11:11
“Why do we remember the past
but not the future?”
— Stephen Hawking,
A Brief History of Time,
Ch. 9, “The Arrow of Time”
For another look at
the arrow of time, see
Imaginary Time: The Concept
“Imaginary time is a relatively simple concept that is rather difficult to visualize or conceptualize. In essence, it is another direction of time moving at right angles to ordinary time. In the image at right, the light gray lines represent ordinary time flowing from left to right – past to future. The dark gray lines depict imaginary time, moving at right angles to ordinary time.”
Is Time Quantized?
Yes.
Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that time is in fact quantized and two-dimensional. Then the following picture,
from Time Fold, of “four quartets” time, of use in the study of poetry and myth, might, in fact, be of use also in theoretical physics.
In this event, last Sunday’s entry, on the symmetry group of a generic 4×4 array, might also have some physical significance.
At any rate, the Hawking quotation above suggests the following remarks from T. S. Eliot’s own brief history of time, Four Quartets:
“It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern,
and ceases to be a mere sequence….
I sometimes wonder if that is
what Krishna meant—
Among other things—or one way
of putting the same thing:
That the future is a faded song,
a Royal Rose or a lavender spray
Of wistful regret for those who are
not yet here to regret,
Pressed between yellow leaves
of a book that has never been opened.
And the way up is the way down,
the way forward is the way back.”
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