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MEMORY FROM PASSING TIME
par Altay Dagistan
As you read these words, time is passing and somewhere, someone is creating memories. As the Spanish novelist Carlos Ruiz Zafón says: "We are what we remember".
Introduction
This text is based on the passage of time, on memory and on the real experience we have of it. In my writing, rather than trying to explain that time is a single content (future=present=past), I've chosen to investigate what time means to different people, cultures and disciplines, and of course, to me. We can compare all these points of view with each other to see the notion of time in a wider context and thus benefit individual understanding.
I researched "time" for two personal reasons:
One of them is that, being of Turkish nationality, born in Istanbul, I was raised by my parents as a Muslim boy who believes in God, heaven and hell, angels and the devil. I was absolutely certain that I was an eternal being. One day I would die, and then my soul would live on in paradise. However, as I grew older, I became more aware of myself. I began to wonder about religious beliefs and realized that eternal life was unproven; indeed, apart from writings in certain books (like the Bible or the Koran), there was no proof of it.
What's more, I wondered how the
the brain, which led me to ask myself many questions about existence. Indeed, the brain is the organ that makes us what we are. Without the brain, even if it's not functioning properly, we're nothing. When the entire system of space works perfectly like clockwork, how can we believe in "magical" phenomena? Without any promise of eternal life, time has become the most important thing for all of us.
The second reason is that, with the fear of one day becoming non-existent, I think more and more about my memories. The more the years go by, the more I have memories that make me aware of the passage of time. These memories make me think about my life and make me nostalgic. My memories give me the desire and curiosity to understand the reality of time. Because it's impossible to answer this question in just one way, I've been researching the many ways of understanding "what's time?
happens".
We'll be exploring the concept of the passage of time as it relates to science, cultures and religions, art and social values. Rather than dividing each point of view along neat lines, I've chosen to disperse them, as I believe that in the concept of time, all aspects work together and are all connected. At the same time, it's also important to understand each aspect individually. The first phenomena we need to think about are change and memory. They form the basis of the passage of time. Next, we'll look at the connection between memory, the passage of time and material objects. Humans are social beings, so objects made and/or used by humans hold information about the passage of time. Inevitably, this encourages forms of communication. Since everything changes over time, evolutions occur. As human beings evolve, so does communication. We communicate in many ways, including art.
Art is one of the oldest methods of communication. Many of the creations of ancient peoples such as the Egyptians, the Ancient Greeks and the Mayans have survived to the present day. For example, the harvest god "Kronus" (also known as Chronos, god of time) is the personification of time in Greek mythology. Kronus watches over the weather and looks after the seasons. Time consumes everything, and according to mythology, Kronus devours his children. This is a metaphor for the nature of time. Today, we can observe this god in the form of ancient sculptures. He is often depicted with a beard, holding a sickle and looking wise.
Like us, these civilizations also thought about time. They all had their own ideas about time, and they all had their own ways of measuring it. Since the creation of man, people of different cultures and religions have had their own views on the notion of time. These peoples sometimes have the same vision of time, and sometimes divergent visions. For example, for some, time is infinite, while for others it has a beginning and an end. Man is the only living being aware of the passage of time. That's why we've built clocks and organized our way of life around time. Today, thanks to technology, we have a better understanding of the passage of time. He can measure time with extreme precision by observing electrons.
This precision in measuring time enabled man to understand, through experience, that the passage of time could be different from one individual to another. The reason for this difference is speed and distance. For example, vision takes time to appear because light has a certain speed. To observe the past, we can simply look up at the night sky. When we look at the sky, we see it as it was in the past, because light takes a certain time to reach the Earth.
Like the stars we observe in the night sky, we live in the past constantly, because the present takes an infinitesimal amount of time to transform itself into the past. The longer we live, the more memories we have. Knowing that our time is limited, we look to the past and think about the future. We try to make our choices for the best possible future. Each choice defines the next and sets our lives on a different course. We are constantly moving towards a tomorrow, and tomorrow moves at the same speed and at the same time as we do. Yesterday remains in
the past as a memory. At some point in our lives, we all notice that time flies. Since we live in an industrial society, the line between the future and the past is less and less visible, because living in a routine has minimized social change. I believe that by thinking more about time, increasing our knowledge and broadening our vision of the passage of time, we can form a better idea of the world, improve our quality of life and make better use of our time.
