Page 277 - For Men of Understanding

The Scientific Explanation of Timelessness
We can clarify this subject by quoting various scientists' and scholars' expla-
nations. Regarding the idea of time flowing backwards, François Jacob, a famous
intellectual and Nobel laureate professor of genetics, states the following in his
book Le Jeu des Possibles (The Play of Possibilities):
Films played backwards let us imagine a world in which time flows back-
wards. A world in which cream separates itself from the coffee and jumps out
of the cup to reach the creamer; in which the walls emit light rays that are
collected in a light source instead of radiating out from it; a world in which
a stone leaps up to a man's hand from the water where it was thrown by the
astonishing cooperation of innumerable drops of water surging together. Yet,
in such a time-reversed world with such opposite features, our brain process-
es, and the way our memory compiles information, would similarly function
backwards. The same is true for the past and future, though the world will
appear to us exactly as it does currently. 16
But since our brain is accustomed to a certain sequence of events, the world
does not operate as related above. We assume that time always flows forward.
However, this is a decision reached in the brain and is, therefore, completely rel-
ative. In reality, we never can know how time flows-or even whether it flows or
not! This is because time is not an absolute fact, but only a form of perception.
That time is a perception is also verified by Albert Einstein in his Theory of
General Relativity. In his book The Universe and Dr. Einstein, Lincoln Barnett
writes:
Along with absolute space, Einstein discarded the concept of absolute time-
of a steady, unvarying inexorable universal time flow, streaming from the infi-
nite past to the infinite future. Much of the obscurity that has surrounded the
Theory of Relativity stems from man's reluctance to recognize that sense of
time, like sense of color, is a form of perception. Just as space is simply a
possible order of material objects, so time is simply a possible order of
events. The subjectivity of time is best explained in Einstein's own words.
"The experiences of an individual," he says, "appear to us arranged in a series
of events; in this series the single events which we remember appear to be
ordered according to the criterion of 'earlier' and 'later'. There exists, there-
fore, for the individual, an I-time, or subjective time. This in itself is not mea-
surable. I can, indeed, associate numbers with the events, in such a way that
a greater number is associated with the later event than with an earlier one. 17
As Barnett wrote, Einstein showed that, "space and time are forms of intuition,
which can no more be divorced from consciousness than can our concepts of
color, shape, or size." According to the Theory of General Relativity: "time has no
independent existence apart from the order of events by which we measure it." 18

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