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Time for Your Brain to Hurt

Posted by Bryan

Discover Magazine reports that time may break down when it is reduced to its most fundamental elements.

The problematic finding has implications on the physics of past, present, and future.

When time gets very brief, the problems start (no pun intended):

Planck time-the smallest unit of time that has any physical meaning-is 10-43 second, less than a trillionth of a trillionth of an attosecond. Beyond that? Tempus incognito. At least for now.

Efforts to understand time below the Planck scale have led to an exceedingly strange juncture in physics. The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality. If so, then what is time? And why is it so obviously and tyrannically omnipresent in our own experience?

Okay, so this is how my non-scientific mind breaks it down:

Time is a physical dimension that can be measured.

Yet, it is relative.

This report speaks to a reality that is independent of time.

Our understanding of it is that it is reeeeelly small.

But as the report confesses, it is so abstract, we don't even have a theory to explain it.

The Bible speaks to God living outside of time, and to have already ordained every detail of every detail of human history (a word to describe the experience of time) even though history continues with no sign of a terminus. Jesus also said that those who belong to him where go to where he is (where there is no time).

Could it be that the abode of eternity is found in the physics outside our comprehension?

By the by, chapter one of my book is called "Let's Begin," and talks (in very non-scientific verbiage) about why God created time.

And it wasn't just to give the world really fancy watches.

July 30, 2007 3:48 PM | TrackBack