Before you start reading the other parts of this memoir, I'd like to clarify my point of view on the concept of time. Time is existence itself. I don't look at the concept of time only as a process or a measure. It is part of universal nature.
It grows like a tree. What has happened so far is what makes us who we are. Although I find general relativity very interesting, I believe more in the Newtonian view of time. "Absolute time" is time that moves constantly, keeping the same speed, independently of other things. Time is a linear concept, with no beginning and no end. The hourglass may be the visual representation of my point of view. As "Isaac Newton" said, we are not able to perceive absolute time. In fact, we become aware of the passage of time through movements and changes (the sun, for example).
We are complex beings, and for us, the perception of the passage of time is much more than just movement.
of the sun.
Ordinary phenomena like water running off the pavement or the movement of leaves in trees keep us aware that time is passing. They give us information about short periods of time. To keep track of longer periods, we look at individual events in the past. In recent years, I've been particularly interested in comparing my past with my present. I'm thinking of my childhood. My childhood is very important for understanding time because it is the greatest contrast between my past and my present. Contrary to people who say that we have the same personality from childhood to adulthood, I personally believe that our mentalities change completely throughout our lives. We create a more perfected version of ourselves. Today, there's nothing left of the house where I spent my childhood. This house, which holds an important place in my memories. My hometown has been transformed beyond recognition.
I envy them, those people who find the same old house, the same street and the same neighbors when they go to visit.
to their parent.
I consider my childhood to have ended at the age of 6. The place where I lived until that age (1994) was home. After that, two important events occurred. First, my grandmother died and my family decided to make a deal with a contractor. They exchanged the family home for an apartment. The house was demolished and replaced by a new building. A few years later, my parents sold the apartment. The second event was school, which I never liked going to until the last day of high school. For me, school was a compulsory place where I wasn't free. I was obliged to spend most of my time there. I didn't feel free, so I was no longer a child. From then on, time began to pass much more quickly and my situation, which until then had been stable, became more unstable due to constant changes.
As I mentioned before, we are not able to track absolute time. We become aware of its passage through changes and movements. Much of this is visual. I question
visualizing the passage of time through the medium of graphics. Graphics are already familiar with time. It's used in calendars, clocks and watches, programs or in mediums that keep track of time like photo albums, postcards, annual reports, newspapers and books. I can manipulate objects from the past in a variety of mediums to tell stories. Resurrecting old photos, postcards and newspapers with new visuals reminds the viewer that one day the past will be transformed into the present. Although these objects are temporary, their effects are permanent.
The universe works in the following way: from the simplest to the most complex. Things like memories develop as a construction into versions more complex than their bases. The present form of a being is defined by its life history. The future is the passing of time. The difference between the future and the past is that we don't have memories of the future, as we do of the past. Memories show us that time has passed. As the future becomes the present, we create memories and send them to the past. In fact, without memories of time passing, we wouldn't be able to determine or understand that time has passed. To understand the changes in our world, we compare the memories of before with the memories of after. The world has been in constant evolution for 4,600 million years(1). Oceans turn into mountains, mountains into seas, rocks into rivers. But these changes take place so slowly that we don't notice them during our lifetime.
Since change is the key to the passage of time, let me add memory and recollection to my topic.
Memories are the human experience of time.
When I was a kid, I used to look at and reflect on the objects people left at home. These objects often made me nostalgic. The memory of these people was anchored in these objects, even though they were no longer there. These objects reminded me of people with whom I had or had had strong emotions. This was sometimes very difficult for me to deal with. I sometimes found it so unbearable to keep these objects that I had to throw them away. It wasn't until I was around 25 that I began to have more and more strength to accept the memories and physical evidence of the people in my life. At that time, I discovered that it was easier to forget people without physical memories. Objects left by other people are strong reminders.
Since our lifetimes are so short compared to the rest of the world, we needed a way to transfer our knowledge to future generations. So we learned to share our knowledge. Without the transfer of memory to matter, all our knowledge would have disappeared with each individual who died. Now, the passage of time is no longer a threat to memory and knowledge. The history, knowledge and thoughts of people who will perish because of the passage of time are now stored in
media such as books, records and photos. Thanks to these media, we've been able to transfer what we've achieved so far to future generations.
This allows collective work to be freed from the time constraints of all the people who live and have lived in the world. It's the evolution of information itself.
Change is essential to the notion of time.
