Deep Time, No Time, Out Of Time

Any conception of deep time has to imagine time as linear. Depth as such involves a top and a bottom and a plumb line dropping between.

That’s also how we experience time in the everyday. It’s linear: it flows from past to present to future. It passes, perhaps at varying speeds, but always in the same direction. We are born, we live, we die; that’s the flight of time’s arrow.

Deep time is just a distant point on the flight path behind us. Unimaginably distant, sure; but behind us, indubitably.

Or then again…

In this short essay I’m going to suggest two things. First, that when you get down to a certain layer of reality – let’s call it a “deep” layer, just for fun, although “depth” is as elusive here as elsewhere – there is no deep time, because in fact there’s no time at all. Second, that although we humans can’t access that layer of reality through our senses, we might be able to intuit it when we enter certain states of consciousness.

1. There’s No Such Thing As Time
And it’s a clear world, windswept and full of beauty as the crests of mountains; as beautiful as the cracked lips of adolescents.

“Beautiful as…” These aren’t the words of a Surrealist poet; they are from The Order Of Time, a short book by Carlo Rovelli. The “clear world” he is describing is quantum mechanics – a world of arid beauty.

Rovelli is not just a wildly popular pop science writer, but also the director of the quantum gravity research group at Aix-Marseille University. The Order Of Time is his follow-up to Reality Is Not What It Seems, in which he explains quantum theory for a lay audience, including some general outlines of his own cutting-edge research. Both books have been international bestsellers.

Let me try to summarise his argument in these two books. Please bear in mind that this is a (grossly) simplified explanation by a non-scientist of an argument that had already been (elegantly) simplified for non-scientists. You’re peering at this picture through multiple layers of candy floss. I’ll do my best.

Panta Rhei

In Reality Is Not What It Seems, Rovelli paints a portrait of quantum reality that boils down to three essential concepts: granularity, indeterminacy and relationality. He lucidly explains the discoveries and theories behind each, but for our purposes I’ll fast-forward to the conclusions:

• Granularity: Nothing in nature is continuous. There is no infinity and no eternity. Everything is granular, and there is always a minimum “grain” size beneath which things cannot shrink. This state of affairs includes gravity, which in turn means that spacetime is not the stretchy, rubbery sheet of continuous stuff familiar from pop science imagery. Instead, spacetime is a network of grains of gravity, all looped together like a kind of mesh or chainmail.
• Indeterminacy: Everything is fluctuating. Electrons disappear, and then reappear in unpredictable places. In the periods between each appearance, they are in a kind of nowhere, dispersed across a “cloud of probabilities”. This applies not just to electrons but to all physical entities, including spacetime itself.
• Relationality: Things become concrete only when they interact with other things. Electrons materialise out of the cloud of probabilities when they come into interaction with something else. This too applies to spacetimes, which can be spoken of in the plural when they are dispersed in the cloud of probabilities.

One of the upshots of all this is that reality is a network of events. What looks to us like an object – a tarot card, a green mountain, a galaxy – is just a relatively long and monotonous event. Quantum reality is nothing but change.

Another upshot is that our everyday understanding of time goes out of the window. Spacetime is a network of grains of gravity; it’s not an arrow, but a mesh.

So why is it that we experience time as a linear “flow”, from past to present to future?

Rovelli’s answer to this question – briefly sketched in Reality Is Not What It Seems, and then elaborated at length in The Order Of Time – is that humans are rubbish at perceiving what reality is really like. Our linear experience of time is the result of our fuzzy perceptual system.

Time’s Arrow

Here’s Rovelli’s argument about time. Ordinarily we talk about the world using words, but words are too messy and imprecise for physics. Physics uses not words but mathematics to investigate and portray the universe. And despite what verbal language might say about the passage of time, in fact none of the equations in physics gives any indication that time moves forwards like an arrow.

None, that is, with one exception. There is one equation that is unidirectional – i.e. that distinguishes between past and future, and cannot be run backwards as well as forwards. It is the equation for entropy. Entropy is about heat: it is unidirectional because heat passes from a hot body to a cold one, but never vice versa.

Now, “entropy” is increasing disorder. If time’s arrow can only be found in entropy, this means that time’s arrow is a progression from less disorder (low entropy) to more disorder (high entropy). Think of the moving molecules in a cup of hot water. They become increasingly disordered as they move around, like a pack of cards being shuffled.

Time = increasing disorder. “Things fall apart,” as a famous magician once put it.

This is where the problem of human perception comes in. What counts as “more” or “less” disordered? It all depends on the order you were expecting to see in the first place.

Arrange your little stack of Major Arcana into numerical order from 0 to 21, and then shuffle them. When you’ve finished shuffling, the cards will seem disordered to you, because you’re looking at the numbers. But the process of shuffling them will have put them into another kind of order – arranged by the colours in the images, or shapes formed by your invisible thumbprints on the paper, or the DNA configurations of bacteria along the cards’ edges, or any other thing. They’re not really disordered; they’re just in a new order that you can’t see, because you don’t know what you’re looking for.

