Time/Contemplation

Gerald Schroeder’s, The Science of God, relates the following event which took place on February 23, 1987. To paraphrase and quote from his account:

Ian Shelton went to work as usual at the Las Campanas Stellar Observatory on top of an 8,000-foot mountain in Chile. His job, to photograph stars in another galaxy, took an exciting turn just as he was getting ready to close another day. As he was processing the last photographic plate, a spot appeared, which had not shown up on any previous plates. It was so large he knew it would be visible to the naked eye, he went outside to check. There it was, a supernova, right before his eyes.

Schroeder goes on to explain that that star had actually exploded 170,000 earth years ago. That would have been about the time of Neanderthals. Of course, if a Neanderthal had looked up at the black sky, he wouldn’t have noticed a thing. However, the light of that supernova was speeding “silently through space, bursting out in all directions, a part of it heading toward the place where the Earth would be at 3:00AM in the morning on February 23, 1987.”

During all the time it took for the light of that supernova to travel to Earth, man's own history began. Humankind progressed through all the ages of development, Iron, Bronze, agriculture, industrial, through WWI and WWII and into the 20th century, and, “still that light beam sped silently, secretly through space, undetected.”

“And, then, without warning, on the night of February 23, 1987, it arrived," and, was noticed by Ian Shelton on his photographic plate

Ok, here’s the punch line…

If you had somehow been able to “hitch a ride” on the photons of that supernova and ridden along with it for all those 170,000 earth years, how much time would you have experienced?

ZERO!

The reason is that you would have been outside of Time. You would have been outside the “temporally linear flow” of our existence. Everything that happened on Earth in all that 170,000 years would have “occurred” simultaneously!!!

I also read somewhere, maybe the same book, that some physicists refer to time as the (mechanism) God uses to keep things from happening all at once.

T.S. Eliot also deals with the whole “time” issue in Four Quartets.

Thinking about "time" eases one into the spiritual, almost effortlessly.

Tomorrow’s another day…….that is, if one exists in the created universe!