Book Title: Elusive Consciousness
Author(s): Narendra Bhandari, Surendrasingh Pokharana, Jitendra B Shah
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad
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Advanced technologies have developed aids to measure Time in very minute intervals as Nano and Pico seconds. How many can even picturise such intervals? The accuracy of measuring such intervals in normal human life is almost meaning less. What about a virus or a bacteria whose entire life may last only that long.
Doesn't this make one accept the notion that TIME is neither Eternal nor independent of the individual?
In some minds this could raise the doubt: Is Time Real?
As mentioned earlier, if Time is related to experience then it is as real as the experience itself, because one measures its passage with reference to the experience
Even the perception of duration significantly depends upon how one considers the importance of the event as very often we try and tend to forget unpleasant moment as something which happened long ago thus pushing it away from the Mind.
Apart from these conceptual questions about Time, what is important to understand is the direction or flow of time which is always in the forward direction. This is termed as the 'Arrow of Time', a term coined by sir Arthur Eddington in 1927, with which one distinguishes, Past, Present and Future. In order to appreciate the relevance of time order, it is useful to look at what one calls a Light cone structure in Space-time, as given by Minkowski, which splits the space time into two regions, the past and the future, showing that history of all particles come from past to present and go to future, staying within the light cone.
The fact that the light cone structure is symmetrical about the point o indicates that in principle, the laws of physics are time symmetric. Does it mean that one can go back in time to re experience the past? Unfortunately, Not!
One of the most fundamental of physical laws attributed to Nature is the 'Conservation of Energy', and associated with it are the first and second laws of thermodynamics, which say that, Energy cannot be destroyed or created and if a system is isolated, (no exchange of energy between itself and its surroundings), the potential energy of its equilibrium state will always be less than that of its initial state. The statement can be understood in the following way.
Any isolated system, has to use its energy content as best as it can for its evolution
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