Change is what makes it possible for the "moment" to pass. The greatest change for man is human evolution. I used to believe that humans didn't come from this world and weren't a part of nature. Because in this day and age, we're not physically capable of living in nature like animals. Our skins and bones are fragile, we're not very muscular, and we don't have the strength to survive.
nor fur to keep us warm in winter, nor claws.
Unlike us, all animals have the skills to survive in the wild. In the end, I changed my mind. Man wasn't always fragile. We became so through evolution. We've made machines, we've adapted to nature in our own way. We have also evolved in communication. The word communication comes from Communicare in Latin. Communicare means "to share". Since our inception, we have developed numerous methods of verbal and non-verbal communication.
I'd like to talk a little about the evolution of communication because I'm a graphic designer, so communication concerns me.
What interests me most is the era before digital communication, because I find the communication methods of that era more sentimental. I'll explain this aspect in more detail later.
In communications, every new development is a threat to old ways of communicating, tending to sideline or even forget them. For example, in 1928, Turkey changed its Arabic alphabet to Latin (the official language remained Turkish). This was one of Turkey's greatest achievements. On the other hand, the change of alphabet led to major cultural losses, as the next generation was unable to read Ottoman literature unless it was rewritten in the Latin alphabet. What's more, when computers arrived, most written messages, such as letters, gave way to digital data. Over time, old forms of communication die out, including radio. My mother often told me about the radio series. Today, there are hardly any. In our family albums, there are postcards and letters. Personally, I've never received a letter from anyone. However, I try to remember the past by keeping the postcards I may have received.
I find postcards a very unique way of communicating. Although it has some similarities to the written letter in terms of communication, it's not the same thing. The amount of information written on a postcard is less than on a letter.
Unlike a letter, a postcard contains visual information. People who are abroad when they send the postcard most often choose a postcard with the image of the city they are visiting.
The visual property of the postcard engages people's visual memory. Moreover, the choice of imagery represents
the taste and also the meaning the sender wishes to give to the postcard. With a few exceptions, we generally send postcards to people we love.
The person holding a postcard holds love in his hands.
his hand. Keeping postcards from the past means keeping
feelings in solid form. Even if the person
sent this postcard doesn't love us anymore, the love of the past is there, in the postcard. In a way, it's a way of collecting the love of passing time.
The oldest postcard we know of was sent in 1840 by Theodore Hook, a London writer. It was hand-painted and had a black stamp. He presumably sent it to himself as a joke to the postal service. The drawing was a caricature of postal service employees. The first postcard was printed in France in 1870 by Léon Besnardeau at Camp Conlie. During the Franco-Prussian war, Conlie was a training camp.
The coats of arms of the Duchy of Brittany were on either side of the
the postcard. The following year, the first postcard with a picture that functions as a souvenir was sent from Vienna. The number of postcards with images increased in the 1880s, thanks to the construction of the Eiffel Tower. This was the golden age of the postcard. Early postcards often featured images of naked women.
This type of postcard is better known as a "French postcard" because the majority were produced in France(2).
One of the most interesting artists I discovered while researching and writing this memoir is Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara. On Kawara lived between 1932 and 2014. On Kawara's work has a lot of influence on existentialism and he had an obsession with the passing of time. His way of recording his existence in time is very inspiring. On Kawara, on his project called "Je me suis réveillé" ("I woke up"), sent numerous postcards (around 1,500) between 1968 and 1989. The recipients of the postcards included such well-known artists as Sol LeWitt, Lucy Lippard and Kasper König. Each postcard bore the message "I woke up" and the time at which he woke up. The message was stamped (not handwritten). He sent two postcards from his location.
On Kawara traveled often. The 1,500 cards show the time he got up, the date and the artist's place of residence. It's an artist's way of keeping track of time and existence(3).
Deltiology is the study and collection of postcards.
This term was coined by Professor Randall Rhodes in 1945. There are a few clues to help us determine the era of a postcard. Postcards are usually sent a few years after they have been printed. Postcards printed by companies usually have the date of printing written on them.
What's more, we can guess the era by looking at the picture. The way people are dressed, the look of a place and a few other indications can suggest the era.
The world's largest collection of postcards is owned by Joe Tiberio. The picture postcards are almost all from the golden age of the postcard. They are collected by libraries,
collectors, schools, historical societies and genealogical societies. They are very important for research because they hold information about what a place looked like at a particular time.
A very interesting area of postcard collecting is the collection of postcards with city images - actual views of a city, a region.
