A hackneyed philosophical question, but it’s worth asking now and then: What is time? Many immediately say, “You can’t separate time from space!” So: What is timespace? Well… let’s say time and space are two aspects of a larger, less graspable package. We’re able to perceive many points in space at the same time and integrate them with our brains to see shapes, distances in the background with a bird or someone’s face in the foreground. In space we’re quite mobile. Time, on the other hand, offers us few options. It’s more like a giant wave on which matter and space are being flung ever forward.
To turn to TimeGlider for just a minute, this project has been interesting because we’re seeking (as our elevator pitch would say) “to do for time what applications like Google Earth do for space”. The steady, measurable continuum of time, while it’s not an existing “geography”, is still regular enough that plotting it on a graph is quite useful. Google, MapQuest, et al. have the advantage of having an existing substance to which a two dimentional map can be an analog, with recognizable borders, landmarks, precise locations, and above all, names. So even though history offers no such analogs, what I’m hoping is that, from the efforts of historians both amateur and professional, we can create a large set of visual time-maps that relate to certain cultures and common memories.
The physicist David Bohm presented a striking case that the universe has a deep, subtle structure akin to a hologram: Every particle has within its endless sub-structure a kind of implied, or enfolded, version of the entire universe — in real time. He called this “the implicate order”. This might seem like a mere fantasy, but consider this. In any point in the room in which you are sitting, the light from all other points in the room is passing simultaneously. Place a spherical camera in any position in the room (or your eyes) and everything is available, from all points. Step outside and some light emanating from every tiny blades of grass, even in the farthest distance, is reaching your eyes. In other words, there is a huge amount of information available inside every point in space. Light is just one spectra and frequency in the electromagnetic spectrum. In a nutshell a “broadcast” from every point in space is reaching every other point in space. (I’d highly recommend either Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order or Lee Nichol’s compendium, The Essential David Bohm.)
So might all events in time be affected or informed by all other events? To be continued…