Becoming True Voyagers through the "Fourth Dimension"
In 1915, Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity, arguing that the universe consists of a fundamental fabric: spacetime.
Moreover, he said, this fabric is warped by massive objects.
The resulting bending and curving explains what we perceive as gravity.
More than one hundred years later, general relativity has proven to be the most successful framework for understanding the universe, guiding scientists to black holes, time dilation, and gravitational waves, as well as countless other discoveries.
But lot has to still be discovered about gravity and its impact of human success .
Wherever reality leads, science follows. The two are inseparably linked, as they must be when science is our way of knowing reality. Reality shifts in ways that are unpredictable and strange. Time and space took very strange turns a century ago, for example, while cause and effect turned into a game of probabilities, and the solid physical universe dissolved into invisible energy clouds. Quantum theory had arrived, keeping pace with where reality led it. What Einstein called the “spookiness” of activity at the quantum level has only become spookier since.
Now it appears that reality is about to lead us into new, unexpected paths once more. A hint of the future was provided decades ago by one of the most brilliant quantum pioneers, Wolfgang Pauli, when he said,
“It is my personal opinion that in the science of the future reality will neither be ‘psychic’ nor ‘physical’ but somehow both and somehow neither.” By using a word that science shuns, “psychic,” Pauli was pointing to a kind of ultimate mystery. The vast physical mechanism we call the universe behaves more like a mind than like a machine.
To thousands of working physicists, the riddle of mind and matter doesn’t apply to their research. But the founder of quantum physics, Max Planck, had no doubt that mind would eventually become the elephant in the room, an issue too massive and obvious to ignore. Planck is worth quoting in full:
“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
So how does this consciousness relate to human mind .
Is it got something to do with gravity ?
Is it got something to do with time ?
Is gravity the link between slow time and fast time ?
Is space a spatial extension of our material bodies or rather matter is the material expression of the space we carry within ?
Is this space we carry within a measure of our worldly success and depending upon it , we experience fast and slow times ?
Speeding up of time is linked to how our metabolism gradually slows down as we grow older.
Because children's hearts beat faster than ours, because they breathe more quickly and their blood flows more quickly etc., their body clocks ‘cover' more time within the space of 24 hours than ours do as adults. Children live through more time simply because they're moving through time faster. Think of a clock which is set to run 25% faster than normal time - after 12 hours of normal time it has covered 15 hours, after 24 hours of normal time it has covered 30, which means that, from that clock's point of view, a day has contained more time than usual. On the other hand old people are like clocks which run slower than normal, so that they lag behind, and cover less than 24 hours' time against a normal clock.
Also from a biological perspective, there is the ‘body temperature' theory. In the 1930s the psychologist Hudson Hoagland conducted a series of experiments which showed that body temperature causes different perceptions of time. Once, when his wife was ill with the flu and he was looking after her, he noticed that she complained that he'd been away for a long time even if he was only away for a few moments. With admirable scientific detachment, Hoagland tested her perception of time at different temperatures, and found that the higher her temperature, the more time seemed to slow down for her, and the longer she experienced each time period. Hoagland followed this up with several semi-sadistic experiments with students, which involved them enduring temperatures of up to 65C, and wearing heated helmets. These showed that raising a person's body temperature can slow down their sense of time passing by up to 20%. And the important point here may be that children have a higher body temperature than adults, which may mean that time is ‘expanded' to them. And in a similar way, our body temperature becomes gradually lower.
The speed of time seems to be largely determined by how much information our minds absorb and process - the more information there is, the slower time goes. This connection was verified by the psychologist Robert Ornstein in the 1960s. In a series of experiments, Ornstein played tapes to volunteers with various kinds of sound information on them, such as simple clicking sounds and household noises. At the end he asked them to estimate how long they had listened to the tape for, and found that when there was more information on the tape (e.g. when there were double the number of clicking noises), the volunteers estimated the time period to be longer. He found that this applied to the complexity of the information too. When they were asked to examine different drawings and paintings, the participants with the most complex images estimated the time period to be longest.
And if more information slows down time, perhaps part of the reason why time goes so slowly for children is because of the massive amount of ‘perceptual information' that they take in from the world around them. Young children appear to live in a completely different world to adults - a much more intense, more real and more fascinating and beautiful one. This is one of the reasons why we often recall childhood as a time of bliss - because the world was a much more exciting and beautiful place to us then, and all our experiences were so intense. Children's heightened perception means that they're constantly taking in all kinds of details which pass us adults by - tiny cracks in windows, tiny insects crawling across the floor, patterns of sunlight on the carpet etc. And even the larger scale things which we can see as well seem to be more real to them, to be brighter, with more presence and is-ness. All of this information stretches out time for children.
However, as we get older, we lose this intensity of perception, and the world becomes a dreary and familiar place - so dreary and familiar that we stop paying attention to it. After all, why should you pay attention to the buildings or streets you pass on the way to work? You've seen these things thousands of times before, and they're not beautiful or fascinating, they're just... ordinary. As Wordsworth puts it in his famous poem ‘Intimations of Immortality', the childhood vision which enabled to all things "apparelled in celestial light," begins to "fade into the light of common day." And this is why time speeds up for us. As we become adults, we begin to ‘switch off' to the wonder and is-ness of the world, gradually stop paying conscious attention to our surroundings and experience. As a result we take in less information, which means that time passes more quickly. Time is less ‘stretched' with information.
And once we become adults, there is a process of progressive ‘familiarisation' which continues throughout our lives. The longer we're alive, the more familiar the world becomes, so that the amount of perceptual information we absorb decreases with every year, and time seems to pass faster every year.
There are two basic reasons why this happens. On the one hand, as we grow older there is progressively less newness in our lives. From one year to the next, we gradually use up the store of potential new experiences available to us. And secondly, as we get older all the experiences we've already had become more familiar to us. Not only do we have fewer new experiences, but the experiences which are already familiar to us become progressively less real.
In William James' words, "each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine." As well as experiencing lots of new things, a woman at the age of 20 is still quite ‘fresh' to the phenomenal world around her - but over the next 20 years, she'll look at the same street scenes and the same sky and the same trees thousands of times, so that more and more of their realness will fade away.
Incidentally, this link between time and information can explain other aspects of time too. One of the ‘laws' of psychological time which I set out in my book Making Time is that "time seems to slow down when we're exposed to new environments and experiences." This is because the unfamiliarity of new experiences allows us to take in much more information. Another of the laws is that "time goes quickly in states of absorption." This is because in states of absorption our attention narrows to one small focus and we block out information from our surroundings. At the same time there is very little ‘cognitiveinformation' in our minds, since the concentration has quietened the normal ‘thought chatter' of the mind. On the other hand, time goes slowly in states of boredom and discomfort because in these situations our attention isn't occupied and a massive amount of thought-chatter flows through our minds, bringing a massive amount of cognitive information.
Time doesn't necessarily have to speed up as we get older though. To a certain extent, it depends on how we live our lives, and how we relate to our experience.
So if time speed is the real measure of our space - matter bodies success , then rejection is just a measure of knowing that the space in us desires to express itself in ways that may stun humanity .
The rejections in the lifes of people like Jack Ma only test this hypothesis .
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