All Perception is Fundamentally an Illusion

Most people who stare at the image below will believe the dark oval in the middle is growing larger. But, believe it or not, it is just an illusion – a static image.

According to a study published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, this illusion has something to teach us about how our brains and eyes collaborate to see the world. Researchers tested the illusion on 50 men and women with normal vision and found that those participants who had eyes with the strongest pupil dilation response had the greatest response to the illusion; while those with poor dilation response could not see it.

The pupils in the human eye are designed to automatically adjust to the surrounding light, dilating when it is dark so they can capture more light, and constricting when it is bright to prevent overexposure. Even though the hole in this illusion is not darkening, the perception or expectation in our mind that it should be darkening is enough to make our pupils respond.

Bruno Laeng, a psychology professor at the University of Oslo and an author of the study, says: “There is no reason that the pupil should change [while looking at this image], because nothing is changing in the viewers world, but something clearly has changed inside the mind.”

The researchers hypothesize that the illusion is deceiving because the gradient on the central hole makes it look to the viewer as if they are entering a dark hole or tunnel, which prompts the participants’ pupils to dilate. Our brains are making assumptions about what it sees based on past experience and is trying to predict and prepare our senses for what it thinks will happen next.

It takes time for light to reach our sensory organs and send the image to our brain. The brain then takes more time to process the image, make sense of it, and decide what actions to take based on the collected information. By the time our brain catches up with the present, time has already moved forward, and the user’s environment has most likely changed.

To minimize this image collection and processing delay, the brain may be constantly trying to predict a little bit into the future so that it can better perceive the present. Being fooled by this expanding hole illusion is not a flaw of the human species, but a feature. It is most likely built up from evolutionary history to help humanity survive.

The information we get from our senses is spotty and incomplete, so the brain has evolved over time to try to guess what is happening in the uncertain and ever-changing world – and to make decisions based on what is most likely to happen next.

People who possessed brains with the best ability to adapt and predict what is happening at any given moment most likely had an advantage over those that lacked the capacity to adapt. When the illusion image is communicated to the brain, it anticipates that the body will soon be entering a dark place and it responds by telling the pupils to begin dilating (so the body will be able to react sooner in case there is danger lurking inside that black hole).

Researchers tell us that everything we perceive is inconsistent with the physical reality of the world. It is not just that the information taken in by our senses can be misunderstood, it is also that there is a universe of information available in the physical world that is imperceptible to the human senses.

Consider light itself. The light our human eyes can detect is only a sliver of the total amount of light that’s out there. The 0.0035% of the electromagnetic spectrum we can see is referred to as visible light, but the other 99.9% percent of the spectrum consisting of radio waves, microwaves, infrared radiation, ultraviolet rays, X-rays and gamma rays are all undetectable by our eyes.

Electromagnetic Light Spectrum

Humans have cone-shaped cells in our eyes that act as receivers specifically tuned to the wavelengths in the narrow visible light band of the spectrum. Other portions of the spectrum have wavelengths too large or too small and energetic for the biological limitations of our perception.

Evolution has not endowed us with the ability to see beyond the visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum; although it is possible to feel infrared radiation as heat and employ other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum for practical uses, such as X-Ray medical imaging.

But we carry on with our lives, oblivious to the huge spectrum of electromagnetic waves present all around us. Humans have managed to survive and reproduce despite our limited view. It’s a good thing that visible light was adequate to help our ancestors detect predators that would do them harm.

But imagine if our eyes were able to detect other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum — our universe would be unrecognizable. We could glean so much more visual information if we were able to see in the radio, infrared or even X-ray regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Bees and butterflies are examples of organisms that can detect Ultraviolet radiation. Some flowers have special markings that can only be seen in UV light. Bee and Butterfly eyes are able to view this electromagnetic radiation like lights on an airport runway, to find their way to the flower’s nectar. Snakes have special sensory organs on the front of their heads that let them ‘see’ infrared waves, which they put to use with particular effectiveness when hunting for warm-blooded prey.

Consider our sense of sound. Humans can detect sounds in a frequency range from about 20 Hz to 20 kHz, though the upper limit in average adults is closer to 15–17 kHz (because humans lose some high-frequency sensitivity as they mature).

That range of sounds allows humans to hear many of the sounds produced in nature, but not all. Any frequency that is below the human range is known as infrasound. It is so low that it may be detected only by a creature with big ears, such as an Elephant or by specialized instruments designed by scientists to detect the low frequency sounds that precede avalanches and earthquakes. Any frequency that is above the human frequency range is known as ultrasound. Bats and Dolphins use ultrasound frequencies as high as 200,000 Hz to help them navigate via echolocation.

Most dogs can hear sound frequencies as high as 47,000 to 65,000 Hz which is far too high-pitched for humans to hear. That is why dogs can be trained to detect when their owner is about to experience a seizure. Dogs ears are also much more sensitive to loud sounds than ours, which is probably why fireworks, thunderstorms and vacuum cleaners send them scurrying for cover.

Consider our sense of smell. Humans have 396 olfactory receptors which are employed to help us pick up scents. Almost all animals, however, have a larger number of olfactory receptors than humans (rabbits have 768 olfactory receptors) which provides them with an excellent ability to smell. 

Among the animals with the greatest sense of smell are bears whose sense of smell is 300 times better than humans and is capable of detecting a deceased animal from up to 20 miles away; elephants who can smell water sources from up to 12 miles away; sharks who can smell the presence of a drop of blood in almost 100 liters of water; and bloodhounds whose sense of smell is 2,100 times better than that of a human’s and can detect trace amounts of drugs and explosives inside packages.

When you consider all these blind spots in our senses, it is obvious that humans live in a world in which many sights, sounds and smells exist that are beyond the ability of our limited senses to detect; and those that we can detect can be compromised by our overactive minds. It’s enough to make you think that all human perception is, fundamentally, just an illusion; or as Bob Dylan keenly observed “All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie“.

It could well be that we are each living in our own virtual reality world, bound by the limitations of our physical senses and the tricks employed by our minds. Dr Laeng believes we each do live in a virtual reality world. Much of what we see is an illusion, but we are not really being tricked – he believes the visual illusions help to reveal the mismatches between what our eyes see and what our mind’s eye thinks is happening.

So what lessons can we take away about how to live our lives knowing the limits of our senses and the tendency of our brains to trick us into seeing what it wants us to see.

One lesson is that we should remind ourselves that things are not always what they appear. It is possible for two people to witness the same event but still give contradictory descriptions of what they saw; even though they are certain their description of events are true. Knowing that our eyes are susceptible to being tricked should make the criminal justice system wary of judging guilt based solely on the testimony of eye-witnesses.

Another lesson is to be careful of letting our minds be swayed by our pre-conceived biases and political opinions. If we each live in our own virtual worlds then we need to be careful of falling into the trap of accepting information that matches our biases and opinions while discarding facts that don’t. If more people were careful to seek out an objective, agreed-upon, reality then maybe there would be less disagreement and discord in today’s society.

