-Schrödinger equation"; it was later renamed the "Wheeler-DeWitt equation." This came about because one day in 1965, John Wheeler had a two-hour stopover between flights at the Raleigh-Durham airport in North Carolina and called Bryce DeWitt, proposing to meet during the wait. DeWitt arrived with the Hamilton-Jacobi equation of general relativity, and sketched the idea of obtaining a wave equation by replacing squared derivatives with a second derivative — a way of undoing the optical approximation.

Wheeler was tremendously excited and declared on the spot that the equation for quantum gravity had been found.

The equation attempts to mathematically combine quantum mechanics and general relativity. In this approach, time plays a role fundamentally different from its role in ordinary physical reality — leading to the so-called "problem of time." The Hamiltonian expresses the total energy of a system – kinetic and potential combined.  This is an invariant constraint on physical states.  The ‘backward’ Hamiltonian reduces to the invariant constraints ‘before’ the system evolves.  This property is known as “timelessness.” In other words, the universe's wave function does not evolve — time drops out entirely.

The WDW equation was neglected for several decades due to the success of string theory, but more recently has become the subject of renewed interest in connection with holographic correspondence, the gravitational information problem, and quantum cosmology … a connecting link to new thinking trying to unmask the intriguing idea of time. 

Bernard D’Espagnat (1921-2015) in his Conceptions of Contemporary Physics, 1965, laid out the big questions.  D'Espagnat received his doctorate under Louis de Broglie, and after a stint as research assistant to Enrico Fermi at Chicago, he worked at CERN — where in 1964 John Bell was developing his famous inequalities. D’Espagnat’s central contribution was the concept of "veiled reality" — the hypothesis that significant experiments had not restored conventional realism, and that an underlying reality exists but remains inaccessible to direct knowledge. We must be agnostic about whatever lies behind the quantum veil – until there is evidence.

D’Espagnat’s work connects with Wheeler-DeWitt in circling the same deep question — what is the relationship between the mathematical structure of physics and reality itself? D'Espagnat's answer was essentially: the structure is real, but the reality it points to remains veiled.  This resonates with Heisenberg’s speculations in Physik und Philosophie (1958).  The uncertainty principle can be read as a formal statement that certain aspects of reality are structurally inaccessible.

Somehow we have to cope with the idea that there is no fixed spacetime stage behind interactions. Spacetime geometry itself is what the events are, not where they are happening.  This begs for some way of envisioning what is contemplated.  Perhaps what we are looking at is a hologram.  The holographic principle suggests that the description of a volume of space can be encoded on a lower-dimensional boundary region, like a hologram on a 2D surface encoding 3D information. So the question of "how many dimensions does reality have" – and which ones it has -- becomes genuinely ambiguous — since the same physics can be described in different dimensionalities. This principle makes dimension a redundancy. 

Penrose imagined a twistor space as a 4-dimensional complex space (8 real dimensions), from which our familiar 4D spacetime emerges as a derived structure. The Kaluza-Klein hypothesis imagines five dimensions “compacted” into four.  These ideas raise new questions …

We think in representations, but every representation involves a dimensional reduction of some kind. The sphere-circle analogy captures this beautifully — the only object whose 3D projection into 2D is a circle is a sphere.  But you can't reconstruct a sphere from a given circle — you need the full family of spheres, their relationships, their invariants across projections. This circles back to the idea about invariants and the backward Jacobian — i.e., knowledge isn't located in any single projection but in the constraints across all of them. 

Spinoza comes to mind because Spinoza says explicitly that “substance” has infinitely many attributes, of which human minds access only two: thought and extension. He isn't saying that reality is mental or physical — he's saying both ‘mentality’’ and ‘physicality’ are modes of something whose full dimensionality is inaccessible to us. This is almost verbatim d'Espagnat's veiled reality. 

For Spinoza, time (duratio, duration) is not a feature of substance itself but of how finite modes experience substance. Sub specie aeternitatis — under the aspect of eternity — there is no time. Reality seen fully and completely simply is, without any before or after. This is what people call the “block universe” today – stated as metaphysics rather than physics.

The Wheeler-DeWitt equation has no time parameter because it describes the universe as a whole — there is no external clock relative to which the universal wavefunction evolves. Spinoza would recognize this at once: time is a feature of finite perspective, not of substance. An equation containing everything cannot contain time.