The same applies to the molecules fizzing around in that cup of hot water. We go looking for a particular or special order among the molecules, and that order seems to fall apart as the molecules cool down. But in principle, any configuration of the molecules can constitute a “particular” or “special” order. It’s just that we can’t see the details that reveal the order in the new configuration.

If we could see the details clearly, then no one configuration of the molecules would seem any more special or particular than any other, and entropy would not appear. We perceive increasing disorder – entropy – because our blurred, fuzzy perception makes us unable to distinguish between different forms of order.

So entropy is a product of humans’ blurred perception of reality. Which means that time itself is a product of our blurred perception of reality. We experience time’s arrow because we’re too short-sighted to see properly.

Interlude: You Can’t Square The Circle

I imagine you fidgeting in your seat about now, because you’ve thought of a killer objection. In fact you thought of it way back there – way down there – at my very first paragraph.

Aha! you cry. But what about all those philosophical traditions that conceive of time as cyclical, from Nietzsche’s eternal return to the Hindu yugas to the Big Bounce? Those are conceptions of deep time, all right. A single yuga, for example, is 4.32 million years, and there are four of those per cycle, and a thousand cycles per aeon.

I’ve got two replies to that.

First, cyclical time is linear time. A circle is just a curved line. Even if you think of time as a really big circle, it’s still always moving in the same direction until it gets back to the beginning. It has to complete one cycle before it starts the next. It doesn’t flip clockwise and anti-clockwise like a swingboat ride at the fairground.

Second, even if you believe in cyclical time, I’ll bet my (linear) life that you don’t actually experience everyday time that way. You might believe in reincarnation, but in the here and now you’re still hurtling towards death, and you’re going to have to experience that death before you find out whether and where you’ll be reborn. You might believe in karma, but you can’t go back and redo the bits of your life that you’ve already fluffed this time around.

No. Philosophical beliefs notwithstanding, we humans experience time as linear, because our perceptual apparatus is built that way.

That applies to Rovelli’s belief in quantum physics no less than to any other philosophical belief. His theory shatters time’s arrow, but nevertheless he is careful not to dismiss time as an illusion. The Order Of Things is rather moving on this point, as Rovelli mourns friends he has lost and considers his own mortality. He is acutely sensitive to what it means for us humans to be creatures of time.

2. Time Never Arrives

The flame burns the incense. The powder turns to smoke. The smoke rises and swirls and drifts away. The ash falls as the flame burns out. Heat turns to cold.

Entropy is a product of humans’ blurred perception. We experience time’s arrow because we’re not in full contact with reality. Or at least, not at our current level of perceptual evolution. But in certain states of consciousness, you might intuit another order.

A shaft of sunlight captures the smoke and holds it suspended. The light becomes a vivarium. The smoke trembles and shimmers there, an exhalation from another dimension that breathes right here beside you. Reality teems beyond your apprehension.

This is how the whole cosmos begins, right now: you stand beneath a fairground ride, candy floss fills your throat, the music sticks and burns against your skin.

You think you want more reality? You’ve had nothing yet, so you can’t have more. Or I mean you can’t have less. It’s very easy to have more than nothing. Well, nobody asked my opinion. But let’s have some more perspective on this.

Human beings are time beings. Human consciousness is time consciousness. This is how you create the cosmos right now: you open your eyes and the vase before you erupts red.

If you think your reality is just one reality among others, you’ve missed the mark. If you think your consciousness is just one consciousness among others, you’ve missed the boat. It’s sailed without you, but it’s going nowhere.

You feel time’s passing as a speck of life in a limitless ocean. The ocean does not exist in time; the ocean itself is not time. The ocean contains a million billion times, a million billion specks. They appear and disappear, just as time appears and disappears.

Reality has neither time nor timelessness. You walk in the forest and you’re stumbling around on the wrinkled palm of a golden giant. Time rises and passes like smoke in a shaft of sunlight, but the sky remains when even the sun has fallen into entropy.

Each one of us humans is time, and all of us times are connected to one another’s time, but the connection is not a line that runs backwards or forwards, up or down, deep or shallow. It’s the connection of smoke to itself as it rotates in light.

This is how the cosmos creates you right now: you close your eyes and your veins chant blood.

I know that I’ve expressed this poorly. I apologise. Words are too messy and imprecise. I’m only a humble time being. I speak with a fleshly mouth that cannot help but grow cold.

Because green mountains walk, they are permanent. Although they walk more swiftly than the wind, someone in the mountains does not realize or understand it. “In the mountains” means the blossoming of the entire world.
– Dogen, 18 October 1240 CE

Works cited
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland And Through The Looking Glass (Penguin, 2003).
Dogen, Moon In A Dewdrop: Writings Of Zen Master Dogen, translated by Dan Welch and Kazuaki Tanahashi (North Point Press, 1986).
Carlo Rovelli, The Order Of Time (Penguin, 2019).
Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems (Penguin, 2017).
W. B. Yeats, The Collected Poems Of W. B. Yeats (Wordsworth, 2000).

Parts of this essay have previously appeared on my blog at gorgoninfurs.com