Finally, we should all be humbled and filled with wonder knowing that what our senses reveal to us is only a small portion of the great wide-world we live in. There is a whole universe out there beyond our human senses – a twilight zone if you will, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of the mind, one where there is so much more for us to discover.

We have a universe within ourselves

“Everybody has a little bit of the sun and moon in them… Everyone is part of a connected cosmic system. Part earth and sea, wind and fire, with some salt and dust swimming in them”

Suzy Kassem

Mankind has always possessed a deep curiosity about the ultimate existential questions of life: how is it that the world came to be and what forces in it led to my creation? Our ancestors, lacking scientific knowledge, made up supernatural creation stories to help them answer these questions and to explain the natural world that their limited human senses observed all around them.

Those of us living today are fortunate because we are on the threshold of becoming the 1st generation to ever know in great detail, and with some confidence, the answers to those great questions. In the past decade the results of several major observational studies have brought a level of clarity and coherence to our understanding of the universe that we have never had before.

The pace of recent cosmological discoveries has been truly breathtaking; especially considering that it was less than 500 years ago when man first learned that the earth revolved around the sun and less than 100 years ago when astronomer Edwin Hubble proved that the universe actually contained more than 1 galaxy.

Thanks to images taken by the Hubble Telescope over the last 30 years; and the first astonishing images produced by the recently launched James Webb Telescope – which sits a million miles away in space – astronomers now have the capability of looking back to the beginning of time – to see the actual birth of galaxies.

The Webb Telescope is 100 times more powerful than the Hubble, with six times more light collecting capability, enabling it to see objects in much finer detail. The increased clarity of the new images have led astronomers to increase their estimates of the number of galaxies in our universe from 200 billion to 2 trillion!

James Webb photo of galactic cluster SMACS 0723, the deepest infrared image of the distant Universe ever produced. The image covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground. It reveals thousands of galaxies, some of which are as far away as 13.1 billion light years. The bluer galaxies are more mature ones, containing many stars and little dust. The redder galaxies contain more dust, from which stars are still forming. Courtesy of NASA.

What really sets the Webb Telescope apart is its ability to focus on the infrared portion of the light spectrum. Most telescopes are designed to see only the small sliver of visible light emitted by stars. The problem with the visible light spectrum is that it gets blocked by the abundant amount of dust and gas that is floating around the universe.

Infrared light is invisible to the human eye but makes up much of the light that comes our way from the universe. The infrared spectrum of light can see past all that dust and gas, which allows astronomers to look with unprecedented detail at some of the earliest and faintest celestial objects in the universe, ones that were born over 13 billion years ago.

Another incredible capability of the space telescope is its ability to detect exoplanets. An exoplanet is simply a planet that orbits a star outside our solar system. Exoplanets have been historically difficult to find because they are very far away, do not emit any light, and are typically much smaller than the stars they orbit.

But astronomers have discovered innovative indirect methods to detect these exoplanets by measuring the dimming of the light of a star that occurs as a planet passes in front of it or by monitoring the spectrum of a star for the tell-tale signs of a planet’s gravity pulling on it and causing its light to subtly Doppler shift.

Using these planet detection methods, astronomers have estimated that about 1 in 5 “sun-like” stars in the Milky Way Galaxy have an earth-sized planet located within its habitable zone. This would calculate to more than 11 billion potentially habitable Earth-sized planets in our own galaxy to discover!

Incredible as it may seem, Astronomers can detect not only the presence of an exoplanet, they can also employ powerful scientific instruments on the telescope, called spectrographs, to identify the unique signatures of specific molecules in their atmosphere.

When an exoplanet passes in front of its host star, a small fraction of the stellar light passes through the exoplanetary atmosphere, where different molecules absorb light of some wavelengths while light of other wavelengths can pass through unhindered. By measuring the fraction of stellar light able to penetrate the atmosphere at different wavelengths, the chemical composition of the atmosphere can be determined.

Turning the intensity of light measured at different wavelengths into graphical signatures allows scientists to measure the chemistry in the atmosphere of distant planets and detect the presence of water or methane molecules which, if found, could provide evidence that there is – or once was – life on the planet.

I had a passing interest in star gazing when I was a boy. I would set up my cheap telescope in my back yard and focus on different celestial objects, not really knowing what I was looking at. My interest in astronomy faded over time as I became busy with the business of life. After my retirement, however, I decided to pick up my old hobby by signing up for one of the science classes produced by the Great Courses called Cosmology: The History and Nature of our Universe. The course re-kindled my interest in the cosmos and stoked my imagination about the wonders of the universe.

Here are just a few of the the things the course covered that seem incredible to me and filled me with wonder:

We can travel back in time…

Even though Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity tells us that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, the universe is so vast it still takes light from distant galaxies a long time to reach the earth. By observing light that originated far away we are travelling back in time to see how the Universe looked when it was younger (we can’t know for sure what distant objects in the universe look like today because their light is not yet observable to us).

Light travels at a speed of 186,282 miles per second, which equates to 5.88 trillion miles per year – which scientists define as the distance light travels in 1 light year. Light from any celestial object that is more than 5.88 trillion miles away from the earth takes more than 1 earth year to reach us. Earth’s average distance from our sun is 93 million miles, so its light only takes about 8.3 minutes to reach us.

The telescopes we have today are powerful enough to observe the first light that came from the hot glowing gas of the Big Bang itself, that moment in time approximately 14 billion years ago, when astronomers believe that our universe came into being.

The brilliant light from this hot gas is observable to scientists via what is called the cosmic microwave background and it shows astronomers a view of the Universe approximately 400,000 years after the Big Bang. Immediately after the Big Bang, the Universe was so hot that the gas was foggy and impenetrable, but as time passed expansion cooled the Universe, and after 400,000 years the temperature dropped enough for the fog to clear and for atoms to form.

So, looking outward (and back in time), our vision is limited by this bright, glowing wall of fog. As the light crosses the expanding Universe, its waves are stretched 1000-fold and arrive as microwaves. So the microwave background reveals the universe in its “pre-embryonic” state right after the Big Bang!

The Laws of the Universe are constant…

Einstein once famously said “The most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it is comprehensible.” How is it possible that humans could have developed the mental capacity to understand such a vast and utterly remote cosmic realm? How can something that emerged out of the atoms and evolutionary forces of Nature come to comprehend itself?

The answer is that we all are, in a sense, children of Nature. Much of the character of the universe is all around us here on earth. We’ve evolved in an astronomical setting that is itself beholden to the same laws of physics that span all of space and time. The laws of physics are the same everywhere, and there is much that is cosmic even here on Earth. For example, humans have evolved within Newtonian space and time, which is identical to 99% of cosmic space and time, and this has resulted in our ability to comprehend things like location, distance, size, light and speed.

As far as we know all objects in the universe obey the same universal laws of nature (gravity, motion, thermodynamics, electricity, energy). Because we have studied these topics here on earth for centuries, we can apply our understanding of these laws to everything we observe in the universe.

