Time
by Kenneth Barnes
A few nights ago several of our teachers were lingering over their coffee cups after the evening meal. They were engaged in one of those fascinating and refreshing conversations that take us far away from the school and its immediate problems - away out into the farthest distances of time and space. We had begun talking about a certain boy’s interest in space-ships, had gone on to compare the distances of various stars in terms of light years and had finally become involved in a discussion of time and eternity. It was this experience that prompted me to talk this evening about time.
I expect that most of us take time for granted, as we do space, thinking of it as something fixed and definite, measured by the ticking of a clock - something quite inescapable and utterly necessary. But when people begin consciously and carefully to think about time it often ceases to be simple and easily acceptable. Such thinking leads to the most bewildering speculation. Even with space it is much the same. We take it for granted that everything is somewhere until we realise that some of the things that matter most to us aren’t anywhere.
Love and friendship are neither nowhere nor anywhere; they don’t belong to space. Yet they are often far more real and significant than many of the things that we can locate in space. We don’t even know where we are. I know where my body is, but more than that I cannot say with certainty. Am I in my heart or my head or my pineal gland, and where am I in my dreams? One of the most difficult questions to answer about time is: has there always been time and will it always be, or was there a moment when time began and will there be a moment when it will end? Perhaps you have always taken it for granted that time stretches endlessly into the past and will go on endlessly into the future.
Ancient peoples felt that they had to account for the existence of time, and so they gave it a beginning. All these ancient ideas supposed that before time began there was chaos - a great unchanging emptiness or formlessness. When there is no change there can be no time, for the only evidence of time is that one thing happens after another. Where there is no change there is no before, no after, no difference between past and present.
You know how the Jews described the beginning: “In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth. And the earth was waste and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God moved upon the waters. And God said: Let there be light, and there was light”. This of course is not a scientific statement, but poetry.
The Greeks in their story used the Gods as symbols, making it seem a story of people, not of matter and time. The story is complicated and there are conflicting versions, but details apart it goes like this: First there was Chaos and out of this Gea and Uranus came. Gea represented the earth, and Uranus the heavens. Then out of the mating of Gea and Uranus Kronos was born. Thus time came to be, for Kronos represents time - hence such words as chronometer. As usual in Greek mythology there were terrible quarrels. Khronos made a violent attack upon his father Uranus, and the rule of Heaven was overthrown. But Kronos was warned that he in turn would be overthrown by one of his children. So every year as his wife, Rhea, gave birth to a child he swallowed it. But the last to be born - Zeus - stuck in his throat and made him sick. So he vomited them all up again, six great Gods: Hestia of hearth, home and family; Demeter of the soil and all growing things; Hera of women and marriage; Poseidon of sea and weather; Hades of the underworld; and Zeus the most mighty leader of the gods. Thus the world’s stage was set for everything to happen, and event followed event in the sequence of time.
But you may say: All this is fairy tale, in the view of science there can be no beginning and no end of time. But beware of making mock of fairy tales; some of the deepest truths about life are hidden in their symbolism. Moreover, science changes its views profoundly from time to time. Once it thought that space went on forever and ever in a straight line. Now, that is no longer believed. More recently the idea of endless time has been questioned. A great astrophysicist broadcast some interesting ideas recently. Many sixth-formers will know that a calculation has been made about the age of the earth, based upon the fact that uranium after many stages of radioactive disintegration produces lead. It happens very slowly but we know the rate pretty exactly. The oldest specimens of uranium ore will obviously contain the most lead, and calculations show that these specimens must have begun to disintegrate 2000 million years ago. If we turn our attention now to the sun we can calculate its age from our knowledge of the process by which it produces its heat: the fusion of hydrogen nuclei into helium nuclei, the process of the hydrogen bomb. The state of the sun at present suggests that it must be about the same age as the earth, perhaps a little older. Now go further, out to the distant spiral nebulae, far beyond the stars that we ordinarily see with our naked eyes. We can even calculate make a tentative calculation as to their age, from what is called the Döppler effect. When a whistling railway engine passes us the note of its whistle suddenly drops in pitch. Because the whistle is travelling away while it is sending out its sound waves, the sound waves are more spread out as they come towards our ears and fewer of them reach us in each second. If fewer waves reach our ears per second we experience a lower pitch. Now the spiral nebulae are not whistling at us, but they are sending us light, and this light is made up of a mixture of colours of different wave-lengths. A reddish light is of longer wave-length and of less rapid frequency vibration than a bluish light. A spectroscope pointed at one of these nebulae shows that its light is more reddish than it ought to be: all the colours are shifted towards the red end of the spectrum. There seem only one possible explanation: that the nebulae are rushing away just like the railway engine. Moreover the effect is greater for the more distant nebulae than for the nearer ones; the further they are away the more rapidly they are moving colossal is the speed at which they are travelling. This is the basis of the idea of the expanding universe, and because we can measure the velocities of the nebulae we can calculate when the universe was all concentrated in one place before and the expansion began. The result gives an age not very different from the age of the sun and the earth. So it looks as if all the changes, the events that we can measure by time, began with one great beginning.