If memory is a backward Jacobian - a constraint on transformations rather than a place in time — then Spinoza's framework fits the model. What we call experience, the passage between modes, and what we call memory, is the same encoding of modal configurations.

The thread from Spinoza through Kant's thing in itself, through Schopenhauer's Will as the hidden noumenal ground, through Einstein's block universe, through d'Espagnat's veiled reality, through Wheeler-DeWitt's timeless equation — is continuous. Each step turns toward the same structure from a different direction: that what we experience as time, space, and causation are modes or projections of something whose complete nature exceeds any single representation.

A time parameter implies an external "clock" outside the system measuring the flow of events where energy and states evolve as time passes. The WDW equation states that the Hamiltonian of the universal wave functional is equal to zero.  Because time is internal to the universe's geometry, the right side of the equation becomes zero. There is no external t to differentiate against.

This pictures a universe where positive energy (matter/radiation) exactly cancels with negative energy (gravitational and potential energy).  The universe does not evolve.  It just is. 

This is a first result – the disappearance of time. 

 

2/ Time then emerges – time becomes an emergent property – internal to the system. Just as "temperature" doesn't exist for a single atom but emerges when you have billions of atoms, "time" emerges from the correlations between innumerably different parts of the universal wave functional, even if the whole system itself is technically stationary.

Roughly: the Schrödinger equation describes how things move through time; the Wheeler-DeWitt equation describes the static probability of different 3D geometries existing as part of the 4D whole.

Time – in brief – exists in the same sense as heat.  Does heat exist? This idea was accepted, from phlogiston to caloric – but then after much dispute in the history of science – building on errors – heat was understood as a form of interaction – a set of events – as for example molecular collisions tending towards a state of equilibrium. The background assumption is chaos – random appearance – then patterns that represent consequences. 

Heat then is the transfer of thermal energy from one body to another. Heat then is not a thing or a state that a body can contain in the way that it might contain internal energy. Heat is an upshot. 

I seem to be arguing in a circle – time is like heat – heat is not a thing but an event – so time is not a thing but an event …

 

3/ The Wheeler-DeWitt equation is striking precisely because it has no time derivative — the universe's wave function is static. Time seems to drop out at the most fundamental level. Similarly, GR's block universe treats time as just another coordinate, with no privileged "now" and no flow. So you get this uncomfortable conclusion: at the deepest level, there is no time. And yet you are experiencing duration right now.

The heat analogy is genuinely apt, and worth pressing harder. Heat isn't a substance — it's a statistical pattern over molecular kinetic states. No single molecule "has" heat. But the analogy has a crucial asymmetry: heat emerges from things that themselves exist in time.

Molecules move, collide, and transfer energy — and all of that is temporal. So heat is emergent within time. Whereas time itself, if emergent, would have to emerge from something that is ... atemporal (?)

Perhaps I am conflating different problems – likely this is why things look so confused.

The first idea is GR's "block universe," which dissolves coordinate time — the idea of a universal now.  Time is flexible and gravity-dependent.  Simultaneity is perspectival. 

The second problem is why we experience duration, or why entropy increases in one direction.

The WDW equation addresses a third thing — quantum-gravitational time – quantum time as the attempt to understand how time emerges from a timeless state – especially on the understanding that spacetime is quantized – i.e., time intervals emerge from the interactions of gravitons – the hypothetical force carrier particle associated with gravity waves.  Spacetime on this model is not a smooth continuum but a foam of discrete pixels or grains. 

Thus even to state the problem requires absurd complexity. On the model of heat, perhaps we can say that heat is emergent, but nevertheless real — e.g., it causes sunburn. The emergence story for time does not imply that time is a fiction. It might mean that time is real at the scale at which it applies, the way temperature is real at its level of description – so, ‘reality’ gets indexed to a situation.  Like heat, time has no fundamental ontological basis in the sense that atoms (for example) do. 

The Page-Wootters mechanism (from the 1980s) floated the proposal for how time can emerge from entanglement in a timeless quantum system. Two entangled subsystems can exhibit correlations such that one subsystem functions as a "clock" for the other, even if the global state is static. The idea was to provide a concrete picture of how internal time can appear inside a WDW timeless universe. 

The complexity of the question and the different senses in which the time parameter becomes the object of inquiry suggest that throwing way too much together here .. I am messing up the argument because implicitly I am demanding that an explanation of time give me a temporal foothold — a "before" state preceding the emergence, thus a process by which time arise

if time is actually absent, I can never meet this demand. The question is malformed. It’s like talking about what happened "before" the Big Bang — suggesting an assumption (that there is a before) that the framework somehow cannot capture. 

