Awakenings

Doctor Oliver Sacks wrote Awakenings about his experiences restoring the consciousness of a group of people who suffered from an epidemic in the 1920s. In particular, he spent a lot of time with a patient he calls “Leonard L” – the first patient he brought back using the Parkinson’s drug L-DOPA.

Leonard L suffered from encephalitis lethargica, a disease that affects the mind in a way similar to Parkinson’s. Sacks learned from his experience with these patients that Parkinson’s sufferers lose their sense of the passage of time, and that this may be the primary cause of most symptoms. Tragically, L-DOPA was not the miracle treatment it first appeared to be, and his patients lost their fairly brief return to normality. (I muse on this topic because for a while last night, I watched Penny Marshall’s movie of the same name, starring Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro.)

Today, I just happened to be reading about Stephen Hawking’s musings on the subject of creation, and God, in which he sees time as the means to understanding how creation could have a beginning and end. Cosmologists have long been bothered by the idea that time could have a beginning and end – it drives them crazy, for no reason that I can think of (other than that the idea is very suggestive of God.) I have written about this before.

One of the ways that cosmologists try and deal with the idea of time beginning is to come up with a mathematical conception of time they call “imaginary time.” Imaginary time allows the concept of finite time, with a beginning and end, to be taken out of the equation. As St. Augustine notes, time is a property of the universe and does not predate it. Cosmology’s imaginary time works from a similar point of view – if time is a dimension of the universe, then time itself is a created aspect of the universe, and at some point tracing back the singularity of the big bang, it can be mathematically viewed such that its flow merges into the big bang event. And voila – by using imaginary time to erase the opening boundary of time, the beginning of time is kind of taken out of the equation.

But cosmologists such as Hawking acknowledge that in “real time”, a time traveler going in reverse towards the big bang would definitely perceive time to have an origin, for they would reach it and be able to go no further.

But “real time” is not without its flaws – for it is rooted in our sense of the passage of time. Unlike people afflicted with the diseases that Oliver Sacks has studied, normal people are quite convinced of their own sense of the passage of time. If you look at your watch, and then look at it an hour later, you are quite convinced an hour has passed – in an absolute way.

The problem is, Einstein demonstrated that time’s passage is affected by relativity. The faster you go, the slower time passes in relation to objects moving at your prior speed. Time speeds up and slows down, based on how fast you are going. Yet your sense of the passage of time does not offer the neurological equipment to compensate for this. If you traveled ten Earth years at near the speed of light to Alpha Centauri, and then came back, you would return thinking that a few days had elapsed, and would instead find all of your relatives twenty years older!

So are the cosmologists wrong to extrapolate an imaginary time to handle their tremendous physics problems – probably not as physicists. But to apply their concepts to our sense of beginning and end would be a mistake. But for us to rely too much on our own sense of time might be a mistake, too.

We use time to navigate our lives. So it is no surprise that try to understand the eternal with five senses that don’t apply to the eternal. But what awaits us on the other side of our lives is so far beyond our understanding, that our imagination genuinely fails us. We have no problem imagining hell – many of us live there now, and so artists paint scenes of torment, cruelty, and malice, set over ulcerous fires. But what of heaven? Who has ever painted a picture of heaven that you thought was believable? None of us really accepts the quaint notion of seraphim with harps? What marvelous pop songs have you heard that sang out about heaven in anything but an Earthly way?

Perhaps the limitations of our senses are a good thing.

I’ve always hated surprises, such that my wife has had to scold me a few times in my life when I’ve circumvented a surprise. Perhaps God, by placing Heaven so far above and beyond our reach as artists, poets, and linguists – outside of time, outside of Earthly dimension – perhaps God has created the one surprise I cannot circumvent.

I can only hope.