The most interesting in this category are postcards with real photos. These are postcards printed on photographic paper. They are different from postcards created on the surface of the pressure plate. Postcards with real photos show real scenes from the past. Postcards printed on paper, on the other hand, can be altered by the creators. They do not necessarily show absolute reality(4).
In April 2015, a postcard was found in a "message in a bottle" that is 108 years old today. It is the oldest "message in a bottle" ever discovered. Ironically, the bottle had been found by an employee retired from the postal service. Between 1904 and 1906, 1020 bottles were thrown into the sea by the Marine Biological Association in England. The bottles were thrown into the North Sea. They were thrown in to prove research into the directions of sea currents. The postcard asked, in three languages (English, German and Dutch), for the bottles to be returned to the marine biologists' association(5).
We can't travel through time, but we can send messages to the future. A "message in a bottle" is one way of communicating with the future. Bottles are usually lost in the ocean. Years later, they can be found.
They contain information about people from another timeline. It's one of the nicest discoveries a person can make. The first known "message in a bottle" was left in 310 BC by Theophrastus, a classical Greek philosopher. He wanted to perform an experiment to show that the Mediterranean Sea was formed by the Atlantic Ocean(6).
The difference between the post, messages in a bottle, writings carved in stone and today's communication (instant messaging, texting and phone calls) is that instant communication doesn't give much information about the passage of time. For this reason
I'm much more interested in long-term communication than in instantaneous communication. Through communication
In the long term, we take our time writing and thinking about the message. We think about it more. We think about the person who will receive the message. We keep ourselves busy with the object. In a way, it's romantic. The recipient has an expectation. He's waiting for the message to arrive. It increases the value of the message. When she reads it, she's reading a message from the past.
She can only imagine the person's current state according to the content of the message. The postcard freezes this present moment and transfers it into the future. This kind of moment capture is unwanted, unlike art.
The things I've told you about so far are part of objective communication. Art, on the other hand, is part of subjective communication. Firstly, the methods we use to communicate change over time. Secondly, communication (objective and subjective) is the memory of time. The evolution of art (subjective communication) is different from the evolution of objective communication. Subjective communication is timeless. A 500-year-old sculpture is still an effective method of communication today. So are paintings. They can show us
the face of a King who has been dead for centuries.
Art is one way of visualizing time. For example, architecture is one of the fields of art, yet when I was younger, I wondered whether architecture could be an art or not. In the end, I decided "yes". I believe that if a structure carries a strong artistic influence, supported by a powerful and aesthetic idea, it can become art. As I've mentioned before, ancient civilizations also had their visions of time, and they expressed this through subjective communication. For example, the Mayans expressed their perceptions of time through their immense structures(7). I'll explain in more detail how these were created in the following section.
For the Maya, time is symbolized by architecture. Chichen Itza is a Mayan city in Mexico. Chi means "mouth", chén means "well" and Itza, "water witch" (8). Itza is the name of an ethnic group. They still exist today. They speak Spanish and Itza. They live in Guatemala. El Castillo aka "Temple of Kukulcan" is located in the center of Chichen Itza. It is a Mesoamerican pyramid site. All the features of this structure refer to time. There are 91 steps on the structure, and the structure has four sides. So 4 times 91 is 364, to which we add a step at the top, making 365, the number of days in a year(7). The structure visually represents the passage of time. A fascinating feature of this structure is that twice a year, a snake-like shadow descended on El Castillo. During sunset, the snake's shadow would wriggle down the staircase and join the snake's head at the foot of the structure. Another impressive structure with weather features is
"The temple of inscriptions". The structure has five entrances. On each entrance, there are hieroglyphic texts written in the Mayan language. The writings say that "time repeats itself, the events of the past happen again and again" (9).
There's a lot of wisdom in this text. If we look at the history of the world, we can see that all the things that have happened, all the wars, all the continental changes, the politics and even the social issues
are continually repeated.
The Mayans were obsessed with time. They were looking for ways to measure time. They didn't have clocks, so they used their environment to measure it.
The Maya had their own calendar. Their calendar consists of three separate calendars (Haab, Long Count and Tzolkin). They are used simultaneously. The days are identified by Haab and Tzolkin. Haab shows 365 days according to the sun. There are 19 months. There are 18 months of 20 days each and one month of 5 days. It has an outer ring with Mayan hieroglyphs representing each month. Each hieroglyph is associated with a character. Tzolkin has 260 days, corresponding to the time of pregnancy. There are 20 periods of 13 days for religious events and ceremonies. The days are numbered from 1 to 13. There are 20 hieroglyphs corresponding to the names of the days. The third part, "the long count" measures longer periods of time. This is an astronomical calendar. It measures what the Mayans called "the universal cycle". Each cycle has 2,880,000 days(10). The Mayans believed that at the beginning of each cycle, the universe was destroyed and then recreated (11).
