Time Is Running Out Of Time

By Shaunak Bakshi

The beauty of time lies in the fact that no moment lasts forever. Every event occurring in our lives is fleeting and a predecessor to the next, no matter if it lasted for a few minutes or an hour. What lies between the beginning and the end is why it all matters more.

Now look at time in a different way. It is the fourth dimension, in the spatial sense. Simply put, every object in the universe is three dimensional, but for it to move forward, to grow, evolve, or progress to a state different from its current one, it needs time as a spatial dimension. And time doesn’t disappoint. We sometimes get deluded into thinking that time ran past, or sat down sulking on the ground and refused to budge, so it had to be dragged. But in reality, it plods along at a constant pace for most of the objects in the universe. It is good to the young, but deadly to the sick and the old. But it slows down, albeit imperceptibly, near massive objects as a result of space-time bending, since we consider it to be a fabric weighed down by the gravity of these objects. Nearing black holes though, causes substantial slowing down of time, due to the gravity of a singularity of enormous mass. But we’re delving into physics now, so let’s just leave it at that.

Until now, I thought of time only in the aforementioned manner. Cursed it, sure, when I had a project deadline, or when I was in a class that refused to end. But that is all my understanding was restricted to. Recently though, a science fiction show put things into perspective for me. I know what I am about to say is based on science fiction, but well, the science fiction of today could be the reality of tomorrow. So bear with me.

Evolution is a law of the universe. Every object evolves, be it a star, a planet, or a black hole. The earth, for instance, wasn’t hospitable in the beginning. It took millions of years to be able to sustain life. Black holes don’t start their lifespan as their own selves either. They are sort of the afterlife of supermassive stars. Darwin may have termed evolution as a law of nature, but he was looking at it only from a biological perspective. If time is the enemy because it kills, evolution is a friend because it ensures that the inevitable death date is gradually pushed back. We all are on a clock, after all. All we can hope for is to prolong this meagre lifespan.

What has never been considered to evolve, on the other hand, is time. Space-time is considered to be a fabric, entwined into a tapestry of unimaginable dimensions. But what if time evolved too? What if it depended on the living beings, unevenly distributed across the universe, to maintain it? Not maintain it in the literal sense, but to prevent it from deteriorating over, well, time? After all, every species plays a role in determining how long a planet would be sustainable, and the depletion of planetary resources leads to increase in disorder, ergo entropy. This in turn, would lead to entropy reduction in a different part of the universe. But entropy is unidirectional as per our understanding, like time, as it only increases with time. So does this reducing entropy mean that time went backwards? And, this all would invariable affect time, wouldn’t it, in at least the parts where entropy change is occurring? Also, assuming space-time to be a fabric, black holes act as rips. We may not have any role in these, but doesn’t every action have a counteraction of equal proportion? The imbalance created by black holes hasn’t been accounted for. What if these rips are slowly tearing the fabric apart? We would have no way of knowing it, because, well, time isn’t a visible entity. And black holes aren’t exactly easy to observe, those sullen children of the universe. In addition, a lot of energy in the universe is unaccounted for, which we pin down on dark matter and dark energy, but we’re running blind, since these haven’t been proved yet.

Call me a glass fully empty sort of a person, but I believe that every species, whether earthly or alien, plays a role in how events occur over time. Causality may or may not play a role in this. Time may or may not have an expiry date. Black holes may or may not have a light at the end of the tunnel (white holes, duh). We may or may not be a factor influencing space-time. Time is, after all, still an abstract topic for us, and while we think we have figured it out, we only know what we are able to observe, which is nothing. Look at the plus side. We know that nothing is definite, so we can bring big changes in life. After all, we are bugs on the cosmic playground of the universe, and could be squished any time, so why not live life like we are meant to, with pomp and circumstance?

By Shaunak Bakshi