All this is by no means certain or conclusive, and it raises the most difficult philosophical questions. Professor Gamov, for one, doesn’t not accept that this proves time had a beginning. But it should be enough to shake our easy assumptions as to what science believes or proves about space, time, and the universe.
It is only however in rare moments that we are concerned about these questions, which belong to what we grandly call astrophysics cosmology. Let us turn to what we experience in our own lifetime. How do you measure time? By the ticking of a clock and the steady movement of its hands? But do you feel time by the clock? Don’t you find, if you consult your feelings, that sometimes an hour goes all too quickly, and sometimes it is all too appallingly long? The actual number of seconds and minutes seems often irrelevant or misleading; when a man is hungry for his dinner, or when he is taking an exam and trying, as we say, to beat the clock. Also, when he is in love. Love has a very powerful effect on time; it makes it seem like a concertina, sometimes stretched out and sometimes compressed. When his love is not present, to the unfortunate man, time goes all too slowly.
With leaden foot time creeps along
When Delia is away.
But when she is present it goes all too fast. When she is coy, not quite as responsive as he would like her to be, it goes even faster. Thus it seemed appeared to Andrew Marvell, when his love seemed to expect him to take thirty thousand years in the mere preliminary act of adoration:
But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Not in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
He implores his love to allow him to get on with the good work, and in his last lines shows how he will make them a relative, not an absolute thing:
Let us roll all our strength into one ball
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
This, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
The thought of time’s winged chariot hurrying reminds me how often we feel that in the modern world time has speeded up terribly and our minds cannot keep pace with events. There used, perhaps, to be time to readjust ourselves on the way from one thing to another. Last week I was having dinner with a man who had just come back from India. He went out there on a Comet; it took only a day - travelling so smoothly that there wasn’t a ripple on a cup of tea, so fast - 8 miles a minute - that the air brakes had to be put on 200 miles before they were due to stop. He came back in a constellation and it seemed, in comparison, like a chugging tramp steamer. So in the modern world we are hurled from England to America, to India, to South Africa, between one breakfast and the next. No long period of inactivity contemplating a gently heaving sea, while our feelings and thoughts quietly sort themselves out, and prepare for the new experience. Do we lose more than we gain? I do not know.
I do know that I often wish our minds could be trained with more steadiness and less speed, that times winged chariot did not invade the classroom to hurry us along and make learning superficial when it should be thorough and deep. I wish that in teaching science we were not tempted every year to work faster, cram more in, because every year more is discovered to add to the mass of facts already in the text books. It inclines one to look back enviously - but perhaps romantically - to the early days of the Royal Society, when a man like Christopher Wren could turn from anatomy to mathematics and astronomy, could experiment in blood transfusion, and build great churches, under apparently no pressure except the desire to know and the sheer delight of experiment.
The most distressing and exasperating aspect of time is that we cannot turn it back. Here it differs from space. In space we can nearly always get back to our starting point, even if we have to hitch-hike. But time is irreversible. Our actions, good or bad, are there, fixed in our past and we cannot unmake them. It is useless to lament what we believe was good in the past. Our losses we have to carry with us.
In August I lost one of my closest friends, [Alfred Schweitzer,] frozen to death in an Alpine storm. He was one of those people who seem endlessly gifted and with boundless energy: scientist, doctor, musician and mountaineer, and with a great fund of love and help to all who needed them. How often I have said to myself in the last few months “If only”! If only I had said to him during the fortnight that he spent with us before the tragedy, “Look, you matter tremendously to a large number of people. Be specially careful, not just ordinarily careful”. Perhaps the thought of this might have been just enough to tip the balance the other way when the decision had to be made as to whether it was wise to make the ascent that day.
But such thoughts are useless, and because we know this, a great deal of man’s thinking about time is tinged with tragedy and fatalism.
Time like an ever-rolling stream
Bears all its sons away
They fly, forgotten as a dream
Flies at the opening of day
As for man his days are as grass. Like the flowers of the field so he flourisheth. The wind passeth over it and it is gone. And the place thereof shall know it no more.
