Seen this way, the resultant entropy or loss of structure is only a loss in our own minds’ way of perceiving patterns and order. And boom! There goes science’s final need for time as an actual entity.
Time’s reality or lack thereof is certainly an ancient debate, whose actual answer may be mind-bendingly more complex, because there may be many planes of physical reality. Time may appear to operate on some levels (for example, biological life) but be nonexistent or irrelevant on others (for example, the quantum realm of the tiny). But the bottom line is always “appear.”
Now back to Zeno’s arrow. A camera follows the arrow’s trajectory from the archer’s bow towards the target. Suddenly, the projector stops on a single frame of a stilled arrow. You stare at the image of an arrow in mid-flight – something that you obviously could not do at a real tournament. The pause in the film enables you to know the position of the arrow with great accuracy: It’s just beyond the grandstand, 20 feet above the ground. But you have lost all information about its momentum. It is going nowhere; its velocity is zero. Its path, its trajectory, has become uncertain.
To measure the position precisely, at any given instant, is to lock in on one static frame – to put the movie on “pause,” so to speak. Conversely, as soon as you observe momentum, you can’t isolate a frame, because momentum is the summation of many frames. You can’t know one and the other with complete accuracy. Sharpness in one parameter induces blurriness in the other. There is uncertainty as you home in, whether on motion or position.
Werner Heisenberg, in 1927, wrote that such uncertainty in quantum theory practice was not due to some technological insufficiency. He said that uncertainty is actually built into the fabric of reality.
In our 2009 book Biocentrism, medical doctor Bob Lanza and I explained it this way: Time is the inner form of animal sense that animates events – the still frames – of the spatial world. The mind animates the world like the motor and gears of a projector. Each weaves a series of still pictures – a series of spatial states – into an order, into life’s “current.” Remember that everything you perceive (even this page) is actively and repeatedly being reconstructed inside your head. It’s happening to you right now.
Your eyes cannot see through the wall of the cranium; all visual experience is an organized whirl of information occurring solely within your brain. If your mind could stop its “motor” for a moment, you’d get a freeze-frame, just as the movie projector isolated the arrow in one position with no momentum. In fact, time can be defined as the inner summation of spatial states; the same thing measured with our scientific instruments is called momentum. Space can be defined as position, as locked in a single frame. Thus, movement through space is an oxymoron.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle has its root here, showing that time is simply not a feature of the external spatial world. The metaphor of a strobe light might be helpful, as fast flashes isolate snapshots of rapidly moving things, like dancers in a disco. A dip, a split, a snap become still poses. Motion is suspended. One still follows another still. In quantum mechanics, “position” is like a strobe snapshot. Momentum is the life-created summation of many frames.
The weaving together of these frames occurs in the mind. Two-and-a-half-thousand years later, Zeno’s arrow paradox finally makes sense. So did Werner Heisenberg when he said, “A path comes into existence only when you observe it.” There is neither time nor motion without an observer.
The demotion of time from an actual reality to a mere subjective experience or social convention is a major step in comprehending the cosmos. True, in the mechanistic universe as described by Newton, Einstein and Darwin, time is spoken of as a kind of ledger in which events are recorded: a forward-moving continuum, flowing always into the future, accumulating. This is because human beings are hardwired to think linearly. It’s essential in the day-to-day keeping of one’s appointments and the watering of plants. But in the end, even Einstein admitted, “People like us…know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
So an irreversible, on-flowing continuum of events is a fantasy. Space and time are tools of animal perception – period. We carry them around with us like turtles with shells. There simply is no self-existing matrix out there in which physical events occur independent of life.
