Pete,
I came across an interesting article from the local paper (Tom Burns, ‘The Joy of Skywatching’, Columbus Dispatch, Sept 9, 2003) about Mars sighting this month. But what gauges me in is his writing about the Andromeda Galaxy or M31. It is the farthest extraterrestial object our eyes can see, and the light from the galaxy needs 3 million years to reach us here and through a distance of roughly 18,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles. The galaxy itself is 150000 light years wide (or 900,000,000,000,000 miles) and contains 300,000,000,000 stars. Okay, take some time to digest all the zeroes before we continue. Moreover, he says, one edge of the galaxy is 900,000 trillion miles closer to us and it is 100, 000 years earlier from the farther edge, and yet we perceive it as one object. This is astounding Pete! It means that when we look at the galaxy we are actually looking at the past, present, and future all together at once. All the conventional time frame as we know in our everyday term, collapses into one. “In essence,” he said, “M31 is stretched out in space, but it’s also stretched out in time.” This is a fact and it is just as real as everything we know and see everyday. Can you imagine if you are looking at someone with both his young and old face altogether at once? Perplexed? Not so for one person.
This phenomenom of our world reminds me of the same thought Augustine, a young monk from North Africa, had 1400 years ago. In 397 A.D., without the benefit of modern sciences and tools, he wrote in his autobiography ‘Confessions’ the same perplexing question we ask today,
“What, then, is time? I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled. All the same I can confidently say that I know that if nothing passed, there would be no past time; if nothing were going to happen, there would be no future time; and if nothing were, there would be no present time. Of these three division of time, then, how can two, the past and the future, be, when the past no longer is and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become past , it would not be time but eternity. If, therefore, the present is time only by reason of the fact that it moves on to become the past, how can we say that even the present is, when the reason why it is is that it is no to be? In other words, we cannot rightly say that time is, except by reason of its impeding state of not being. (Confessions, XI, 14)
Augustine went on deeper in his quest and he even predicted accurately what the modern science fueled by Einstein general relativity theory would say about time and space 1400 years later. I mentioned earlier that when we look at M31, we are actually looking at both the past and future. This is also what Augustine miraculously infered in the last sentence of the following quote:
“If the future and the past do exist, I want to know where they are . I may not yet be capable of such knowledge, but at least I know that wherever they are, they are not there as future or past, but as present. For if, wherever they are, they are future, they do not yet exist; if past, they no longer exist . So whereever they are and whatever they are, it is only by being that they are.” (Confessions, XI, 18)
We can go on and on exploring and amazed by this time-space issue but Tom Burns is right, “Don't despair, my brother and sister stargazers”, lets just enjoy the beautiful night sky this month with neighbor Mars. Have fun!