The Nature of Time

This post was started a while back and has been sitting around waiting to get finished. Just thought I'd send it out.

* * *

I watched that show Journeyman last night. I have to say it's one of those shows that snuck up on me, but I like it a real lot. I think it had something to do with the fact that it came on after Heroes, and with Heroes being so bluntly spectacular and being an ensemble show and all that, Journeyman was naturally overshadowed.

Anyway, the basic premise is that it's a less campy Quantum Leap. This guy jumps backward through time and apparently fixes problems in the time-stream continuum. I say apparently because he doesn't know why he jumps, and has to use his instinct to determine why he's sent back and how to fix it. Each episode is open-ended but there is the over-arching story of how this is happening to him, and, to a lesser extent, why.

In the episode from last night, the lead character accidentally alters history by dropping a digital camera in the past. A side effect of the result - that technology advances on Earth at a much accelerated rate - is that his only child, a son, was never born, and instead he has a daughter. He spends the rest of the episode trying to get the camera back.

Another plotline, relating more to the over-arching story, is that he finds another "traveler." Up until now, he'd thought he and his ex-lover were the only ones (he runs into her on his "trips" and they sort of work in tandem). He helps this man find a woman who'd been his wife in another timeline and somehow "remind" her of a life that had never been. It was very interesting and got me thinking about the nature of time.

I've long had a theory that time is one moment, and it's only our limited perception that forces us to experience it over a length that we consider as time. My theory is that as we evolve, we'll be able to at first see backwards or forwards in time in some limited scope, and eventually we'll experience time as a moment. Think of how different life would be if at its inception everything about it was already known. What kind of concerns would you have at this stage? There would be no more fretting about what's to come, there would only be the knowledge of how a lifespan played out.

This theory kind of negates the idea of free will, which is scary, but I often think a man is measured not by what happens in his life, but how he deals with those things. If your consciousness were to be able to ruminate on the nature of your whole life before you live it, wouldn't you be able to think upon only metaphysical things? I know it sounds odd, but it's kinda how my mind thinks. The universe is full of contradictions, why not this one?

Another theory I have, this time about consciousness, is that when one dies (or, in some cases of extreme universal awareness as a result of profound meditation) one's consciousness immediately expands from one's physical location in infinite directions in an instant. At that instant, one experiences all of the universe and understands it for the first time.

These two theories sort of combine to form a third theory about the nature of multiple universes. If one imagines any infinitely small particle as having a "destiny," that particle travels through time-space in one line in one universe, but at the same time, at every infinitely small fragment of time, that particle goes in an infinite number of different directions in both space and time. Sort of imagine fireworks, except instead of the explosion being finite, it's infinite, and instead of their being one, they happen constantly and forever, creating basically a mesh of interweaving singularities.

Now, it's been so long since I started this that I don't know where I was going with it, but I'm pretty sure I had a point at some time.