I found myself in an existential conversation with my 8 year old daughter yesterday. It was sparked off by her statement that we are living in the past.
What she meant was that one day, somebody would look back on May 1st 2019 as the past, and of course that would start on May 2nd.
I started to disagree with her and say that actually whilst we're living it, we are in a state of now, however the thought crossed my mind that now is an illusion. Can we really ever claim to be living right now, do we ever live in the moment?
The more you think of it, the more you realise that it is impossible to define when now is because it does not have the same defined boundaries as the past or the future.
Even if you say the words this is now! By the time you get to the end word, the first one is already in the past. In fact each word you speak is slewed in the past and the future, there is the bit of the word you've already spoken, and the bit you are yet to speak.
So when the hell is now?
My daughter's fascination with the past comes from wanting to know what me and her mother were up to before she was born, a time she affectionately terms, the olden days.
I told her that one day she would have children, and they too would refer to the time when she was eight, as the olden days.
This caused her to come to the conclusion that she was in fact living in the past.
The future is easily defined as things that have not happened yet, though if we look at Einstein's theory of relativity we see that time is effected by how fast we are going, or how massive an object we are near.
This is why the clocks on GPS satellites orbiting the earth have to be adjusted to take into account that time in orbit is running slightly quicker than time on earth.
If you were to travel off in a spaceship at 99.99% the speed of light for around 4 months, time would slow down for you so much so that when you returned to earth, I would be 22 years older!
So how would you be able to determine a shared state of now for the both of us?
For instance, you might say to your self after 1 month, I wonder what Cryptogee is doing right now. But what would that really mean? A month to you would be several years to me, and if in your spaceship you came to a sudden stop as you were saying it, the point at which you asked the question would be several years in the past for both of us.
Time can be viewed as the rate at which things happen, and this is important if we are to define now, perhaps there is a state of now which we can identify using the scientific method.
So what does science say about now? Well a scientist called Max Planck discovered the Planck length, which can be thought of as the pixel of the universe, this is the closest possible distance that two objects can be from each other without touching (touch is also illusory but let's leave that for another musing!).
From Planck's length, we can work out Planck's time, which is how long it takes a photon of light to cross this infinitesimally small distance, which of course isn't very long at all, it is 10 to the minus 43 seconds, which is the equivalent to:
0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds.
To give you an idea of just how small this number is, if you tried to count of the amount of Planck units at a rate of a million per second, several trillion years would pass and the universe would have died a heat death before you got to count the amount of Planck units contained in one second.
So it seems that now is just an illusion, a functioning illusion, but an illusion nonetheless.
The now illusion serves us well, when I tell my daughter to clean up her room now! She could just as well answer too late dad, now has passed and is just an illusory state of being anyway.
Luckily she just says okay!
Further Reading
Title image: Malvestida Magazine on Unsplash
Composite by Cryptogee
SO WHAT ARE YOU DOING RIGHT NOW? AS EVER, LET ME KNOW BELOW!
