What Time Is It?

Lat week, BBC2’s “Horizon”, asked the question, “Do You Know What Time It Is?” Brian Cox appears to be becoming the new face of science on TV. Recently, he fronted the programme about the “Big Bag Machine”, The Large Hadron Collider at CERN where he works as a particle physicist. He is a good choice for trying to encourage an interest in science in the new generation. He looks more like he should be in a Manchester pop group than splitting atoms.

The question he asks here, obviously seems a simple one to anyone without a knowledge of the basics of 20th Century science. But, anyone that knows even a pop version of either Einstein or Quantum Mechanics, knows that the question is not at all a simple one. Yet, the reason it is not simple for either of these two theories of the Universe is different according to each theory. Why should this be of particular interest for a Marxist? Because Marxism is not just a theory of Economics, Politics or Sociology, it is a Philosophy of the fundamental questions of science, of the very nature of existence. From the beginning the creators of Marxism Marx and Engels engrossed themselves in natural science, because the fundamental aspect of their theory was materialism. But also, some of the fundamental questions that Marxists ask about the world depend for their validity on the very questions that Science answers.

Some of the answers that Brian Cox put forward in respect of the question of time, actually pose a problem for some of the basic tenets of Marxism, however, as I will try to demonstrate. They pose questions that need to be answered.

The programme proceeded by moving from the basic questions about time to the more complex. For example, when we ask the question, “What Time Is It?”, what do we mean? Our current Calendar is fairly recent in human history, and is not shared by Muslims, Jews and so on. From what point are we measuring time from? If we mean what time of day then that depends where we are on the globe, how accurate our timepiece etc.

But, the more esoteric nature of the question arises when we ask about the nature of time itself. Does time begin with the Big Bang, or was there time before the Big Bang, and if so does this mean that something existed prior to the Big Bang? This means that asking these questions about time also involves asking questions about the nature of the Universe, and its creation. Big Bang theory says that Time itself began with the Big Bang. Yet, even the most prominent proponent of the Big Bang Theory, Stephen Hawking, if I read him correctly, now believes this to be incorrect. Rather, the latest attempt to produce a unified theory of everything that can bring together Einstein’s theory of the very large, with the Quantum Theory of the very small, String Theory, suggests that the Big Bang was just one event in one dimension of a Universe or multiverse comprising many filaments.

Both Relativity Theory and Quantum Theory mean that the question “What Time is it?” is not susceptible to a straight forward answer. On the one hand Relativity Theory tells us that there are no absolutes – a concept which also lies at the heart of dialectics – everything including Time is relative. Time, Relativity Theory tells us, and it has been demonstrated to be true, moves faster or slower for all of us depending upon where we are, or what we are doing. The faster you move the slower time moves for you compared to everyone else. The closer you are to a gravity source again the slower time moves for you than everyone else, so, indeed, time moves slower for your feet than it does for your head!!! The force of gravity is so strong at the Event Horizon of a Black Hole that time is slowed so much that it actually stops.

Quantum Theory also in another sense says that there are no Absolutes, but in a different sense. Quantum Theory says that everything is about uncertainty and probability. Yet, in another sense this DOES mean that there are absolutes. One experiment fires a single particle of light – a photon – towards a target, but places a filter with slots between the source and target. The result is astounding. Despite the fact that only one Photon is fired what we find is that this Photon passes through every possible slot. It is as though the Photon – travelling at the speed of light where time stands still – goes back and tries a different route to the target. In fact, because there is a higher probability of the particle passing through certain slots compared to others what we see is a distribution, what statisticians call a probability distribution that resembles a wave.

The other aspect of Quantum Theory is the Uncertainty Principle. This certainly causes some problems for Marxists in respect of their materialism. The uncertainty principle says that the charge of a particle is uncertain until it is observed. This doesn’t mean that we just don’t know what that charge is, but that the particle itself doesn’t know whether it is positive or negative until such time as it is observed!!! The importance of this I will come back to later. One of the consequences of this is what is called “Quantum Entanglement” . This means that two particles even though they are separated in space can be linked together. When one particle is observed to determine its charge this act determines the charge as its opposite in the other particle.

