The valley of the Dead Dry Bones

Talking of "fairy tales", and stories (mythoi) that , albeit seemingly irrational, ring true, are the ones contained in the Bible.

Only a few are more powerful than the prophecy of Ezekiel concerning the Resurrection of the Flesh. This passage, quoted by many but mysterious in the highest degree, is known as "The Valley of the Dead Dry Bones".

PS I think this prophecy contains an important clue as to the very mystery of time. Just notice how the Lord recreates life, playing, as it were, the movie we call death in reverse order..

Ezekiel Chapter 37

הָיְתָה עָלַי, יַד-יְהוָה, וַיּוֹצִאֵנִי בְרוּחַ יְהוָה, וַיְנִיחֵנִי בְּתוֹךְ הַבִּקְעָה; וְהִיא, מְלֵאָה עֲצָמוֹת

1 The hand of the LORD was upon me, and the LORD carried me out in a spirit, and set me down in the midst of the valley, and it was full of bones; ב וְהֶעֱבִירַנִי עֲלֵיהֶם, סָבִיב סָבִיב; וְהִנֵּה רַבּוֹת מְאֹד עַל-פְּנֵי הַבִּקְעָה, וְהִנֵּה יְבֵשׁוֹת מְאֹד. 2 and He caused me to pass by them round about, and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry. ג וַיֹּאמֶר אֵלַי--בֶּן-אָדָם, הֲתִחְיֶינָה הָעֲצָמוֹת הָאֵלֶּה; וָאֹמַר, אֲדֹנָי יְהוִה אַתָּה יָדָעְתָּ. 3 And He said unto me: 'Son of man, can these bones live?' And I answered: 'O Lord GOD, Thou knowest.' ד וַיֹּאמֶר אֵלַי, הִנָּבֵא עַל-הָעֲצָמוֹת הָאֵלֶּה; וְאָמַרְתָּ אֲלֵיהֶם--הָעֲצָמוֹת הַיְבֵשׁוֹת, שִׁמְעוּ דְּבַר-יְהוָה. 4 Then He said unto me: 'Prophesy over these bones, and say unto them: O ye dry bones, hear the word of the LORD: ה כֹּה אָמַר אֲדֹנָי יְהוִה, לָעֲצָמוֹת הָאֵלֶּה: הִנֵּה אֲנִי מֵבִיא בָכֶם, רוּחַ--וִחְיִיתֶם. 5 Thus saith the Lord GOD unto these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live. ו וְנָתַתִּי עֲלֵיכֶם גִּידִים וְהַעֲלֵתִי עֲלֵיכֶם בָּשָׂר, וְקָרַמְתִּי עֲלֵיכֶם עוֹר, וְנָתַתִּי בָכֶם רוּחַ, וִחְיִיתֶם; וִידַעְתֶּם, כִּי-אֲנִי יְהוָה. 6 And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the LORD.' ז וְנִבֵּאתִי, כַּאֲשֶׁר צֻוֵּיתִי; וַיְהִי-קוֹל כְּהִנָּבְאִי, וְהִנֵּה-רַעַשׁ, וַתִּקְרְבוּ עֲצָמוֹת, עֶצֶם אֶל-עַצְמוֹ. 7 So I prophesied as I was commanded; and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a commotion, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. ח וְרָאִיתִי וְהִנֵּה-עֲלֵיהֶם גִּדִים, וּבָשָׂר עָלָה, וַיִּקְרַם עֲלֵיהֶם עוֹר, מִלְמָעְלָה; וְרוּחַ, אֵין בָּהֶם. 8 And I beheld, and, lo, there were sinews upon them, and flesh came up, and skin covered them above; but there was no breath in them. ט וַיֹּאמֶר אֵלַי, הִנָּבֵא אֶל-הָרוּחַ; הִנָּבֵא בֶן-אָדָם וְאָמַרְתָּ אֶל-הָרוּחַ {ס} כֹּה-אָמַר אֲדֹנָי יְהוִה, מֵאַרְבַּע רוּחוֹת בֹּאִי הָרוּחַ, וּפְחִי בַּהֲרוּגִים הָאֵלֶּה, וְיִחְיוּ. 9 Then said He unto me: 'Prophesy unto the breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath: {S} Thus saith the Lord GOD: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.' י וְהִנַּבֵּאתִי, כַּאֲשֶׁר צִוָּנִי; וַתָּבוֹא בָהֶם הָרוּחַ וַיִּחְיוּ, וַיַּעַמְדוּ עַל-רַגְלֵיהֶם--חַיִל, גָּדוֹל מְאֹד-מְאֹד. 10 So I prophesied as He commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great host.

Stephen Jay Gould on Deep Time

Stephen Jay Gould's book Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle is dominated by a grand theme:
Deep Time

In our age of computers, we talk of billions of years with nonchalance. The fact that we can compute these huge expanses of time fools us into believing that we can grasp them. But, is it so? Can we genuinely understand even, say, a period of mere 100 years? I would answer in the negative. Our entire life experience is confined to a few decades at best, and the age of our grandads is already mythology.

No, we cannot understand Deep Time, beyond a sense of awe. It is thus sobering to realize that this notion is quite new in the history of ideas. Only a few hundred years ago the world was young. Then, Deep Time appeared to hunt us forever.

We are not just microbes in space, our life is ephemeral in time as well. Let us never forget how ephemeral....

Time within time, or how particles act like bees

Time flows, an instant goes away and is replaced by the next one, in a endless, silent, dull procession (at least, that is what our collective imaginary keeps repeating to us usque ad nauseam).