As one grows older and one’s perspective becomes longer, one feels this more intensely. Recently I was talking with some other teachers…[The rest of this document is missing. Knowing the date of the death of Alfred Schweizer this document can be dated to Autumn 1952]
KKA few nights ago several of our teachers were lingering over their coffee cups after the evening meal. They were engaged in one of those fascinating and refreshing conversations that take us far away from the school and its immediate problems - away out into the farthest distances of time and space. We had begun talking about a certain boy’s interest in space-ships, had gone on to compare the distances of various stars in terms of light years and had finally become involved in a discussion of time and eternity. It was this experience that prompted me to talk this evening about time.
I expect that most of us take time for granted, as we do space, thinking of it as something fixed and definite, measured by the ticking of a clock - something quite inescapable and utterly necessary. But when people begin consciously and carefully to think about time it often ceases to be simple and easily acceptable. Such thinking leads to the most bewildering speculation. Even with space it is much the same. We take it for granted that everything is somewhere until we realise that some of the things that matter most to us aren’t anywhere.
Love and friendship are neither nowhere nor anywhere; they don’t belong to space. Yet they are often far more real and significant than many of the things that we can locate in space. We don’t even know where we are. I know where my body is, but more than that I cannot say with certainty. Am I in my heart or my head or my pineal gland, and where am I in my dreams? One of the most difficult questions to answer about time is: has there always been time and will it always be, or was there a moment when time began and will there be a moment when it will end? Perhaps you have always taken it for granted that time stretches endlessly into the past and will go on endlessly into the future.
Ancient peoples felt that they had to account for the existence of time, and so they gave it a beginning. All these ancient ideas supposed that before time began there was chaos - a great unchanging emptiness or formlessness. When there is no change there can be no time, for the only evidence of time is that one thing happens after another. Where there is no change there is no before, no after, no difference between past and present.
You know how the Jews described the beginning: “In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth. And the earth was waste and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God moved upon the waters. And God said: Let there be light, and there was light”. This of course is not a scientific statement, but poetry.
The Greeks in their story used the Gods as symbols, making it seem a story of people, not of matter and time. The story is complicated and there are conflicting versions, but details apart it goes like this: First there was Chaos and out of this Gea and Uranus came. Gea represented the earth, and Uranus the heavens. Then out of the mating of Gea and Uranus Kronos was born. Thus time came to be, for Kronos represents time - hence such words as chronometer. As usual in Greek mythology there were terrible quarrels. Khronos made a violent attack upon his father Uranus, and the rule of Heaven was overthrown. But Kronos was warned that he in turn would be overthrown by one of his children. So every year as his wife, Rhea, gave birth to a child he swallowed it. But the last to be born - Zeus - stuck in his throat and made him sick. So he vomited them all up again, six great Gods: Hestia of hearth, home and family; Demeter of the soil and all growing things; Hera of women and marriage; Poseidon of sea and weather; Hades of the underworld; and Zeus the most mighty leader of the gods. Thus the world’s stage was set for everything to happen, and event followed event in the sequence of time.
But you may say: All this is fairy tale, in the view of science there can be no beginning and no end of time. But beware of making mock of fairy tales; some of the deepest truths about life are hidden in their symbolism. Moreover, science changes its views profoundly from time to time. Once it thought that space went on forever and ever in a straight line. Now, that is no longer believed. More recently the idea of endless time has been questioned. A great astrophysicist broadcast some interesting ideas recently. Many sixth-formers will know that a calculation has been made about the age of the earth, based upon the fact that uranium after many stages of radioactive disintegration produces lead. It happens very slowly but we know the rate pretty exactly. The oldest specimens of uranium ore will obviously contain the most lead, and calculations show that these specimens must have begun to disintegrate 2000 million years ago. If we turn our attention now to the sun we can calculate its age from our knowledge of the process by which it produces its heat: the fusion of hydrogen nuclei into helium nuclei, the process of the hydrogen bomb. The state of the sun at present suggests that it must be about the same age as the earth, perhaps a little older. Now go further, out to the distant spiral nebulae, far beyond the stars that we ordinarily see with our naked eyes. We can even calculate make a tentative calculation as to their age, from what is called the Döppler effect. When a whistling railway engine passes us the note of its whistle suddenly drops in pitch. Because the whistle is travelling away while it is sending out its sound waves, the sound waves are more spread out as they come towards our ears and fewer of them reach us in each second. If fewer waves reach our ears per second we experience a lower pitch. Now the spiral nebulae are not whistling at us, but they are sending us light, and this light is made up of a mixture of colours of different wave-lengths. A reddish light is of longer wave-length and of less rapid frequency vibration than a bluish light. A spectroscope pointed at one of these nebulae shows that its light is more reddish than it ought to be: all the colours are shifted towards the red end of the spectrum. There seem only one possible explanation: that the nebulae are rushing away just like the railway engine. Moreover the effect is greater for the more distant nebulae than for the nearer ones; the further they are away the more rapidly they are moving colossal is the speed at which they are travelling. This is the basis of the idea of the expanding universe, and because we can measure the velocities of the nebulae we can calculate when the universe was all concentrated in one place before and the expansion began. The result gives an age not very different from the age of the sun and the earth. So it looks as if all the changes, the events that we can measure by time, began with one great beginning.