The nature of matter is constant…

Not only are the laws of physics the same throughout the universe, so is the nature of matter. As far as we know the atomic elements that make up all the matter on earth exists everywhere throughout the universe.

Us, and everything around us, are made of atoms. Atoms are incredibly tiny and numerous. There are about 100 kinds of atoms that we have discovered, each making a particular chemical element, such as hydrogen, carbon, gold, or uranium. The elements are ordered in a periodic table so that elements with similar chemical properties line up in columns.

The Thermonuclear fusion occurring inside stars causes them to become “atom factories.” The huge weight of a star makes a hot, dense core like a furnace: The star burns lightweight fuels into heavier ones. This fusion burning releases energy, which heats the core further and keeps the reactions going. Heat also moves up to the surface, which glows brightly. In the core, the ash from one reaction becomes the fuel for another.

For example, hydrogen burns to helium, which then burns to carbon, and so on. Reactions further down the sequence need ever-higher temperature, because nuclei with more protons repel more strongly. Ultimately, how far along this sequence a star gets depends on its mass; stars of higher mass
can make heavier elements.

How do these freshly made nuclei get out of the star’s core and into the matter that makes up our universe? The remarkable journey starts when the nuclei are brought to the surface in huge, hot currents of gas. On their way up, at lower temperature, the nuclei acquire their quota of electrons and become atoms. These atoms are finally ejected into space when the fuel runs out, the nuclear reactions cease and the star dies.

We are made of star stuff…

When the astronomer Carl Sagan said his famous line that each of us are made of star stuff, he was reminding people that much of the matter of our bodies was created within the stars long ago. He wanted people to know we are marvelous and our story is, too.

Modern cosmology doesn’t just deal with huge things like stars and galaxies; it must also consider the creation of atoms and the planets and people that atoms make. It is a story that takes us from the hearts of atoms to the hearts of stars, and out into the galaxy to watch the birth and death of stars and planets.

It is complemented by the the billion-year mechanism that slowly coaxes these tiny atoms into assembling plants and animals and people – and even the brain reading this sentence. We are no less a part of the Universe than any star or galaxy.

The atoms in you and me probably drifted around in the interstellar medium for 1 or 2 billion years before joining a denser cloud. Within such clouds, small pockets collapse to form stars, and around these stars, disks of dust and gas, which in turn form planets.

In the case of the Earth, some atoms ended up in a spherical ball, with a barren, cratered surface heaving with volcanism. During the next 4.5 billion years, an extraordinary transformation took place, enabled by atoms’ amazing ability to stick together and form molecules which can combine in complex ways.

It’s easy to feel small and insignificant when you consider the vastness of the universe and the timescale of celestial events, especially in comparison with our meager human lifespan. We become awestruck while looking at telescopic images and realizing that a single picture representing one minuscule sliver of the universe is filled with thousands of galaxies, each with billions or trillions of star systems and each of those with its own planets.

Deep field images like those produced by the Webb telescope show us spectacular moments frozen in time. We can see galaxies wrap around one another, colliding and tearing their dusty, star-riddled arms apart in a violent ballet. It’s no wonder that people all over the world stare in wonder at the majesty of it all.

Space exploration is one of the few things that our divided society can agree is overwhelmingly positive. It reminds us of our inherent connection with the universe, but it can also lead to feelings of a profound sense of insignificance – showing us, on a grand scale, just how small we are.

However, despite the vastness of the Universe and our small place in it, we should not feel insignificant. A diagram plotting mass versus complexity would show that living things are enormously more complex than astronomical objects. If objects shone with a brightness in proportion to their complexity, then galaxies would be dim light bulbs, while our brain alone would be a beacon of light visible across the whole Universe!

When you think about it that way, we are very special – and we should be grateful to the stars above that we are one of the most complex things the universe has ever made!

“We are survival machines… blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes”

The picture of human nature painted by Princeton Professor and science journalist Robert Wright in his book “The Moral Animal: Why we are the Way We Are – the New Science of Evolutionary Psychology” is not a very flattering one.

According to Wright, the human animal spends its life desperately seeking status because we crave social esteem and the feel-good biological chemicals that flood our bodies when we impress people.

Though we claim to be independent thinkers who hold fast to our moral values no matter what the consequences, the reality is that we become self-promoters and social climbers when it serves our interest.

What generosity and affection we bestow on others has a narrow underlying purpose, aimed at the people who either share our genes or who can help us package our genes for shipment to the next generation.

We forge relationships and do good deeds for people who are likely to return our favors. We overlook the flaws of our friends and magnify the flaws of our friend’s enemies. We especially value the affection of high status people and judge them more leniently than strangers. Fondness for our friends tends to wane when their status slips, or if it fails to rise as much of our own and we justify this by thinking “He and I don’t have as much in common as we used to“.

Wright says that we do all these things, mostly unconsciously, because of the evolutionary roots of human behavior that have been passed down throughout the 2 million year evolution of the human species – these behaviors are programmed into our genetic molecules.

The book explores many aspects of everyday life while looking through the lens of evolutionary biology. It borrows extensively from Charles Darwin’s better-known publications (including On the Origin of Species) to provide evolutionary explanations for the behaviors that drive human social dynamics.

Below are just a sample of the provocative questions Wright tackles in his book:

Why are humans more monogamous than other animals?

The birth cycle of the human species, unlike most animals, takes a long time. Human mothers carry their babies for 9 months and their children require years of caring and development before they are capable of living independently.

Due to the long birth cycle, women only have a limited number of chances to pass on their genes to the next generation (about a dozen or so during their lifetime). Men, on the other hand, have unlimited chances to pass on their genes given enough supply of women.

From a male evolutionary point of view it makes sense that their genetic drive would be to have sex with as many females as possible. However, this is not in the best interest of the female. To increase the chances of survival, and the well being of her children, it was in the female’s best interest to select male partners who were high in a genetic trait that Wright calls “Male Parental Investment“. Men with high parental investment traits have loyalty characteristics that make them more likely to invest in a monogamous relationship with a single woman and their children.

Men who women perceived were more likely to stick around after their baby was born became more appealing to women and therefore more likely to successfully mate with them. As a result of this preference by females, the trait for high male parental investment evolved over time to become more genetically prominent in men across thousands of generations.

Why is a wife’s infidelity more likely to break up a marriage than a husband’s?

Jealousy is a natural emotion for human beings, but a 1982 experiment which asked participants to picture their partner either having sex with another person or forming a close emotional bond surprisingly showed that men and women experience jealousy very differently.

For the men, picturing their mate having sex with another person led to feelings of intense rage and anger while the idea of their mate being close friends with another male didn’t bother them as much. Women, on the other hand, showed the opposite reaction. They were much more distressed with the idea of their partner forming an emotional attachment with another woman than they were with the idea of one-time sexual infidelity. 