The Mayans invented the most extensive and precise calendar of all mankind (12). They followed the movements of the sun, moon and planet Venus etc. to create complex but highly accurate calendars. They became aware of the cycles of nature, the planets and their own bodies, and used them to measure time. They were able to date the distant past and the future, and they did so without the use of technology. The Maya accepted the theory that past, present and future exist together(12). Like a racing car making laps around a circuit, the future and past (the road) always came back to the beginning (the present). The Mayans used a total of 17 different calendars. After years of research, Jose Argues discovered that "the scientific superiority and galactic sophistication of the Mayan calendars is due to the fact that they were based on a measurement and mathematical system very different from the time-keeping systems and devices we know or use in today's world"(12).
The Mayans didn't just measure time. They also believed in helping time to pass. They believed that time created space. They used the solar calendar and the sun's movements to measure the passage of time. They believed they had to feed the sun to help it pass through the sky(7). They made human sacrifices in the belief that they were feeding the sun with their blood.
Different cultures and religions have different views on time. In the first book of
In the Hebrew Bible called "Genesis", it is written:
"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, darkness was over the deep, and the breath of God hovered over the waters. Then God said: Let there be light. And there was light" (13). So, in the Jewish religion, time is not eternal. Before creation, time did not exist. In Islam, however, the opposite is true. In the Koran, it's written: "He does not give birth, nor has he been born".
This means that God does not have an existence that can be measured by time. So, Islam tells us that the notion of time is non-existent in metaphysics. This is also the case for Buddhists. In Buddhist belief, time has neither beginning nor end. Time is eternal, and temporality is an illusion. You could say it's relativistic. However, we humans cannot imagine life without time, because in our world, existence is based on time. Divine eternity and time are not the same.
For example, the sentence "God created time" is incoherent. If God had created time, this would mean that time did not exist at the time of his creation, but this cannot be, as God would not be a subject of the notion of time. An object of life that doesn't (yet) exist, such as a tree, can come into existence only after a certain amount of time has passed. A tree is born. We look at it this way because we accept objects of life only in terms of their forms. Before the tree was a tree, it was a seed. So, is the seed the origin of the tree? Before a seed became a seed, it was pollen, water and earth. So, is this the origin of the tree?
If we follow this process of metamorphosis, we can
to the creation of the world. But even the creation of the world doesn't tell us what its origin is, since the world was something else before it was the world. So today we can't justify the origin of anything, and according to this argument, time is eternal. So, time has a time and the time of time has a beginning. This idea is an indispensable creation of our conditioned mentality.
to time. In this case, there's only eternal darkness and a universe that doesn't exist for a place where time doesn't exist. It's so natural to think like this, given that we have no memory of before we were born. According to our memory, we didn't exist before we were born. We have no memories, no feelings. Since we think
for each individual, time only exists during their lifetime.
Since humans are aware that time passes, they measure it to organize their lives. What time is it? If you want to answer this question and you don't have a watch, you can look to the sky. The sky is a natural clock for observing the passing day. However, there are a few things you can do,
measuring the length of a day using the sky (the sun rising then setting) is not very accurate.
Since the creation of the world, the Earth's rotation speed has been slowing down. As a result, days are getting longer and longer. Today, we know that the Earth's rotation no longer takes 24 hours.
Scientists at the Westford Observatory in the USA measure the exact length of each day. They don't rely on the sun to measure this rotation. Using two identical telescopes, they measure the radio waves coming from space and examine the instant of time when the radio wave arrives, simultaneously with two telescopes placed at two different locations. First, the radio wave arrives at the telescopes at the same time. Then, once the Earth has rotated, the wave no longer arrives simultaneously at the two telescopes, so that they are no longer synchronized. After one complete revolution, the two telescopes are synchronized again, and the scientists stop the stopwatch. Thanks to this method, they were able to measure the exact duration of one Earth rotation. The rotation times recorded are different all the time. They are random, with shorter or longer rotations, but never exactly 24 hours. Scientists explain these daily changes by the influence of wind(7).