All this is by no means certain or conclusive, and it raises the most difficult philosophical questions. Professor Gamov, for one, doesn’t not accept that this proves time had a beginning. But it should be enough to shake our easy assumptions as to what science believes or proves about space, time, and the universe.
It is only however in rare moments that we are concerned about these questions, which belong to what we grandly call astrophysics cosmology. Let us turn to what we experience in our own lifetime. How do you measure time? By the ticking of a clock and the steady movement of its hands? But do you feel time by the clock? Don’t you find, if you consult your feelings, that sometimes an hour goes all too quickly, and sometimes it is all too appallingly long? The actual number of seconds and minutes seems often irrelevant or misleading; when a man is hungry for his dinner, or when he is taking an exam and trying, as we say, to beat the clock. Also, when he is in love. Love has a very powerful effect on time; it makes it seem like a concertina, sometimes stretched out and sometimes compressed. When his love is not present, to the unfortunate man, time goes all too slowly.
With leaden foot time creeps along
When Delia is away.
But when she is present it goes all too fast. When she is coy, not quite as responsive as he would like her to be, it goes even faster. Thus it seemed appeared to Andrew Marvell, when his love seemed to expect him to take thirty thousand years in the mere preliminary act of adoration:
But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Not in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
He implores his love to allow him to get on with the good work, and in his last lines shows how he will make them a relative, not an absolute thing:
Let us roll all our strength into one ball
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
This, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
The thought of time’s winged chariot hurrying reminds me how often we feel that in the modern world time has speeded up terribly and our minds cannot keep pace with events. There used, perhaps, to be time to readjust ourselves on the way from one thing to another. Last week I was having dinner with a man who had just come back from India. He went out there on a Comet; it took only a day - travelling so smoothly that there wasn’t a ripple on a cup of tea, so fast - 8 miles a minute - that the air brakes had to be put on 200 miles before they were due to stop. He came back in a constellation and it seemed, in comparison, like a chugging tramp steamer. So in the modern world we are hurled from England to America, to India, to South Africa, between one breakfast and the next. No long period of inactivity contemplating a gently heaving sea, while our feelings and thoughts quietly sort themselves out, and prepare for the new experience. Do we lose more than we gain? I do not know.
I do know that I often wish our minds could be trained with more steadiness and less speed, that times winged chariot did not invade the classroom to hurry us along and make learning superficial when it should be thorough and deep. I wish that in teaching science we were not tempted every year to work faster, cram more in, because every year more is discovered to add to the mass of facts already in the text books. It inclines one to look back enviously - but perhaps romantically - to the early days of the Royal Society, when a man like Christopher Wren could turn from anatomy to mathematics and astronomy, could experiment in blood transfusion, and build great churches, under apparently no pressure except the desire to know and the sheer delight of experiment.
The most distressing and exasperating aspect of time is that we cannot turn it back. Here it differs from space. In space we can nearly always get back to our starting point, even if we have to hitch-hike. But time is irreversible. Our actions, good or bad, are there, fixed in our past and we cannot unmake them. It is useless to lament what we believe was good in the past. Our losses we have to carry with us.
In August I lost one of my closest friends, [Alfred Schweitzer,] frozen to death in an Alpine storm. He was one of those people who seem endlessly gifted and with boundless energy: scientist, doctor, musician and mountaineer, and with a great fund of love and help to all who needed them. How often I have said to myself in the last few months “If only”! If only I had said to him during the fortnight that he spent with us before the tragedy, “Look, you matter tremendously to a large number of people. Be specially careful, not just ordinarily careful”. Perhaps the thought of this might have been just enough to tip the balance the other way when the decision had to be made as to whether it was wise to make the ascent that day.
But such thoughts are useless, and because we know this, a great deal of man’s thinking about time is tinged with tragedy and fatalism.
Time like an ever-rolling stream
Bears all its sons away
They fly, forgotten as a dream
Flies at the opening of day
As for man his days are as grass. Like the flowers of the field so he flourisheth. The wind passeth over it and it is gone. And the place thereof shall know it no more.
As one grows older and one’s perspective becomes longer, one feels this more intensely. Recently I was talking with some other teachers…
[The rest of this document is missing. Knowing the date of the death of Alfred Schweizer this document can be dated to Autumn 1952]
Archeve reference: PP KCB 3/7/2 documen 13 and also PP/KCB 3/7/1 document 09