Wright attributes both of these responses to a natural built-in evolutionary reflex of the human species. It is the male’s unconscious desire to propagate their genes that drives their sexual jealousy. Picturing their partner in a sexual act with another man was enraging to them because of the possibility that another man could impregnate their partner, potentially resulting in them rearing a child that had another man’s DNA.

For females, it is not so much the thought of their mate having sex with another female that is upsetting to them; it is the danger that her mate will form an emotional bond with another woman and it will lead to him withholding some of the resources that her man provides to her and her children (so that he can share them with the new woman).

What makes a family prefer some children over others?

Wright claims that evolution has a role in influencing which child and specifically, which gender children the family prefers. Evolutionary psychologists explain that parents will tend to favor the child/gender that has the greater potential to carry on their family’s genes.

This ability to pass on genes historically differed based on what social class the family came from. In a poor family of low status, it was usually the girl who had a greater chance to marry “up” into a family that was wealthier. In wealthier families, it was the boys who were favorites to spread their family’s genes because of their power to find any woman or even multiple partners.

In a study of medieval Europe and nineteenth-century Asia, anthropologist Mildred Dickeman reported that killing females before their first birthday, was much more common among rich, aristocratic families than it was among poor and low-class families. And rich families much more frequently gave inheritances to their eldest son rather than their eldest daughter.

This evolutionary influence still carries on today. A 1986 research study of the island families in Micronesia found that low-status families spent more time with their daughters while higher status families spent much more time with their sons.

Why do humans have morals?

Why is it that humans seem to exhibit a higher sense of morals than other species? Is it because we are conditioned to do what’s right from a very young age, or is it something we are born with? If you ask an evolutionary psychologist, they’ll say that humans behave in a moral way simply because it helps us to fulfill unconscious Darwinian urges for the survival and propagation of our species. 

Our moral behavior is an evolutionary instinct from our past that helps us to survive while enhancing our image. In essence, doing good things for other people is to our advantage because it establishes a debt in our favor that we can cash in at a later date when we need help. For example, if you give food to someone who is desperately hungry, they are much more likely to assist you in the future when you need help to survive.

Wright refers to this concept as “reciprocal altruism“. Our altruism is not selfless. We will readily do good things for other people when it will improve our image and standing in the community or raise our overall social status.

On the other hand, we are not so quick to help others when doing good for others carries no benefit to us. It is clear that human moral sentiments are used with brutal flexibility, switched on and off in keeping with our self-interest.

Evolutionary Psychologists conclude that there is scientific evidence that what we do can be explained by the evolution of our species and the unconscious urges we have to pass on our genes. Altruism, compassion, empathy, love, conscience, the sense of justice — all of these things, the things that hold society together, the things that allow our species to think so highly of itself, can be shown to have a firm genetic basis.

That’s the good news. “Given that self-interest was the overriding criterion of our design, we are a reasonably considerate group of organisms”, says Wright. The bad news is that, although these things are in some ways blessings for humanity as a whole, we need to keep in mind that they didn’t evolve for the “good of the species” and aren’t reliably employed to that end.

Although I found this book thought provoking and many of its insights fascinating, I still like to believe that we are more than just animals doing things instinctually or robots running a program that was downloaded into us. I believe we are all endowed with a spirit that makes it possible for us to rise above our nature and resist the urges of what Biologist Richard Dawkins calls our “selfish genes”.

In the movie “The African Queen“, there is a scene where Humphrey Bogart claims that he can’t change his bad behaviors because “it is only nature”; but Katherine Hepburn responds smartly to the captain’s statement by saying: “Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.”

May you experience all the benefits and wonder of our miraculous genetic past, but also have the strength of spirit you need to overcome our built-in selfish instincts and motives. If you can do this you will become more than human!

Industry is the Enemy of Melancholy

I was fortunate to retire from my traditional work career at the relatively young age of 56. Retiring early had become a goal of mine ever since I observed how much my father enjoyed his 30 year post-work life. My father was perfectly content to leave the working life behind and fill up his days with fishing, tending his vegetable garden, solving the daily crossword puzzle, taking naps and watching the home town Sports teams on his television.

When the time came for me to retire, I had an idyllic vision of spending my days in similar fashion. Finally, after 56 years, I was looking forward to being my own boss – thrilled to have the opportunity to wake up every day and do whatever it was that interested me. I believed that every day would feel like Christmas!

And those first few months of retirement really were magical. Gone was the stress of having to be available 24/7 to my company’s sales and management teams who were battling to close million dollar deals, gone was the daily 3 to 4 hour commute in bumper-to-bumper traffic, and gone was the chronic sleep deficit.

It was goodbye to all that. What replaced it was the pleasure of deciding which book to read from my list of “books I always wanted to read“, fly fishing in the beautiful rivers of New England, taking long rides on my electric bike, spending quality time with my grandkids, and attending stimulating concerts and plays with my wife.

Something begin to happen, however, that I was not expecting about six months into my retirement. As the novelty and thrill of being retired began to subside I began to notice that I was experiencing melancholy moods and moments of soul searching. I was spending time reflecting on topics like past loss, the certainty of my physical and mental decline, and the uncertainty of how future generations will deal with the big existential challenges the world is facing.

Without the rigors of work to occupy my attention, my mind was set free to wander where it wanted to go and to my surprise I discovered that it often wanted to contemplate dark and doleful topics. I was not that concerned about these sometime melancholy moods because I reasoned that it is one of life’s natural reactions to harbor feelings of both happiness and sadness; and I remembered the wise old grandmother who once said: “A good day is a laugh and a cry“. Still I wondered why my pensive thoughts were increasing in frequency at a time in my life when I expected to be most content.

Then I happened to read about a study conducted by Harvard psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert which could help to explain the phenomenon I was experiencing. These researchers developed a smartphone app that allowed them to collect the thoughts, feelings, and actions of a broad range of people at random moments as they went about their daily activities.

Using the app, Killingsworth and Gilbert asked people what they were doing and how happy they were while doing it. They sifted through 25,000 responses from more than 5000 people and reported that 46% of the people were thinking about things other than what they were actually doing at the time (in other words, they were daydreaming about something other than what they were doing). They discovered that those people who were daydreaming typically were not happy; while those who were fully engaged in their activity were the happiest. 

The researchers wrote that unlike other animals, human beings spend a lot of time thinking about what is not going on around them, contemplating instead events that happened in the past, might happen in the future, or will never happen at all. This “stimulus-independent thought” or “mind wandering” appears to be the brain’s default mode of operation.

Although this ability is a remarkable evolutionary achievement that allows people to learn, reason, and plan, it apparently comes with an emotional cost. “We see evidence that a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind,” they said in their report. The bottom line is that we’re more likely to think negative thoughts when we let our minds wander.

Maybe that is why people who are waiting in line or stuck in traffic appear to be more irritable. And maybe my melancholy moods have increased in frequency since leaving work simply because my mind is no longer required to spend 10+ hours a day focused on the demands of my job.