In something that is more like science fiction, scientists have actually been able to use the principle of Quantum Entaglement to create a teleportation machine that has successfully teleported information between particles over from one side of a river to the other. See: here .

This is a problem for Marxists. Marxists stand on the ground of materialism. One of the classic questions that distinguishes Materialists from Idealists is the tree falling in the wood question. That is, does the tree actually fall in the wood if no one is there to observe it? The idealist says no, because for the idealist everything that exists in what we call the material world is nothing more than a construction of the Mind. The Mind produces ideas, and those ideas become manifest in the material world. The materialist says, yes, because for the Materialist the Mind is itself only a product of the material world, a complex of chemicals, and chemical reactions. The Material world exists whether the Mind exists or not. But, the Uncertainty principle throws that into doubt, it puts humans back at the centre of the Universe, because it gives to the tree in the forest question a new twist, “Does the particle have positive charge without it being observed to have such?” Answer “No”.!!!

Marxism rests on two basic ideas – Materialism and Dialectics. In fact, there is some confusion over the relationship between the two. For Marx, the bedrock of his theory was Materialism not dialectics. Marx began from the thesis that everything was real, and it was from this reality of a material world that humans had evolved, and within that the human mind, and ideas. Ideas developed as a function of the material world, though not mechanically. The human Mind has the power to abstract, and so an idea plucked from the world of reality can be manipulated within the mind, abstracted from, joined with other ideas similarly processed, and thereby produce a whole series of other ideas not directly taken from the material world. When Marx wrote Capital, it was overtly this method that he used. Collecting facts about that material world, in particular how Man in that world had gone about producing the needed for his survival and development, and how the changes in the way he achieved that in turn changed the way man related to man, and the ideas this engendered within him.

But, Marx recognised that a fundamental characteristic of Matter, and, therefore, of the material world is that it is constantly changing. But, the earliest philosophers had recognised that the very process of change involves a contradiction. One of the best examples is Xeno's Paradox . Xeno concluded that movement i.e. change was impossible because it involved such a contradiction of thing being in two places at the same time. There are many similar examples. Take that of tangent. A tangent is a straight line that touches at a point the circumference of a circle. Calculus tells us that at this point the angle of the straight line and the angle of the circle are equal!!! Yet, how can it be that a circle which involves a continual curve is equal to a straight line???

One of the reasons this gave early philosophers a problem was this very fact that it meant that one of the basic elements of logic – the syllogism – was broken. Aristotle, formulated the syllogism, and its basic form is that A = A. That is a thing is always equal to itself. In modern compuing this syllogism is broken all the time. A common piece of code which is used in respect of changes, for example to build a simple counter is A = A+1, where the new value of A is whatever the value of A was plus 1. But, as Trotsky demonstrated in his polemic against the renegade Marxist Burnham, the syllogism fails at an even more basic level of reality. He points out that not only the symbols representing A will differ if examined ever more closely, but that if we take these two A’s to be physical things, for instance a 1lb of sugar, then we will find that if we measure these two things very accurately, we will find they are not the same. To come back to the issue of time, he points out that a lb of sugar is not even equal to itself, because the molecules and atoms that make up the sugar are themselves continually changing, and so if you measure this lb of sugar it will be different at the end of the measuring from what it was at the beginning. Only if you could compare something with itself outside the passage of time could it be equal to itself, but everything exists in time, and time is perpetually moving forward – even Einstein’s theory doesn’t change that because time still moves forward even at different rates, and where it stops in a black hole you could not measure anything, because time would have stopped for the measurer too.

But, this has caused some confusion. The dialectic has become for some Marxists a kind of totem, they have gone some way to turning the dialectic back off its head from where Marx had turned it. Marx took the dialectic of Hegel in its Idealist form and put it the right way up. Hegel was an Idealist, and so for him the starting point of the dialectic was the Idea. The Idea continually moved forward in Men’s heads – actually for Hegel in he Head’s of Philosophers like himself who then translated the Idea into the Material World through the agency of The State. So for Hegel the dialectic was a kind of mystical force in its own right which drove on development in the material world. For Marx this was nonsense. Ideas changed because the material world changed, and the two reacted upon each other. The dialectic was not a material force, nor even a material force, but was simply a description of that very characteristic of matter that it was in continual flux. To turn the dialectic into anything else other than a description of that process of change is to turn it half way back up again, to invest it with the kind of mystical property that Hegel gave it. So, Marx in writing Capital uses dialectical terminology – largely because he wanted to rail against those that were decrying Hegel – not because he began from a search for such contradictions – he didn’t – but as an effective means of describing, in philosophical terms, that very process of change which Capitalist development represented. Marx overturned not just the content, but also the form of the Hegelian dialectic. It is for a materialist nothing more than a convenient concept by which to describe those very processes of change at a quantum level that our normal terms are unable to deal with.

