Having spent the last two days in the hospital watching over my son as he recovers from surgery (he’s fine), one of the main things on my mind, as you might well imagine, was how I was going to do this KTK post. I had absolutely nothing in mind, but as I was released from this necessary but rather mind-numbingly hands-on childcare duty with only about two hours to spare, I had time to think. What I kept thinking about, for the most part, was how much time was available to write it. In this case, subtracting the time necessary to drive home, it was about an hour and a half.
As it turned out, an article from Scientific American written by Dan Falk, and titled “Learning to Live in Steven Weinberg’s Pointless Universe,” provided me the necessary inspiration.
Weinberg, a Nobel Laureate physicist who died last week at 88, may be best known among the lay-scientific for a statement that appeared in a book that made the rounds in the late 1970’s, titled The First Three Minutes. At the time Weinberg’s volume garnered a great deal of attention as one of the first popular attempts to provide a lay explanation for the earliest period of time then imaginable: the first minutes of the universe’s creation, and one of the first and most accessible works popularizing the notion of what we now know as the “Big Bang.”
As Falk writes:
[Weinberg’s] most famous (or perhaps infamous) statement can be found on the second-to-last page of his first popular book, The First Three Minutes, published in 1977. Having told the story of how our universe came into being with the big bang some 13.8 billion years ago, and how it may end untold billions of years in the future, he concludes that whatever the universe is about, it sure as heck isn’t about us. “The more the universe seems comprehensible,” he wrote, “the more it also seems pointless.”
Stephen Hawking, 2007
While the main topic of Falk’s tribute to Weinberg is the debate over the idea that the universe is the product of some all-knowing, omnipotent force or deity (Weinberg, an atheist, had nothing particularly good to say about religion), he reminded me that a snippet about time in the context of Stephen Hawking’s slim, cleverly-titled “A Brief History of Time” suggests that time itself has a more definitive point of origin.
In A Brief History of Time (1988), Stephen Hawking speculated on the possibility that the universe had no precise beginning; his controversial “no-boundary proposal” (formulated in the 1980s with Jim Hartle) suggested that time might have behaved like space in the universe’s earliest moments. Without a “time zero,” there was no moment of creation—and nothing for a creator to do. (It’s hardly a surprise that some people who balk at the teaching of evolution also object to the teaching of big bang cosmology.)
Hawking’s “No-boundary” proposal posits a universe that can be depicted as a tennis shuttlecock, as depicted by the NASA diagram below and to the right.
Hwking’s theory depicted as a shuttlecock; attribution: NASA.
From Quanta Magazine:
The “no-boundary proposal,” which Hawking and his frequent collaborator, James Hartle, fully formulated in a 1983 paper, envisions the cosmos having the shape of a shuttlecock. Just as a shuttlecock has a diameter of zero at its bottommost point and gradually widens on the way up, the universe, according to the no-boundary proposal, smoothly expanded from a point of zero size. Hartle and Hawking derived a formula describing the whole shuttlecock — the so-called “wave function of the universe” that encompasses the entire past, present and future at once — making moot all contemplation of seeds of creation, a creator, or any transition from a time before.
“Asking what came before the Big Bang is meaningless, according to the no-boundary proposal, because there is no notion of time available to refer to,” Hawking said in another lecture at the Pontifical Academy in 2016, a year and a half before his death. “It would be like asking what lies south of the South Pole.”
Hartle and Hawking’s proposal radically reconceptualized time. Each moment in the universe becomes a cross-section of the shuttlecock; while we perceive the universe as expanding and evolving from one moment to the next, time really consists of correlations between the universe’s size in each cross-section and other properties — particularly its entropy, or disorder. Entropy increases from the cork to the feathers, aiming an emergent arrow of time. Near the shuttlecock’s rounded-off bottom, though, the correlations are less reliable; time ceases to exist and is replaced by pure space.
As can be gleaned from the above, the study of time can devolve into the hyper-scientific, and for this reason to gain a more fulsome understanding of an admittedly complex inquiry, we should give fair due to its popular, artistic representations, particularly those which are earnestly intended to provide a layperson’s understanding of time.
And true to form, from an artistic and particularly from a musical perspective, the subject of time has been of perennial, almost obsessive subject. Of course, no one in the modern era has explored the theoretical ramifications of time more than the renowned scientific team of Sir Michael Philip Jagger and his working colleague Keith Richards, whose contribution to this field ran the gamut from the willfully optimistic Time is On My Side (which they did not author) to the revelatory Out of Time (which they did). By 1971 a more sober assessment of time’s implications had prevailed, as Jagger cannily observed, “I have my freedom, but I don’t have much time.” Finally, in 1974, with their efforts to comprehend the subject evidently stymied by its staggering complexity, these two researchers flatly declared that “Time Waits For No One.”
In the interim, and doubtlessly with a jealous eye trained on Jagger and Richards’ pioneering work, other musical researchers picked up the topic. Perhaps best known is Roger Waters’ rumination on the subject, simply titled “Time,” as expressed by the group Pink Floyd:
The title used by Waters was doubtlessly influenced by the work of another respected contributor to the field, Mr. David Bowie, who also explored the topic in his own work, also laconically titled “Time.” Mr. Bowie’s efforts in this regard were immeasurably aided by his timely choice of clothing, as demonstrated below.
At about the same time, the daunting nature of defining the concept of the continuing nature of existence was also obliquely referenced by the musical assemblage of Chicago, who rather despairingly inquired, “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” Others, such as the cynical duo that comprised the research team known as Steely Dan, took a more metaphysical and opaque approach in “Time Out of Mind.”
As can be seen from the examples above, time has presented a quintessential riddle, not only to our most esteemed physicists but also among some of humanity’s most revered musical artists. Accordingly, after all is said and done, the apparent insolubility of this phenomenon may have been best expressed by turning it back on itself, and simply stating, as Leonard Cohen did with much eloquence, that it’s Closing Time:
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