This study confirms that many philosophical and religious traditions are on to something true when they teach that happiness is to be found by living in the moment, and by training their practitioners to resist mind wandering and concentrate on the here and now. Yoga teachers and those teaching meditation practices usually stress the importance of “mindfulness” or “being present” for a good reason — because when we do, it usually puts us in a better mood.

When I look back at my work career, I can see now that those moments when I felt most fulfilled was when I was in the middle of product development activities, being part of a team inventing electronic test solutions to solve complex manufacturing challenges. During those moments all the powers of my mind were fully engaged in solving the problem at hand and there was a sense that the results of the team’s collective work would have a positive impact on the company, our customers, and to a certain extent, society in general.

William F. Buckley put his finger on the unique ability that meaningful work has in preventing the onset of depressive feelings when he wrote “Industry is the enemy of Melancholy“. Simply put, if we are busy doing work that requires a focused mind it becomes difficult for the mind to wander and contemplate spirit dampening topics that are likely to cause the blues.

I happened to listen to an online homily about work that touched on a similar theme from a spiritual point of view that was given by Bishop Robert Barron. Bishop Barron made the point that our very being is deeply influenced by our actions and that the kind of work we do has a lot to do with the kind of people we become.

People who have no work usually struggle with depression because our sense of dignity often comes from work. Those who suffer from unemployment feel not just the financial burden of a lost paycheck, but also the loss of dignity brought about from the loss of their livelihood.

When you are feeling down one of the things psychologists recommend is to get to work on a project. It tends to make you feel better because work engages the powers of mind, will, creativity, and imagination and we become awakened when we give ourselves over to a project.

It doesn’t have to be a grand or complicated project. In fact, Bishop Barron mentioned that he found that one of the things that brings him the most satisfaction is doing the dishes. His day is usually filled with meetings and intellectual activities, so it is a relief for him to do some simple physical work at the end of the day. It brings him satisfaction to make order out of a dirty kitchen and to see everything clean and in its place when he is done.

The Bishop referenced this lyric from Bob Dylan’s song “Forever Young” to emphasize that work is a blessing and that souls can not fully prosper when their hands and feet are idle.

“May your hands always be busy, may your feet always be swift, may you have a strong foundation when the winds of changes shift”

Bob Dylan; Forever Young

Not all work is physical, though. Pope John Paul II categorized different kinds of work for the faithful. There is physical work (the work of the body), intellectual work (the work of the mind), spiritual work (the feeding of one’s soul), and moral work (charitable work on behalf of the poor and mistreated). When we are attentive to each of these categories of work in our daily life, it is then that we best fulfill our divine potential and become collaborators with the purpose of God.

I like that idea. May we all come to see our work, in all its different manifestations, as collaborating with the purpose of God and as bringing us into a more perfect union with a higher power.

There is no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing

Humans have reached a point in their evolution where they can use technology to manufacture artificial climate silos in their homes, cars, and workplaces that insulate them from the effects of uncomfortable weather conditions. Even on the field of play, athletes labor under precisely controlled environmental conditions designed to prevent their performances from being disrupted by wild card weather elements.

This capability to create our own ideal environment is a relatively new phenomenon. It was only 250 years ago when the first efficient wood stoves were invented and only 100 years ago in the 1920’s when cars started to be mass produced. My mother who is 93 grew up in a house that had no indoor plumbing or home heating (except for the kitchen stove). The first new car I bought in 1982 did not come with air conditioning.

Back then, weather conditions were a big deal because you couldn’t avoid them. It was not really possible to separate life’s activities from the daily whims of Mother Nature. By necessity, people were exposed to the elements every day and had to learn to adjust their lives according to the ever-changing weather conditions.

They never knew what surprise weather conditions they would have to face when they woke up and would have been astonished at the advances in the meteorological sciences which gives us the capability to predict future weather events.

Today, we take it for granted that we can get accurate weekly, daily and hourly weather forecasts for any location in the world; but the value of this foresight is diminished by the fact that most people don’t even bother to check weather forecasts any more because our technology can overcome the weather. The outside weather now has very little impact on our life.

I was not sheltered from the weather when I was growing up. I had a paper route that required me to get up before sunrise to deliver newspapers to the homes in my neighborhood. Spring, Summer, Winter and Fall under hot, cold, rain or snowy conditions I delivered those papers. I walked to school on the other side of town in all kinds of weather conditions. I camped out with my friends in their backyards, at the city playground, and at the town cemetery. I spent many hours out in nature fishing, hiking and trapping with my father and brothers.

It is a shame, I think, that most people try to avoid having any direct exposure to the elements. I think the avoidance of what many people refer to as “bad weather” has taken some of the fun, excitement and wonder out of living. Some of the most memorable moments in my life have occurred when I stepped outside to embrace the elements head on.

Moments such as:

• Laughing while running with my children through the puddles on my street in my bare feet and shorts during a rain storm that broke up a prolonged heat wave.
• Paddling down a frosty river in an aluminum canoe during a cold and windy November afternoon to help my older brother check his trapline – my hands and feet numb from the 10 below zero wind chill.
• Walking home from a card game at a friend’s house during the great Blizzard of 1978 and losing my sense of direction in the whiteout conditions.
• Riding around with my Dad in a DPW snow plow, cleaning up the streets of the city after a big snow storm.
• Fly Fishing in the middle of a rain storm, catching one trout after another, only stopping when a bolt of lightning suddenly came down out of the sky and struck a tree on the other side of the river, setting it on fire.
• Walking home from my job late at night in the middle of a light snow flurry and being mesmerized by the big snowflakes doing a dance as they floated slowly down illuminated by the parking lot flood lights.
• Listening to the rain fall on the roof of my tent while camping – the repetitive sounds of the rain drops lulling me to sleep.
• Playing soccer with my colleagues after work during the steaming dog days of summer and drenching ourselves with water (and cold beer) to cool down.
• Standing in the face of gale force winds at the top of Mount Monadnock while doing some Fall hiking – the temperature 50 degrees cooler at the top than it was at the base of the mountain.

Sure, I was wet and cold or uncomfortable from the sun, heat and wind during many of these moments; but that is what made the moments even more memorable to me. We become so used to our creature comforts and living within such a narrow range of climate conditions, that it becomes remarkable to us when we choose to step outside and expose our bodies and our senses to something new and different.

I’m glad that I was taught not to fear bad weather, otherwise I never would have gathered first hand experience of the fury and majesty of our remarkable planet. I am in agreement with Alfred Wainwright who once wrote “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing”.

Wainwright was an author, illustrator and naturist who devised the popular Coast to Coast walk in England.  A shy and unhappy kid, Alfred hated to be inside. To escape, he began walking up to 20 miles at a time; and creating detailed maps and drawings of his local area and all the places he visited in England.

Wainwright believed that the precious moments of life are rare and to be treasured:

“The precious moments of life are too rare…we should hoard them as a miser hoards his gold, and bring them to light and rejoice over them often. We should all of us have a treasury of happy memories to sustain us …to be stars shining through the darkness.”