But, here is where the issues raised in the programme do cause a problem for Marxists stemming from the two theories of time – that resulting from Relativity Theory, and that stemming from Quantum Theory. As Cox elaborated the consequence of Einstein’s Theory is that time and our passage through it is rather like a tube that follows a given path. According to this the Past, Present and Future are not only a function of when, but of where. In other words there is a place where our past exists that we could travel back to, as well as a place where our Future exists, where again we could similarly travel to. This presents an obvious problem for Marxists. If that were true then it means that the Future is predestined. In that case we cannot alter it, and so there is no point in us trying. But, this conclusion flows directly from the Einsteinian view of time as being continuous, that it can be continually broken down into smaller and smaller periods of time to infinity. That is central to the concept of the dialectic as described by Trotsky in “In Defence of Marxism”.

In opposition to this Einsteinian view, the Quantum Theory puts forward the idea that there is no such predestination, Time is not a path through space, but itself grows into the future. On this view Time is not infinitely divisible, but is granular, that is it is possible to get down to individual distinct granules of time. If we view the Dialectic in a purely mechanical way as some kind of totem then this clearly would represent a problem, because it would mean that Trotsky’s argument falls. It would be possible to examine something during one of these granules of time, though that would seem to pose another problem as to whether although this granule of time existed as distinct from other granules, it too could be divided, in which case Trotsky’s argument surely still holds. But, in some ways that issue is irrelevant. If the dialectic is nothing more than a concept that allows us to deal with what appear to be contradictions arising from the nature of matter as continually in flux, then if Quantum Theory gives us a more accurate, a scientific means rather than philosophical grounds on which to understand that phenomena then why worry? The question also arises what is the space that exists between these granules of Time? Perhaps one way of udnerstanding this is through the uncertainty principle, and maybe this gives the explanation to to those other dialectical paradoxes. Perhaps, it is not that a a straight line and a curve are both the same at the point of tangency, but that their nature is ucnertain like the charge of a particle until observed. Perhaps, there is a 50% chance that at the point of tangency the point is curved, and an equal 50% chance that it is straight. Similarly, the space between granules of time might not be space at all but appear as nothing, only because it represents a movement of time that is uncertain. Perhaps in this "space" in fact what we have is a 50% possibility that time is moving forward, with a 50% chance that it is moving backwards.

There is, however, another paradox that appears to arise from Quantum Theory and the Uncertainty principle. If, the charge of a particle is determined at the point that it is observed then is it the case that this event determines not only the present and future of the particle, but also its past. In other words does the observation determine what the particle has always been, even though until that time it was undetermined, so the past of the particle is in fact altered. But, if that is the case to what extent does this have a ripple effect backwards in time?

At the moment no one has been able to provide a means of unifying the Einsteinian Theory with Quantum Theory, though as stated earlier String Theory looks the best bet at being able to achieve that. Until such time neither theory can be said to provide us with a complete theory of the Universe. Another possibility could be that Time itself is no different than other aspects of the material Universe including its forces, and is itself made up of time particles, that would certainly explain why time like light is affected by gravity. It would also explain why Time slows down the faster you travel. If as einstein says nothing cantravel faster than light then this sets a limit for how fast Time Particles coudl travel. If Time particles travel at the speed of light then the faster you travel the slower they are moving relative to you. A the speed of light they would be stationary compared to you so Time would stand still. In that case, it could be that just as with the case of the photon that went through every possible slot so too time particles could act in the same way, so that an infinity of futures is created, with some being more probable than others. Indeed, it could be that the Universe itself exists simply because it was one of a whole range of probabilities more or less likely including some in which no Universe was created.