What Kind of Time “Flies”

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLV, Issue 21156, 1 October 1938, Page 12

What Kind of Time “Flies”

INTERESTING LITERARY OBSERVATIONS

There's a cliche to the effect that “time flies.” But what kind of time —daytime, night-time, past, present, or future? How fast does it fly, how far, when did it start and when will it finish? And if one gets right down to brass clocks, what in cosmos is “time”? Four Seasons Questions These questions men have asked ever since early thinkers discovered that daylight follows darkness, four seasons make a year, and a fistful of sand takes so much of the day to flow through an hour glass. Professor Albert Einstein’s addition of a fourth dimension to space introduced time to the physicists as material, but something having entity in a universe only partly perceptible to the senses. Philosophy and psychology alike bandied time around until J. W. Dunne clipped its wings and pigeonholed it in “The Serial Universe,” recently published in New York. What is Time? Time, Mr Dunne say’s, is an infinite regress, a series extending backward infinitely, which means that reality (the world as it seems) must be serial. In this universe the past and the future are both wiped out and there is only an “eternal now,” in which events are expressed as occurring in an infinite mathematical series, each term of definite relationship to every previous term. Multidimensional worlds do not appeal to Dunne. But the usual philosophic method of dealing with any regress is to dismiss it promptly—as promptly as one would dismiss consideration of the serial question, “which came first, the hen or the egg,” or the terms of a series in which there is a child of a parent who was a child of' a parent who was a child of a parent—etc., ad infinitum. How to Measure Time Time can be considered in two ways, according to Mr Dunne. Just as onethird can be expressed also as ,3333333p1u5, so time might be expressed in terms of an infinite series receding back from the present, or as arbitrary but useful divisions in terms of events taking place in a “moving now.” Then “now” itself must be definitely tied down to this era, this century, decade, hour, or fraction of a fraction of a second. For time (the eternal now), he says, can travel slowly or as fast as light, but no faster. The Place of Dreams What place have dreams, so-called mental telepathy, clairvoyance and related phenomena, in the universe of serial time? One often dreams of a fture event, only to have it occur with many physical details exactly as dreamed. Disregarding cases where false memory causes one to believe one has dreamed of an event after an experience has taken place, the author points out that the human mind is capable of far greater power for perceiving' distant horizons than human stubbornness, a quality of the human mind, will permit it to achieve. Furthermore, he presents research evidence showing that its capacity for gaining knowledge is not limited by time, space, or connections to the past mechanical world through the senses. The ability to perceive coming events and conditions is but one such capacity of the human mind which can be cultivated, he asserts, concluding that dreamed future events are realities perceived by the human mind as displayed in time and that there really need be no barrier to mental gain of knowledge concerning past and future events.

Fascinating Reading One of the interesting by-products

of this consideration of time is proof, acceptable to natural scientists, of personal immortality. Mr Dunne makes the point that in this system “we individuals have curious—very curious beginnings—beginnings, but no ends.” So-called death, he says, appears only in the lop-sided first term of the eternal now series, and applies to a firstterm world, whereas “our immortality is in multi-dimensional time, and is of a very different character” from any lugubrious picture of bored individuals dragging memory’s ever-lengthening chains, craving extinction they cannot find.

“The Serial Universe,” unlike tire author’s preceding book, “An Experiment with Time,” contains no introductory section of easy, fascinating reading. The reader must dive headlong into deep epistemological considerations of the theory and tabular analysis of a “regress." Despite frequent footnotes “for the lay reader” the work of digging out the fundamental grounds of knowledge is of primary interest and value to specialists in cosmology and subordinate branches of natural science. For such, this is w’ithout doubt one of the sensational books of the decade.