He also believed that direct exposure to nature in all its forms was one of the the surest pathways to create happy memories:

“Oh, how can I put into words the joys of a walk over country such as this; the scenes that delight the eyes, the blessed peace of mind, the sheer exuberance which fills your soul as you tread the firm turf? This is something to be lived, not read about. On these breezy heights, a transformation is wondrously wrought within you. Your thoughts are simple, in tune with your surroundings; the complicated problems you brought with you from the town are smoothed away. Up here, you are near to your Creator; you are conscious of the infinite; you gain new perspectives; thoughts run in new strange channels; there are stirrings in your soul which are quite beyond the power of my pen to describe. Something happens to you in the silent places which never could in the towns, and it is a good thing to sit awhile in a quiet spot and meditate. The hills have a power to soothe and heal which is their very own. No man ever sat alone on the top of a hill and planned a murder or a robbery, and no man ever came down from the hills without feeling in some way refreshed, and the better for his experience.”

Alfred Wainwright

So if you want to create new perspectives and feel a powerful stirring in your soul, I suggest you take Mr. Wainwright’s advice and find yourself some suitable clothing that allows you to get out and experience the weather in all its forms. Be one of the people who feels the rain and not one of the crowd who just gets wet!

3 a.m., Hello My Friend

My sleep patterns are a mystery to me. I do not understand why they frequently change or why I so often find myself waking up in the middle of the night, usually at 3 a.m. I have difficulty falling back to sleep even when I practice the usual tricks that have helped put me to sleep in the past (quiet music, meditation, prayer). When those tricks fail me, I eventually rise from my bed to work on some boring task until such a time that my body and mind feel ready to sleep again.

Apparently I am not alone in experiencing periods of interrupted sleep. Sleep experts report that around a third of the population has trouble sleeping and difficulty maintaining continuous sleep throughout the night. I wonder if many of them, like me, have more than a passing familiarity with the 3 a.m. hour.

The author Ray Bradbury had something to say about 3 a.m. in his dark fantasy novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes:

“Three AM. Charles Halloway thought, it’s a special hour. Women never wake then, do they? They sleep the sleep of babes and children. But men in middle age? They know that hour well. Oh God, midnight’s not bad. you wake and go back to sleep, one or two’s not bad, you toss but sleep again. Five or six in the morning , there’s hope, for dawn’s just under the horizon. But three, now, Christ, three A.M. Doctor’s say the body’s at low tide then. The soul is out. The blood moves slow. You’re the nearest to dead you’ll ever be save dying.

Sleep is a patch of death, but three three in the morn, full wide-eyed staring, is living death! You dream with your eyes open… you lie pinned to a deep well bottom that’s burned dry. The moon rolls by to look at you down there, with its idiot face. It’s a long way back to sunset, a far way on to dawn, so you summon all the fool things of your life, the stupid lovely things done with people known so very well who are now so very dead  – and wasn’t it true, had he read it somewhere, more people in hospitals die at 3 A.M. than at any other time…?

Ray Bradbury, “Something Wicked This Way Comes”

Why do many people feel afraid or uneasy about the time between midnight and sunrise – especially 3 a.m.? Is it some embedded memory of the horror novels and films we consumed in the past or is it an instinct left within us from our distant ancestors who had to battle nocturnal predators for thousand of years?

For starters, 3 a.m. is sometimes referred to as The Witching Hour, the time of night when some believe the veil between life and death is at its thinnest, allowing spirits and ghosts to travel more easily between the two worlds. The time between 3-4 a.m. is also thought of by some as the Devil’s Hour. The Catholic Church in 1535 forbade activities during the 3-4 a.m. hour because Jesus was crucified at 3PM – and the inverse of that would be 3 a.m. – making it an hour of demonic activity. The number 3 can be used to make a mockery of the Holy Trinity, also making it an ideal time to carry out acts of evil.

Over time, fear of the Witching or Devil’s Hour became common amongst large groups of people, so foul meaning was attached to it. If we’re always waking up disturbed at 3 a.m. then something dark and ominous must be at fault. I have a friend who shared with me that he becomes anxious if he happens to wake up at 3 a.m. and he has to get down on his knees and pray the Rosary in order to calm his spirit . Even those who do not fear spirits or ghosts seem to believe that nothing good really happens at 3 a.m.

My background in engineering has conditioned me to look for scientific explanations to mysterious phenomenon rather than the actions of sinister spirits, ghosts and demons from the shadow world. My research into the topic has revealed that human biology and evolution may have something to do with our often confounding sleep experiences, as well as our tendencies to wake up in the middle of the night.

For most people, 3 a.m. comes along right about the time our body is coming out of a REM phase, the moment of our deepest sleep; when our heart rate slows, our body temperature drops, and our brain turns off as many functions as possible so it can repair itself and so we can get truly deep rest. If we happen to wake up suddenly at the end of an REM phase, we are going to feel very disoriented. The natural reaction to these strange feelings is fear and unease because we can’t help but feel panic when we wake up feeling unlike anything we ever feel when we are conscious.

These nighttime awakenings are distressing for most sufferers, but there is some evidence from our recent past that suggests a period of wakefulness occurring between two separate sleep periods was normal. Throughout history, various medical texts, court records and diaries mention instances of segmented sleep – commonly referred to as “first” and “second” sleep.

In Charles Dickens’ book Barnaby Rudge (1840), he writes:

“He knew this, even in the horror with which he started from his first sleep, and threw up the window to dispel it by the presence of some object, beyond the room, which had not been, as it were, the witness of his dream.”

Anthropologists have documented that bi-modal sleeping was common in preindustrial Europe when sleep onset was determined not by a set bedtime, but by whether there were things to do. Historian A. Roger Ekirch’s book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past describes how households during this time period retired a couple of hours after dusk, woke a few hours later for one to two hours, and then had a second sleep until dawn.

Ekirch noted that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th century as the Industrial revolution took hold. He believes the practice of consolidated nighttime sleeping started in the upper classes in Northern Europe and filtered down to the rest of Western society over the next 200 years.

Interestingly, the problems of reported insomnia start to appear in literature at the same time as accounts of split sleep start to disappear in the late 19th century. So it may be that modern society is placing unnecessary pressure on individuals to seek continuous consolidated sleep every night – even though there are natural biological tendencies in the human machine towards bi-modal sleep patterns.

Although we aspire to have consolidated sleep, this may not suit everyone’s body clock or work schedule. Perhaps some of us are more suited to the segmented sleep pattern practiced by our pre-industrial ancestors. In fact, some forms of segmented sleep are still accepted in today’s society. Cultures that allow for an afternoon siesta, for instance, acknowledge that our internal body clock lends itself to such a schedule because we naturally experience a reduction in alertness in the early afternoon.

A number of recent studies have found that split-shift sleep schedules provide comparable performance benefits as one big sleep, as long as the total sleep time per 24 hours adds up to around 7 to 8 hours. Several shorter sleeps during the course of a day can be just as beneficial for our health, performance and safety.

