Disentangling our confusion of Time and History.

At the behest of a good friend, I'm reading Stephen Hawking's last book, "Brief Answers To The Big Questions." My friend especially enjoyed Hawking's cogency and demeanor in his writing as he got into big ideas without resorting to his native jargon of science; he did the extra work and it payed off.

While one of his big questions is pertinently theological, "does God exist", what spurs this essay stems from his question, "will we survive on earth?" He begins this chapter by invoking "the doom's day clock"and it's history, as well as his book that made him famous, "A Brief History of Time...

And than it struck me: History is not identical with Time.

Yet, we've fused these two concepts together, especially when we address the "irreversability" quality of reality that's usually attributed to the "second law" and goes by the name "entropy". (Set a head of cabbage on your counter top and you'll watch it move to a state of rot but never the other way around.)

Here's my attempt to un-confuse time and history via the thought-experiment below.

Imagine yourself sitting alone in a small cubicle, walls of beige bereft of pictures, no devices except for this: a vintage clock with a second hand that continuously spins around its 60 second lap. The movement of that second hand is rightly time. What's missing in this situation--at least it's minimized--is history.

This situation neither minimizes nor maximizes time. (Space remains changeless.) What is minimized is history. Basically, after an hour of sitting you will have the history of your heart beats, breaths, and thoughts.

Now, take a "day in the life of"-- a city. Instead of sitting alone in a sterile cubicle you stand on a corner of a bustling street-scape. In this case, time is the same in either situation; what changes is "history". Or at least its amount: you can easily imagine the throngs of people each being uniquely historical while sharing the same time and same space .

More, while you are engaged in your history of observing this hour of history, you could change your vantage point by crossing the street or by running down the same side of the street to its opposite corner. What you can't do however, is re-do these moves; the best you could do is to retrace your steps. This irreversability has to do with history--not time.

All time is, I would offer, is the analog of sweeping second hand found on the clocks and wrist watches of yore. That we now use digital clocks and watches is history.

Time remaining equal, what can change is the amount of history within a given time.

Is light better thought as illumination- or revelation?

The question captivating me to day is this: How do ideas relate to light-- they both enable us to see don't they? Maybe, light isn't illuminating as much as it's revealing?

The thought experiment.

Imagine yourself in a darkened room where nothing is visible. No worries though, you have a flashlight. You turn it on and point the beam around to illuminate objects in order to get your bearings. A couch; an ottoman; framed prints; carpet; you deduce that you're in a living room. What ever you pointed your flashlight at, you awashed that object in light and once so illuminated, you could see it; everything else remained invisible.

Now imagine yourself on your driveway on a bright and early Saturday morning equipped with bucket, sponge and soap, and water hose and sprayer. This Saturday you begin your to-do list by washing your car.

Where these two scenarios have similarity is in "awashing," and the pointing of a delivery system. While the hose system is delivering water and the flashlight, light-energy, in either case we feel ourselves to be flooding an object with something delivered from a tool in our hand.

Here's the key difference: any resulting splash back from the jet of water hitting the car and we're likely to get wet (unless your reflexes are quick). Without an ensuing "splash back" from our washing the ottoman in light, we don't see it. Washing with water, the splash back is superfluous. Washing with light, the splash back is mandatory if we are to see a thing-- that is, for a thing to be visible rather than invisible.

It's this mandatory splash back of photons entering our brain system through our pupils and causing visibility where I'm seeing that light doesn't so much illuminate a thing as much as it reveals a thing. Light doesn't wash an object the way water does. Instead, light interacts at an atomic level with that object in a way that purposely makes enough of a splash back to travel through pupils and reach a brain that can translate those "droplets" into the ottoman and couch on which we can lean back and lounge with our feet up.

I might be splitting hairs except for this: It's not the photon itself that makes something visible; rather, it's that a photon "splashed back" from the ottoman or the car newly cleaned and shiny; before a photon can make an image in your brain, it must first have been in an entangled relation with that object. With out such relation, a photon can only be seen as a flash of light that doesn't reveal anything.

New Intro (in progress).

What ever "divinity" is, I've come to see that it's better found in a notion of creativity than it is in our traditional notion of perfection. If what I see is truly "there", this would mean for us, that to the extent we are willing to participate in real creativity, to this extent, we are participating in the Divine.

How does Creativity get defined when the essence of creativity is about transcending boundaries?