Now or Never (Or Maybe It Already Happened?)

  (From Stephen Hawking’s interpretation of time)

    Time, though we experience it constantly, remains ambiguous and often subjective. It can be measured by the period over which an action unfolds, but it also embodies an irreversible increase in entropy, a slow change from structured to disorder. Time for me and time for the universe would be very different – to the universe, human existence may be a blink of an eye, perhaps even shorter.

    We can break down time into three phases: present, past, and future. But do they truly exist as distinct entities? I once wondered if we are, in fact, living entirely in the past and the future only. What we perceive as the ‘present’ is technically a moment that has already happened. For instance, when I observe flowers by the roadside, am I truly seeing them in the present? It might be more accurate to say that I am seeing them in the past because my brain needs milliseconds to process and interpret the visual information before it reaches my consciousness.

    This realization raises questions about the nature of ‘now.’ Are we always experiencing a slightly delayed version of reality? If so, the ‘present’ becomes elusive – more like a memory that our brain instantaneously translates into a semblance of current experience. This means that every action, every thought, and every observation is a moment that has already passed by the time we are aware of it.

    I liked the way Stephen Hawking talked about looking down at the past rather than looking back. The past is not merely something that fades behind us. Instead, it forms a foundational layer beneath us, supporting our perception of the present. In this way, the present could be seen as the surface of a deep, layered past. We stand on a surface of the layers, which is the boundary between the past and the future, and we have simply decided to call it “now.”

(Warning: The Rest of This Text is for Physics Nerds Only)

    Since Stephen Hawking mentioned a possible time reversal scenario by exceeding the speed of light, I would love to add onto it. First of all, exceeding the speed of light is impossible even if we have an infinite amount of energy. Then what was he talking about? He was talking about wormholes. Time is a space, and has a shape. And it is greatly affected by gravity which can bend the time dimension. It is fun to imagine dropping a bowling ball onto a fabric. If spacetime interacts with gravity, the result is a “curvature” much like how the bowling ball warps the fabric around it. Massive objects, like stars and black holes, create such curvatures in spacetime, and this bending directly affects how we experience time.

    In areas of intense gravity – say, near a black hole – time slows down relative to regions with weaker gravity. This phenomenon, known as time dilation, is why astronauts in orbit, experiencing slightly less gravity than on Earth, age just a tiny bit slower. But wormholes take this concept further. A wormhole is a hypothetical "shortcut" in spacetime that connects two distant points by using the areas of intense gravity, potentially allowing instantaneous travel between them. If such a phenomenon were possible, passing through a wormhole would allow one to travel vast distances in a matter of seconds, effectively bending time and space. We theoretically exceed the speed of light, therefore taking a time machine back to the past!

    Time’s passage can also be seen as a process of increasing entropy, where the world becomes more disordered. As the universe expands, according to the laws of thermodynamics, entropy increases, which we perceive as the passage of time. But what if the opposite were to happen? Instead of expanding, imagine the universe is shrinking, a scenario known as the ‘Big Crunch.’ If we consider time’s direction to be determined by changes in entropy, then a decrease in entropy could cause time to flow in the opposite direction.

    This leads to the intriguing hypothesis that the universe might expand and then contract, possibly in an infinite cycle. The moment I am experiencing now could potentially have already happened thousands of times, or perhaps I am experiencing it in reverse, like a video played backward. This would imply that the decisions I make are the same ones I’ve made countless times before, reassuring me that I am on the best path I could create!