Illusion 1 Hour
Gwenda Arguin
It's never been easier to know what time it is. NIST broadcasts the time to points across the country. It's fed through computer networks and cellphone towers to our personal gadgets, which tick in perfect synchrony. Humanity's ever-improving agreement on the time smooths communication and transportation, and it lubricates our economy.
For many people, this unruly version of time is "radical," she says. But as technology to better count the time grows ever more sophisticated, our everyday understanding of time itself may need to start changing.
To get a sense of where the rigid time that governs most of our lives comes from, Sherman takes me into a beige-colored laboratory crammed with experimental equipment and computers. There are three big boxes looming above lab benches, holding three high-precision atomic clocks. Each box is labeled with a name: One's called George, another Fiona, and the third is Elvis.
George, Fiona and Elvis are just part of the 21-clock ensemble NIST uses to generate the official time. These three clocks tick using hydrogen atoms. The atoms are excited using radiofrequency energy and then sent into a chamber. Once inside, they decay, emitting a specific frequency of light.
Those light cycles are the "tick" of the clock. By averaging a subset of the 21 clocks together, NIST has created a system that can count the time to within one quadrillionth of a second. That means the government's clock can keep time to within a second over the course of about 30 million years.
The ever-advancing NIST clock is one way to understand time. But theoretical physicist Prescod-Weinstein bristles at that definition. She says this version of time is just the time the government wants you to think about.
The time from this lab is used to run our lives. It says when planes take off and land, when markets open and close, when schoolchildren arrive at class. It controls computer networks, navigation tools and much, much more.
Governments around the world aren't just providing the time as an altruistic service to citizens, Prescod-Weinstein argues. It's about keeping society organized and efficient. It's about increasing economic productivity.
True time is actually much more flexible than most people realize, Prescod-Weinstein says. According to Einstein's general theory of relativity, space and time are tied together, and space-time can bend and curve.
The effect is minuscule compared to a human lifespan, but it is real and measurable. Boulder, Colo. is a mile above sea level. That means the gravitational field is slightly weaker, and time ticks by a little faster.
But modern technology can't deal with flowy time like this. As a result, the timekeepers at Boulder and elsewhere make corrections to ensure these different flows of time look like they're ticking in lockstep. The same goes for satellites farther from Earth, like those that make up the Global Positioning System. The system works by measuring the time difference between several satellites carrying clocks in space to the time that people measure on the ground.
Without correctly calibrating for the difference of the ticking clocks inside the GPS satellites, the system wouldn't be as accurate, Prescod-Weinstein says. "Any kind of system that uses GPS requires general relativity," she says. "You have to understand what time flow of the satellite is like and how that is different from time flow from Earth."
In places where gravity is very strong, time as we understand it can break down completely. At the edge of black holes, for example, the powerful gravitational pull slows time dramatically, says Prescod-Weinstein. And upon crossing the black hole's point of no return, known as its event-horizon, she says space and time flip.
At the edge of the observable Universe, there's something else happening, according to Katie Mack, an astrophysicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada. The Universe is expanding from the Big Bang, and that expansion is stretching time too.
"When you see things in the really distant Universe, because of the expansion of the Universe, it takes longer for things to happen," she says. The effect is known as cosmological time dilation and it's far more powerful than the tiny time changes seen near Earth.
Compare for example two identical stars that explode: One nearby, and one far away. "If we see a star exploding, and that star takes about 10 days to go from the brightest part of the explosion to dim again; if we look at it in the very distant Universe it might take 20-30 days," Mack says.
Mack, who's written a book called The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking), says that many billions of years into the future, time could get stranger still. The Universe is expanding, and because of entropy, energy and matter are becoming more and more evenly spread out across the ever-growing void. In its final state, the Universe may end up as an inert cloud of energy and matter, where everything is evenly distributed.
So time, as we understand it, has some really big problems, but it also has some really tiny ones, too. In fact, some scientists who study the microscopic interactions of fundamental particles are questioning the idea of time itself.
Arkani-Hamed has reached this conclusion over the past decade, as he's tried to gain a better understanding of what's happening inside the world's most powerful atom-smashers. These giant devices use huge amounts of energy to collide together subatomic particles. Calculating each collision as it happens should, according to quantum mechanics, require hundreds of pages of complex mathematics. Yet inexplicably, a much simpler equation can work just as well.
Arkani-Hamed believes the concept of time itself may be behind the discrepancy. In physics equations, time is used to keep track of the sequence of things as events unfold. But he has come to believe that organizing particle collisions according to "when" unnecessarily complicates the mathematics. Instead, he's experimenting with abstract geometric shapes that can describe events without using time.
Just as humans keep improving their maps, they must improve their clocks, Kitching says. Better clocks can make GPS more accurate, computer networks faster, and enable new technologies in everything from stock trading to astronomy.
And yet, he adds, the NIST lab's relentless counting of seconds, minutes, hours and days is being used for everything from navigation to power production. For humans, there is enormous social value in trying to tame nature's unruly sense of time.
After reading the Word they shared, I began seeing a picture of myself standing on a beach called Provision for Destiny. Excitedly, I began scooping up a portion of the sand for myself. Once I had scooped up my handful it began immediately to sift through my fingers. This was disconcerting to me. I felt like I was losing my portion.
What you do with and in the time given you is eternal and goes on forever. You could say the true nature of who you are and what you do is cloaked in the illusion of natural time. This illusion can tell you there will be no consequences for speaking words of death. This illusion can tell you there will be no long range eternal effects released when you speak as I tell you to in agreement with My Word. Whatever the enemy can tell you in relation to the value of your time and words in order to render you ineffective he will. This is why it is so important to understand that there is only one truth for any and every situation, the truth of My Word. Outside of My Word, all else is an illusion as well. There is revelation of the Word but all revelation must be true to the Word as well.
I affected time by listening to My father and doing only as I heard Him say or saw Him do. I took what He gave Me and released it into finite time. As a result, people were healed, delivered and set free from lives of bondage to sin and the devil. People were freed and they became eternal bearers of My light in a dark world. What happened to them affected generations to come. In others words, what you do with what you hear from Me has the power to affect natural time and infuse it with eternal purpose which in turn continues to grow like a mustard seed until all the birds of the air have a place to rest.
What is time? It is to do something in the correct or same rhythm as someone else. It is doing something at a speed or pace which feels natural. The only natural I want you to feel in relation to doing things within the space of time is the supernatural. I want it to become natural to be supernatural.
Yet when we are among the full-grown (spiritually mature Christians who are ripe in understanding), we do impart a [higher] wisdom (the knowledge of the divine plan previously hidden); but it is indeed not a wisdom of this present age or of this world nor of the leaders and rulers of this age, who are being brought to nothing and are doomed to pass away.
Lord, when it comes to You, time has no power to stop or hold back anything You desire to see and have done. When Joshua fought in battle, time stood still and the sun did not set until victory was accomplished. Therefore, I say the sands of time running through the hour glass of my life are all subject to You. I will not limit myself by what I see or by disobedience in any way. I will not run to and fro comparing myself or trying to accumulate the sand of another for my own purposes. The hour glass of my life is not confined to time but is eternal, for when I leave this physical life I simply continue on in You. I step over the boundaries of time which cloak the true nature of who I am, an eternal son of the Most High God.
In a previous essay, I wrote about how our perception of reality is not always as accurate as we believe it is. We took a look at The Five Illusions of Perception, and how to strengthen our model of ultimate reality by deepening our understanding of the universe. I made an argument for changing the lens through which you view the world so that your goals and aspirations in life could be more easily achieved.
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