So my recommendation for all of you who have trouble sleeping is to forget about demons and witches, forget about manufactured sleep drugs, forget about trying to achieve what society tells you is the perfect consolidated sleep pattern – and simply find a sleep pattern that works for you and one that matches your own unique rhythm.

If you can manage to do that then maybe you will, like me, come to see 3 a.m. less as a foe and more as a friend!

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Time out of Mind

Time is a familiar but mysterious concept. We think about and use it every day, yet it is difficult to describe what it actually is. Saint Augustine puzzled about time when he wrote, “What is time? If no one asks me, I know. But if I wish to explain it to someone who asks, I know not.”

Poets and philosophers throughout the ages have eloquently tried to capture how their senses perceive Time by using phrases such as; “Time is fleeting“, “Time waits for no man“, “Time heals all wounds” and “Time stands still“. None of these phrases, however, succeed in advancing a deeper understanding of the mystery that is Time.

My background in engineering led me to wonder about the concept of Time beyond the typical artistic and philosophical musings – to explore what science actually had to say about the mysterious subject. So, with curiosity and time on my hands, my search led me to an online course called the Physics of Time. In this month’s blog I will share some of the interesting insights I learned about Time from that course.

Time can be examined from two separate scientific perspectives. The first is a biological perspective which deals with internal human body clocks and how the brain processes and perceives time. The second is an external cosmological perspective which has to do with the origin and evolution of time in the known universe.

Human bodies and brains have a natural way to recognize the passing of time because we have predictable biological clocks – like breathing and the beating of our hearts – that exist within each of us .

With a heart rate of about 60 beats per minute and a lifespan of roughly 70 years, the human heart will beat approximately 2 billion times. Chickens have a much faster heart rate of about 275 beats per minute, and live only 15 years – but their hearts, in the end, will also have 2 billion lifetime heartbeats.

Science has observed that the hearts of most animals will beat somewhere between 1-2 billion times but there is an inverse relationship between heart rate and lifespan. In general, the faster the heart rate, the shorter the life span. I wonder if those animals who live fast and die young perceive time any differently than us longer life-span creatures.

Besides the heart and the breath, Neuroscientists have identified three kinds of timekeeping devices inside our brains. One part of the brain keeps track of what time of day it is, another part keeps track of how much time has passed while doing certain tasks and still other parts of the brain serve as alarm clocks for events set to happen in the future.

Different neuron pulses working together in the brain help us to perceive the passage of time. These pulses can be affected by stimulants, such as caffeine, and depressants, such as alcohol which interfere with neurotransmitters in ways that make our internal clocks speed up or slow down.

We experience other biological processes that don’t repeat themselves but still contribute to our awareness of time passing: We age; we think; we make choices; we plan for the future; we remember the past. All these different aspects of time are crucial to what it means to live our lives and be human beings. Perhaps the most important aspect of our awareness of the passage of time is the accumulation of experiences.

People have observed that when they are focused on a task, they don’t pay as much attention to the outside world or to their internal clock. This causes their internal timekeeping devices to slow down while the outside world speeds up. For example, I am surprised how quickly the hours elapse while I am engrossed watching my favorite sports teams compete in a big game.

In contrast, when we are bored and not focused on any one task, the opposite effect happens. Our internal clock seems to go faster while the outside world seems to slow down. For example, when I am stuck on an airplane with nothing to do, the plane trip seems to last forever.

Scientist have reported that subjects in high-stress experiments recollect that time slowed down for them during stressful events. One theory behind this phenomenon is that the more memories we accumulate, the more time we think has passed. Our brains, when we are in a high-stress situation, does its best to record absolutely everything. It accumulates a huge amount of data, so when you think about the situation afterward, you have more memories to leaf through—and, therefore, it seems as if more time has passed.

This theory gets support from the fact that time seems to pass more quickly as we age. Summer seemed to last forever when we were children, but it seems to rush by as we get older. It may be that when we were young in the summertime, such activities as going to the beach were new to us, but as we get older we experience fewer interesting new things. Our brains don’t take in as much new information and we create fewer memories than a child would; thus, time seems to pass more quickly for us compared to when we were a child.

To understand Time from a cosmological perspective is difficult because it requires the human mind to reckon with complex physical laws of the universe that were set in place at the beginning of the universe – and to consider hard to grasp time spans that are billions of years in length.

Most physicists believe Time began approximately 13.8 billion years ago with a singular event known as the Big Bang – the so called “birth” of the universe – a point where space underwent rapid expansion and the laws of physics as we understand them came into being. The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, so it is a substantial fraction of the age of the universe.

At the beginning, all matter in the universe was densely packed and its temperature was extremely high. About 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe cooled sufficiently to allow the formation of subatomic particles and simple atoms. Giant clouds of these primordial elements later coalesced through gravity into matter, eventually forming early stars, galaxies and the other astronomical structures that are observable today.

The feature of matter that is inextricably linked with time is called entropy. Entropy is a way of talking about the disorderliness of “stuff” in the universe. It is the natural tendency of things to lose order over time. For example, a whole egg is very orderly, but if we break the egg, it becomes disorderly; if we scramble the egg, it becomes even more disorderly. A scientist would say that the egg moves from a low entropy state to a high entropy state.

In the long run, nothing escapes the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Entropy is the only quantity in the physical sciences that seems to imply a particular direction of progress, sometimes called an arrow of time. As time progresses, the second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases over significant periods of time. Entropy measurement can be thought of as a clock and things only happen in one direction of time – not the other. The past is always defined to be the direction in which entropy was lower.

The pull of entropy on matter is relentless. Everything decays. Disorder always increases. The increasing entropy of our universe over time underlies all the ways in which the past is different from the future.

It is the reason why you can disperse the scent of perfume from a bottle into a room, but cannot put the scent back into the bottle; the reason why you can mix cream into your coffee, but cannot un-mix it; the reason why cars eventually break down; the reason you remember the past and not the future; the reason you are born young and grow older; the reason you can make a choice about what to have for dinner tomorrow, but not about what to have for dinner yesterday.

When energy is in a low-entropy form, it can do useful work. When energy is converted into a high-entropy form, it becomes useless. We have fossil fuels sitting in the ground with energy in them in a concentrated form. We can extract the energy to do useful work because the entropy of the fuel is low. Once the fuel is burned it is converted to its high entropy form and it can no longer perform useful work. You can heat a room in your house by burning coal, but you cannot cool off a room in your house by unburning fuel and turning it into coal.

The common thread in these examples is irreversibility: Something happens in one direction, and it is easy to make it happen, but it does not happen in the other direction, or if it does, it is because we put effort into it. It does not spontaneously happen. Things go in one direction of time. They do not go back all by themselves.

It’s not time itself that treats the past, present, and future differently; it’s the arrow of time, which is ultimately dependent on all the “stuff” we have in the universe. It is the arrow of time that gives us the impression that time passes, that we progress through different moments. It’s not that the past is more real than the future; it’s that we know more about the past. We have different access to it than we have to the future.