If we want to measure the passage of time accurately, we can consult the atomic clock. The atomic clock is the world's most accurate tool. It uses atoms to measure time. The atomic clock contains a rare atom called caesium. Around this atom gravitate electrons in several orbits. These move from one orbit
around the nucleus. As a result, they emit light. Light waves reach their maximum level 9,192,631,770 times per second. This number never changes(14). We can therefore say that it is an infallible metronome (it never stops, never changes and never goes wrong). This is why the atomic clock is so precise.
Atomic time therefore gives the exact definition of
the earth's rotation. Thanks to the atomic clock, the whole world can be synchronized (programs, navigation, communication).
Atomic clocks were used in a time experiment in 1974, to test Einstein's theory of relativity(15). In the "Hafale-Keating" experiment, two atomic clocks are set to the same time. One of the two atomic clocks is placed in an airplane, while the other is placed on the ground. After landing, the clocks were retrieved and showed different times(15). This experiment proved that by changing the speed of a three-dimensional movement, we travel in time. Each and every one of us, by virtue of our lifestyle, is more or less in motion on a daily basis. The notion of time thus becomes relative, depending on the individual.
According to Einstein, the closer we are to an enormous solid mass like the Earth, the more curved space-time becomes (16). As a result, time passes more or less quickly. On the scale of the Earth, this effect is small, but in the universe it can be much greater, as there are much larger planets. They bend space-time so much that time passes much more quickly (one year on one of these planets can be equal to 10 years on Earth), a subject used in the science-fiction film "Interstellar". In this film, the main character and his crew are sent into space to find a new habitable planet to ensure the survival of mankind. On the first planet they visit, every hour they live is equivalent to 7 years on Earth. Why is this? Because the planet is close to a vortex called gargantua, which causes gravity anomalies on the planet. It's called "gravitational dilation effects" (17). This is due to Einstein's theory of "General Relativity". The main character
and his team spent 3-4 hours on the planet over a period of 23 years.
on Earth.
We are constantly living in the past. Even light takes time to reach our eyes. When we look at the sun, we don't see what it looks like at the moment we look at it, we only see the memory of it. Since sunlight takes eight minutes to reach Earth, we can only see what it looked like eight minutes before. When we look up at the sky in the middle of the night, it's possible that some of the stars have long since died. We are then looking at their past (18). By looking at the sky, we can look back in time. There's an image called the "ultra-deep field". The world's most powerful telescope, Hubble,
took a photo of this small patch of sky at night in 2004. In this image, we can leap back in time 13.2 billion years(19). We can even see galaxies that no longer exist. Imagine if they had found a habitable planet in one of these galaxies. If we had a super-telescope that could see any street on Earth, we could observe past life.
For centuries, we've been creating a multitude of devices such as analog clocks, digital watches and various calendars to keep track of the passage of time. What's more, we've always looked for different ways to do this. We've used art, accumulations, recordings, documentation, architecture and other methods. With so many possibilities, we leave our mark on the passage of time, while at the same time accumulating for ourselves.
the traces of time to understand its passage, using art (mentioned above), communication inscriptions and even actions.
Why do we do this? Why do we record
time using a variety of methods? Human beings are the only creatures we know who are aware that their time is limited. This creates anguish and confusion in people's minds, driving them to justify their existence through time. Time is precious and counted. Lost time will not return. In the animal kingdom, each species has a limited lifespan. Mice, for example, only live for two years. They live fast and they die fast. They have the ability to become parents just three months after birth. The lifespan of a human being also has a natural duration in time.
Humans have sought immortality for generations. Although we haven't yet succeeded in finding it, some scientists believe it is possible. Human beings are born with a certain number of cells. Over time, these cells die and diminish in number.
These cells do not regenerate. That's why we die(20). But what if we could manage these cells?
One theory is that everything, including time, began with the Big Bang. So, before the Big Bang, the notion of time didn't exist(21). A South African physicist, Neil Turok, disagrees with this theory. According to him, if something
generated the Big Bang, this means that time already existed(22). For him, the fourth dimension is the distance between two parallel universes (23). When parallel universes collide, they become one and the same universe, filled with the energy of the collision. For him, time has always existed. The measure of time is infinite. We divide time into days, hours, seconds, milliseconds... These divisions of time never stop. We keep asking ourselves this question: Why are we constantly moving into the future?
