The Moment

What physicists are working towards, although not all of them know it, is that solidity exists only in the fraction of time known as the moment and the moment is real only phenomenologically. You recall your chair as solid throughout the time you have been sitting on it but what you recall are the moments in which it was solid. Its solidity is a bridge to the future which is constantly collapsing just behind the moment and passing into being just ahead of it.

Where is the solidity of your chair a fraction of a second ago? Where is that now? To illustrate this arcing away of reality in all dimensions from the moment or reality coalescing toward it consider the moment represented as a magnet, with the force lines round it as both the decay and coalescence patterns of the phenomenological moment, which know neither past nor future.




Trouble is, you’ll still have to eat and pay bills. Those moments do not arc away. Sleeping rough feels solid all the time.

8 comments:

Smoking Hot said...

Jim, are you trying to do my head in? lt's Sun morning and l'm not prepared for such posts especially as last night l was listening to music with my good friend Jack Daniels (who seems to have gone!)

l may return to your post after copious amounts of coffee :)

Wrinkled Weasel said...

Smoking, I think it is a Haiku.

Jim Baxter said...

Smoking,

Exactly - It's Sunday. Thought for the day. Well, my kind of thought for the day.

Katabasis said...

This reminds me of Gilles Deleuze. Have you ever read him?

Jim Baxter said...

Katabasis,

Never, no. I was thinking more of Everett.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Everett_III

But thanks for the reference. I shall make the usual start. Some link to Spinoza it seems?

Bob said...

There has been some success in time travel which would allow us to go back in time a fraction to investigate if the moment really existed and whether our chair was really solid. They flew a concorde a few years ago and went faster than sound for an hour and were able to show a small timeslip between where they should be in time and where they actually were.
The magnet is an excellent indicator of time as the magnetic force lines can be observed to decay ( using graphite dust patterns) over time. The metal needs to be recharged with an electrical current periodically or it will eventually lose all of it's magnetism.

Anonymous said...

Or reality is merely a holographic projection from the edge of the universe. For all I know, reality is as real as a dream.

Jim Baxter said...

Anon,

Yes, there is that theory too. The whole thing is played out on the surface and the stuff in the middle has no say.

I blame Einstein. Things were simpler before he came along.