15
“Tell me what you understand about time,” he said as he soaked up the remains of his soup with his bread roll.
Brian and Helen looked at each other then back at David. “What do you mean exactly?” Brian was first to voice their jointly shared question.
“I don’t want to influence you by elaborating” said David. “Go on just tell me what you understand about time.”
“We-ell” Helen this time “We-ell, time marches on doesn’t it. It can’t be stopped, or speeded up. Sometimes it seems to drag and others it whizzes by but that’s just how it feels not what’s happening really.”
“Yes, and you can’t relive a moment at best you can only repeat a moment. You can predict an event but you can’t pre-visit it.” Brian was really getting into this. He carried on. “And if the same thing was happening in one of your parallel universes we would never know about it would we?”
“Okay,” said David, “what you have said is that time is linear and that time passes us by. It cannot be reversed, side stepped or rushed. What if I said that time isn’t passing us by? What if I said that it is us that is hurtling through time?”
“That’s a bit hair splitting David” “Not really Brian. When you describe time as passing us by you give it energy or suggest that it has a force or energy of its own a bit like the wind or tides. But if we travel though time then time becomes inert, static and it’s existence is a by product of our motion. More like a headwind when standing at the bow of a ship at sea.”
“But what difference does it make?” asked Helen. “What we said in answer to your question is accurate.”
“Only to a point” David said again. “You see I was thinking about what we said yesterday and I must admit to feeling a bit strange last night. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it but basically I thought that what we had described was a place that might be…” David paused.
“Go on.” said Helen remembering her own visit to the library.
“Well, I thought it could make room for a place like Heaven because, to be honest what with our telescopes and probes and rockets we’ve pretty well denied the churches any place for a god to exist and suddenly, now, there IS a place.”
“I know what you mean,” said Helen. And Helen told them both what she had read whilst at the library the night before.
Together they reflected on what they had discovered.
After several long moments Brian remembered that they had gotten into the subject of a heaven when David had asked about their understanding of time.
“So what was it you were asking us David, about time?”
“I was wanting to explore the idea that time is inert and static and that our experience of time is nothing more than the by-product of our universe travelling in the bigger space,” said David. “Its important, because for a being that exists outside our universe to be able to look at us in the same way as we can look at the plates of a two dimensional universe, the straw universe of one dimension or the sphere of the bubble universe it has to be possible for that being to move freely up, down, forwards, backwards or side to side in the bigger universe and for that to be true ‘time’ had to be static.
“Strangely, the solution came to me when I was unwrapping a chocolate bar last night. I decided I also wanted a drink so I re wrapped the chocolate bar which – I realised – was akin to me backtracking time. Although in our reality I continued my journey through time as always.”
They all sat silently.
“What you seem to be saying is that these bubbles move through the bigger space and that time is a by product of that movement. That time only exists because the bubble is moving.”
Brian turned towards Helen as she finished. He added, “So what happens if a universe isn’t moving through the bigger space?” “Then there IS no such thing as time in that universe,” concluded David.
David went on, “The time effect within a universe must be directly proportional to the speed of the universe within the bigger space but even that is mind blowing because speed is a product of distance and time here.
“That must mean that movement in the bigger universe is instantaneous which means that a being – there – would be, could be, every where at once.”
At which point Helen joined with, “and that would be very God like. Just as it is written in the various religious books I was reading last night.” “And,” interjected Brian, “no more mind blowing for us than the concept of three dimensions or two dimensions must surely be to a being that lives in a fibre-optic cable.”