Pretty boring, right?

Unless... unless you can zoom into one of those instants, and find another time, a hidden time. After all, atoms of matter were thought of as indivisible only a little over one hundred years ago, and, as it turns out, they very very roomy; why should instants of time be any different?

Hidden time. A tantalizing hypothesis, and the basis of a fascinating model of Quantum Mechanics concocted by Pavel Kurakin and George Malinetskii, from the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics and the Russian Academy of Sciences (you can read an informal account here). Kurakin and Malinetskii have developed Cramer's transactional interpretation of QM, and gone a bit further. When a subatomic particle has to move, say from an emitting source to a detector, it sends out probing waves, like scout bees. Each goes its own way, hits the possible targets, and comes back. At the end, a global decision takes place, and the particle moves from one point to the next. This entire set of transactions happens in hidden time. In other words, before the particle has made up her mind, there is no time tick, at least as far as our physical clocks are concerned.

Intriguing, isn't it? A tacit assumption one always makes is that all phenomena occur within the same time scale. But there are other options. Perhaps what for me is a time tick, for you is an entire lifetime, or an eternity...

Yet another chapter in my book on Time.

The timeless universe of Julian Barbour

Bookshops and public libraries are powerful attractors in my life: hardly a day passes by without a fleeting visit to these cornucopias of information and dreams. Friday was no exception: I was at Borders loafing about, and I ended up in the Physics section. My trained eye spotted an interesting title within seconds: The End of Time, by Julian Barbour. I had vaguely heard of the fellow before, through some readings on the interpretation of Quantum Mechanics and on Quantum Gravity. Barbour, I seemed to recall, does not believe in Time. He in not alone, mind you: Melissus, Nagarjuna, Plotinus, McTaggart, and numerous others were also vocal disbelievers. But there is a difference: Dr. Barbour is a theoretical physicist, and physicists (with some notable exception, such as the Loop Quantum Gravity folks) assume space-time as the background where physics happens.

What kind of universe does Barbour envision? His world, which he cleverly christened Platonia, is a world of Nows (by the way, Platonia is also the name of his web site). Each Now is a possible configuration of the entire universe, complete in itself, and static (think of a single photo snapshot). How are Nows concatenated to one another? They aren't. Quite simply, there is notion of similarity describing how far apart two Nows (i.e. two universe's configurations) are. Some photos look similar, others do not. By arranging a list of contiguous Nows, one gets a factitious timeline, a bit like arranging photo grams one gets a movie (notice that you could arrange the deck in more than one manner).

All right, but how come we do experience the flow of time? Here is a clever move by Barbour (as matter of fact, a few others, like Emanuele Severino in Destino della Necessita', had a similar argument, albeit from a different angle). It is called time capsule. A time capsule is a special type of Now, containing some data that appear like traces of other Nows, or fragments of recorded history. Thus, in his view, there is no flow whatsoever, only we (you and I) are inside the same time capsule that suggests the existence of past & future.

Crazy? Not really. After all, what do we know about past and future? Only what our memory and our imagination tell us. No more, no less.

Summing up, Julian Barbour brings us back to the number 3 instead of the Minkowskian 3+1 =4. Space is real, time is not (*). Instead of increasing dimensions, like String theorists do, he reduces them by one. He kills Time.

Allow me to add a coda here, before quitting. I like all of the above, so much so that in my book on Time a section will be dedicated to charting the charming land of Platonia. However, I have a gut feeling that this is a great start, but not the entire story. Perhaps space too is not that real after all. Perhaps we live in a space-time capsule, and the entire vast expanse of this universe is no more than a mad game of mirrors within mirrors. Perhaps the basic ingredients of reality are not Nows, but a multiplicity of Here-And-Nows, hic et nunc. Perhaps....

(*) A note for the math-savvy: I hope my sentence above hasn't mislead anyone into believing that Barbour's universe is R^3. It is not; his kosmos is the so-called configuration space, whose dimension depends on how many entities there are. For instance, if there were only 3 particles, our physical universe would be the manifold whose points are the different configurations of a three-body system. As you can see, it is a pretty roomy house...

PS After coming back home, I chased Barbour all over the net. He appears in a riveting 1/2 hour video, which I truly liked. It is called Killing Time: enjoy.

Nayra qhipa: a walk through time facing backwards?

I have started writing a book on Time (in the same spirit of these ramblings), so I am collecting a conspicuous bulk of material on the old god Chronos, from every imaginable quarter: phenomenology, physics, high-brow literature, pulp fiction, anthropology and comparative linguistics.

In a recent surf I have stumbled upon this article, by Núñez and Sweetser: it describes the way in which the Aymaras denote past and future. As it turns out, the term for past is nayra – which means “eye,” “front” or “sight”. They use qhipa – meaning “back” or “behind” – to denote the future.

I find all this fascinating: after the initial shock, it makes perfectly good sense: futurum semper incertum, or, in the immortal dictum of Yoda on Dagobah -Impossible to predict, the future is-.
We see the past (to some extent), but the future is out of sight (except for our boring, restless imagination, and our arrogant reason).

What is even more intriguing is the following thought that dawned upon me a bit afterwards: perhaps Aymaras walk through time facing backwards.

In other words, suppose your attention faces only the past, and you reject all attempts to anticipate the future. Then, you are walking through time a' rebours, a bit like squids.
And why not? What is the point of facing the future if it is totally invisible?

Somewhere, as if by magic, I hear a tune singing the enchanting words:

-Que Sera, Sera,Whatever will be, will be. The future's not ours, to see. Que Sera, Sera-