Stephen Hawking combined the biological and cosmological elements of time into three distinct “arrow of time” components. First, there is the thermodynamic arrow of time—the direction of time in which disorder or entropy increases. Second, there is the psychological arrow of time. This is the direction in which we feel time passes—the direction of time in which we remember the past, but not the future. Third, there is the cosmological arrow of time. This is the direction of time in which the universe is expanding rather than contracting.

At the moment of the Big Bang our universe was in a condition of very
low entropy and very high organization. That’s what got time started in the way we experience it in our everyday lives. Ever since the Big Bang, we’ve been living out the process by which the universe increases in entropy. That’s the influential event in the aftermath of which all humans live.

At this point in time the universe is in a condition of medium entropy. It is today that we have galaxies and stars and planets and life on those planets. Complexity depends on entropy; it relies on the fact that entropy is increasing. We don’t have to worry about how complexity can arise in a universe that is evolving. The simple fact that entropy is increasing is what makes life possible.

Scientists have confirmed that the universe continues to expand. Distant galaxies are moving away from us, and the farther away they are, the faster they are receding. The amount of space between us and the other galaxies is increasing.

The second law of thermodynamics predicts that the total entropy of the universe will continue to increase until it reaches equilibrium. The universe will calm down and become colder and colder. Everything will scatter to the winds, evolution will stop and we will have empty space once again. It is speculated by some that after a googol (1 x 10 to the 100th power) years from now, our universe will be empty space and that empty space will last forever.

There are some however who believe instead that multiple universes exist. According to this idea, the Big Bang was an event that is quite small in the history of a much larger multiverse. We see only a finite bit of the universe;
perhaps farther away than what we can see, the universe looks very
different. The fact that our own universe is inflating gives some credibility to this idea.

Those who talk about the possibility of a multiverse are simply observing that there is a barrier in our universe’s past beyond which we cannot see.
Is there a finite amount of stuff out there? Is there an infinite amount of stuff that works exactly like the stuff we can see? Or is there an infinite amount of stuff and conditions that are very different from place to place? Until scientists can answer these questions, they can only speculate.

Regardless of which theory you believe about how the universe will ultimately evolve, we can say that all scientists agree that the universe is a complicated system, embedded in an environment that is far from equilibrium and that there is something called entropy that characterizes the organization or disorganization of us and our environment and results in the evolution of matter.

No discussion of Time would be complete without mentioning
one of the most important contributions ever made to science – Albert Einstein’s 1905 publishing of the Theory of Special Relativity. Before Einstein, physicists thought of time as simple and absolute, a steady linear flow separate from the three dimensions of space.

Einstein showed that time is not simple and absolute but is actually influenced by speed and gravity. He stated that there is a link between motion in space and the passage of time. Space and time are fused together in what Einstein called 4 dimensional space-time.

Einstein theorized that Time runs more slowly for an object if it is in motion. Scientists proved this by synchronizing two atomic clocks and placing one clock in a stationary location and the other clock on a plane that was flown around the world. Upon landing, the clocks were no longer synchronized, the one that had been on the plane was milliseconds behind the one that was stationary – indicating less time had elapsed for the moving clock.

With Einstein’s relativity discovery, there is no such thing as one moment of time throughout the universe that everyone agrees on. Space and time are not absolute; they are relative – which means what we call time can be different for different observers.

How much time passes for an object depends on how you move through the universe. The network of satellites in space that carry precision atomic clocks for the global positioning system must be constantly compensated because they “lose” seven microseconds per day compared to ground clocks that are operating in a “slower time stream”.

The faster something moves, the “slower” it ages. Physicists call this effect time dilation. Theoretically, under its influence, a space voyager could return to Earth after a 20-year voyage to find himself hundreds of years in the future. To carry time dilation to its absolute extreme—as we approach travel at the speed of light, it is possible that time stops and immortality begins.

Space-time, Einstein’s four-dimensional reality of our universe, is a collection of an infinite number of events, just as space is a collection of an infinite number of points indexed by the three dimensions of space. Just as we think of all space as being “out there”, Einstein said we should think of all time as also being out there: “The difference between Past, Present, and Future is only an illusion, however persistent“.

I must admit that my deep dive into the science of time raised as many questions as it answered – but that doesn’t mean my study was a waste of my time. On the contrary, I gained some wisdom about life and walk away with a list of important things to remember that will help me make the most of whatever time I have left.

• Remember that we are very, very small – Mankind is like a grain of sand in the vast Sahara Desert, occupying an infinitesimally small place in the universe. The astronomer Carl Sagan said that earth is nothing more than “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam and our time amounts to nothing more than a blip“. Compared to the enormity of the cosmos and the eternity of time, it is wise for us to keep an attitude of humility, remembering the short duration of our life and the insignificance of our daily struggles.
• Be grateful we are alive – In a world full of matter, humans have been fortunate to form over time into a remarkable collection of atoms that are alive, conscious and capable of love and memory. As far as we know, we are the most advanced form of life in the wide universe. In his book Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut expresses wonder and gratitude for the gift it was to have become what he called some of the “sitting up” kind of mud in the universe.

“God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, “Sit up!”
“See all I’ve made,” said God, “the hills, the sea, the
sky, the stars.”
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look
around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God.
Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly
couldn’t have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way I can feel the least bit important is to
think of all the mud that didn’t even get to sit up and
look around.
I got so much, and most mud got so little.
Thank you for the honor!
Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.
What memories for mud to have!
What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!
I loved everything I saw!
Good night.
I will go to heaven now.
I can hardly wait… Amen

Kurt Vonnegut “Cat’s Cradle”

• Embrace change – Entropy is a natural law, we can’t repeal it or wish it away. Entropy is what helps us to evolve and it is what makes life complex and interesting. So, rather than fight change – which is inevitable – it is healthier for us to embrace the change in our life and determine how we can best use it to evolve in ways that make us better.
• Be Mindful of the Present – Sometimes it can be impossible to focus entirely on the present because it comes with an echo of the past and a foretaste of the future. Our minds typically refuse to stay in the present, constantly regretting a past that can never be undone or anxiously awaiting a future that may never arrive. The mind can be trained with Mindful Meditation techniques that teach us how to live “outside of time”, focusing our attention on each passing moment, slowing our perception of time and relieving us of our anxiety over past and future events.
• Get busy and try something new – Time moves more slowly for a body in motion and we perceive the passage of time as moving slower during those moments when we are creating new memories. That tells me if I want to make the most out of time I should be pursuing activities that keep me moving and learning new things.
• Don’t rule out the Divine – There is agreement among scientists that the universe started in a dense state of very low entropy and that it is expanding over time towards higher entropy. The questions that still puzzle scientists however is what triggered the Big Bang event and why did the universe start in such an unlikely state of low entropy? As a man of science and a man of God, I am somehow comforted when all questions cannot be answered and there is room in the discussions for us to ponder the possibility of a divine hand in the origin of the universe.

May you enjoy your own personal time travel trip – here’s hoping that you live every moment and love every day before your precious time slips away.