Einstein's theory states that the past, present and future all exist simultaneously(24). Time is the fourth dimension(25), and we move in it, just as we move in the other three physical dimensions. It's like walking or going somewhere by train. The past is the road we've just taken, and it becomes irreversible.
The future is already here, it's already known. We just have to move forward to reach it. The rule is that we can only go forward.
Physicist Fay Dowker asserts that space-time is made up of small elements, just like sand(7). A day's passing is not an isolated event, but the result of many individual events, with grains of time arriving one after the other. So, if time were sand, each grain would be an individual trial. These trials can accumulate over time. This accumulation generates the construction of our universe, as mentioned above. Thus, the sum of all these individual trials shapes time. This means that the future is not decided in advance. It evolves as we go about our lives. This theory is closer to the theme of my dissertation.
We make immutable choices throughout our lives. They're immutable because we can't go back. However, not all the decisions we make are irreversible. In fact, there are some choices we can go back on again and again. Those we can't can lead to critical moments. Since time does not allow us to change them, our lives follow the line of our previous choices. A single decision can influence the rest of our lives.
For example, if a person has to choose between two different career paths, his choice will have repercussions throughout his life. He will be more likely to meet one woman rather than another. He or she will then start a family with his or her career choice as a starting point, which will have an influence on his or her descendants and, more broadly, on a large number of individuals in the generations to come. The initial choice is therefore crucial not only for the individual concerned, but also, over time, for an exponential number of people.
One day, a young woman meets a young man and a few years later they get married. I like to capture the moment a few minutes before they meet. He's in an apartment talking to his friends, not imagining for a moment what's going to happen, not knowing who's coming. As she climbs the stairs, the young woman can't guess that with every step she takes, she's getting closer to the moment that will change her life forever. This is the magic moment. I imagine this moment again, creating a dream in my mind, because I knew in that brief moment what awaited them both. The passage of time requires not only choices, but also the intervention of other people who will influence the story of our lives. What's more, these encounters will change the history of both parties.
Photographer Alec Soth worked on a project entitled "How couples met (26)". With Stacy Baker, who invited him to join in research on the subject, they visited a retirement home to take photos of married couples, listen to their stories and look at their wedding photographs. The aim of the project was to explore why some couples stay together despite the passage of time, and to see what enduring love looks like. One of the stories was about Mary and Georges. They met at a country-western club called "Sahara" in Kentucky. When they met, Georges was an alcoholic. He drank 54 beers a day. He was in debt to the tune of $9000. The following year, Mary offered to help him pay off this debt and kept her promise. During their marriage, once when he was drunk he threatened to kill Mary and her two children, but Mary and the two children escaped and the swat team came to the house. Mary took him back, however, and over time things got better. Georges stopped drinking, he hasn't touched a drop of alcohol since, and against all odds, they've stayed together. At the end of the day's shooting, Stacy told Alec that the dating stories weren't all that interesting, but what was by far more exciting was the fact that they'd stayed together. Another couple named Joe and Rose-Anne; as with all the other couples, they were asked to show an old photo of their wedding. Simultaneously they gave exactly the same photo. Two people, holding a single memory, together, for decades.
Our sense of time is that the past did happen and exists in our memories. Experiments show that a sense of self (being aware of one's own existence) is necessary before children develop memory formation for events that have happened to them. Donna Rose Addis, Professor at the University of Auckland, wondered whether there was a link between the way we remember the past and the way we imagine the future. Through her research and experiments, she discovered that the neural activity employed by human beings when recalling the past turns out to be relatively similar to that employed when imagining the future(27). The reason being that we humans attach pieces of our memory to create an idea of the future. This research was published in 2007. More recently, they have discovered that imagining the future is a much more intensive process than remembering it, perhaps because imagining the future is the result of new mental constructs that require new coding than that which exists when we remember the past (28).
Our past gives us the ability to plan the future. We can think about past events and how they might have been different. This allows us to reflect on our future choices. We remember things we value. It's memory that can also keep track of time, for example, being able to remember what an average person looked like today, but also what that person looked like yesterday. Nevertheless, the passage of time has negative effects on memory; as we age, our memory begins to decline (29).