Asking why time feels like flow from within a block universe might be like asking why a three-dimensional object looks two-dimensional from a certain angle.

The "why" is answered by the geometry, but no amount of geometric explanation will make the 2D appearance feel 3D to an observer.

That is: the phenomenology and the ontology are at different levels.

Feeling and thought …

4 / Perhaps recognizing the conflation is genuine progress.  Each of the three problems has its own philosophical fallout.  They only partially overlap.

The block universe problem is primarily about the ontology of tense — whether "now" picks out something real in the world's structure, or whether it's perspectival, the way "here" is. Relativity's main contribution is showing that simultaneity is frame-dependent, which strongly suggests "now" is not a feature of the world but of the observer. The philosophical fallout is about whether becoming, change, and passage are real or apparent.

The low-entropy past is a separate problem — it's about the arrow of time and why, if the laws of nature are time-symmetric, we experience an asymmetric world with a remembered past and an open future. Boltzmann's H-theorem and its descendants try to address this, but they also smuggle in the low-entropy boundary condition. The real puzzle is why the boundary condition holds — why the Big Bang was so extraordinarily ordered. This is sometimes called the Past Hypothesis, and it sits somewhat awkwardly between physics and metaphysics.

Pixelated spacetime — discrete or quantized spacetime at the Planck scale — is again different. It arises from trying to reconcile GR with quantum mechanics – the problem here is to reconcile the micro- and macroscopic worlds. 

Facing this complexity we might conclude that time, time as we experience it, has no objective counterpart in reality. This slide toward idealism — roughly, that time is a feature of mind rather than world — is more of a landing spot than a satisfying explanation. It stops the regress by relocating the problem inside consciousness

Problem: consciousness is at least as mysterious as time (maybe even more so). This move in argument trades one impossible problem for another.

Feeling and thought …

 

5/ Simpler still.

In thinking through some of the implications of the WDW way of looking at the cosmos, there is another, much simpler, alternative.  Roughly: our intuitive concept of time is simply a folk concept that was never going to survive contact with deep physics intact, the same way that "solid object" does not survive contact with atomic physics. Tables aren't solid in the way naive intuition supposes, but we don't conclude that tables are mental constructs. We just revise the concept. The discomfort with time may partly be the grief of concept revision, resisting the idea that the intuitive notion is an approximation – at best.  It’s not what we thought originally. 

The residue — the thing that doesn't dissolve with concept revision — is the experience of becoming.  The weight of learning, as it were, as one goes through experience – the press of inertia against this.  Poetry rather than physics may be a bigger help to explore the why it feels like something to move through the sequence that clocks tick out, measure by measure.

 

6/ Ricoeur argues that there cannot be any grasp of time save as narrated time – telling a story.

That is strange in a way because the thing I was trying to do was not tell a story but instead face the actual reality of things. 

However, Ricoeur's argument in Time and Narrative is stronger than it first appears: the aporia of time is not a problem waiting for a technical solution.  The problem is a constitutive feature of human existence. Narrative is not a substitute for explanation but the only form in which lived time can be coherently structured at all.

This is a claim about the limits of the third-person, objective stance — that it necessarily loses something that only first-person, enacted time can recover.

Thought and feeling …

Note the difference between saying "narrative is how people make sense of time" and saying "narrative is what time is." Ricoeur sometimes slides between these two different ideas – but the slide deserves to be resisted. Realism before hermeneutics.

The stark reality (the thing I wanted to face) and the straw man (the stories people tell) are harder to separate than they seem. The block universe, the entropy gradient, the pixelated Planck scale — each of those is stark enough. But the experience of time, the thing that makes one want to understand it in the first place, stubbornly resists the third-person frame. Not because physics is wrong, but because the question has two faces that don't fully meet.

That's not nothing. That's actually a fairly precise result.  We are indeed a question for ourselves.  We live in this interzone between the physics and the meaning of time. 

We exist at a particular scale between the Planck length and the cosmic horizon.  We have just enough cognitive reach to glimpse the laws that govern us without fully escaping the conditions they impose.  Time feels like a river from inside what may actually be a big block — it’s dizzying to occupy this position – wonder might be the most intellectually honest reaction one can have – call it philosophy.