We worry a lot about tomorrow, because we think about yesterday. We refer to "tomorrow" as the day after today. Scientifically speaking, "tomorrow" is
the start of the next 12 hours, until the next 12 hours. However, in our social life, we experience a slight difference. Generally speaking, "today" is defined as the time we are awake until we go to bed. The notion of "tomorrow" doesn't vary from person to person, since in the end, everyone needs to sleep. If we meet again tomorrow, we'll meet again after a lapse of time defined by the act of sleep; which will have made us aware that a new day is beginning. However, tomorrow cannot exist, because once our mind has arrived there, for it it's the present (it's today, not tomorrow). So, philosophically speaking, "tomorrow" will always remain a part of the future that moves at the same speed and in the same direction as "today", and which we can never reach. That's what makes "tomorrow" really interesting, because it's a time within a time. "Tomorrow" as a word is abstract. In terms of time, tomorrow can't be defined specifically, because there's never just one tomorrow. Instead, it would be more accurate to say that every subsequent day is a tomorrow. Tomorrow has an infinite number of beginnings and endings that stack up endlessly to create days, months, years, centuries and so on. Every day will have a tomorrow, and every day has been the tomorrow of a previous day. This transformation is the natural result of the concept
time.
Imagine a place where there is no Tomorrow, but every day is the same. All "tomorrows" and "yesterdays" are "today". Time hasn't stopped, nor are we traveling through time. Time just repeats itself like a loop. In this place, you go to bed every day, only to wake up on the same day. In this place, a person could experience the existence of different daily chronologies by making different choices each day, and he could observe the separation of different chronologies resulting from human interactions. In A Never-Ending Day, actor Bill Murray, who plays a journalist, has been sent to a small town to portray the local holiday: "The Groundhog Day", a day that seems to be caught in a time loop that repeats itself over and over again. Bill Murray's character is the only person capable of realizing this phenomenon, that every day in this town is a repetition of the day before. Every day, he tries something different. He's obviously interested in a girl, and every day he takes a different route to try and win her heart. It doesn't matter if he fails, because time loops in this city, the day will start again and he'll try a new way to win her heart.
In today's world, most of the population unfortunately lives each day as if every other day were the same. However, unlike the character in the film, there are no second chances. Our civilizations are based on a simple routine. Many of us waste our precious time going to work and coming home. Repeating these actions five days a week. Taking a vacation once a year in a middle-class hotel, ending our existence in retirement shortly before the hour of final judgment. The tourists I saw during my first 25 years in Istanbul were either very old or very young. I don't remember seeing many 30/50 year-olds.
The madness of over-consumption resulting from over-production has not only stolen time from our planet, but also from us. We live so fast and so low, we forget that time is our most important asset. A man with more time is a richer man than a man with lots of money. We'll always have a chance to earn money, but we've never had a chance to earn time. Instead of running around, instead of always trying to be somewhere at a specific time, it would make life so much more pleasant not to worry about it. As the song "Out of Time" by the band Blur tells us: "You've been so busy lately that you haven't found the time to open up your mind and watch the world spinning gently out of time".
Scientists, artists, philosophers, civilizations: at least once in their lives, they've had the idea of asking the question: what is time? For the passage of time to make sense, I think it's important to be able to see it from different points of view. The answer to the question "What is time?" depends on who is asking the question, and to whom. Having an idea of the definition of the passing of time is important, because I believe that being socially aware of this temporal movement adds enormously to human characteristics and enhances the quality of our lives. Ultimately, we're all just emotional and spiritual beings affected by the passage of time. We may or may not be eternal. For example, what we do know is that we have limited time. It must therefore be used wisely. As far as time is concerned, I have no explanation; time is a vast concept on which the whole of life in this universe is built. The purpose of this reading is not to answer the question "What is time?" but to explore the passing of time from a broader perspective. Through personal research and ideas, I've shared with you knowledge and insights (both my own and those of others) relating to the concept of time passing. While my ideas on the passing of time are my vision of this world, such ideas can only come from each and every one of you.
This research into the passage of time has enabled me to improve my ideas and knowledge of time. Now that I understand better and see the past with a broader vision, I can have a more developed conjecture about my future. I've discovered that time is unique to each individual. And I've come to believe that the present doesn't exist and that the past passes directly into the future without transition. I see how the past shapes what we are today. We are a result of the past. On the other hand, I'm still worried about the existence of eternal life, because during my research I couldn't find any tangible proof of this. Finally, I end my thesis with an optimistic viewpoint. We need hope to go on living. One of the successes of religious beliefs is to keep hope alive in people. Believing that my existence won't end with death allows me to give meaning to my life. Thanks to my research, readers of this memoir will be able to form their own ideas about time.
In the end, we always have time to think about it.
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