Time doesn’t actually exist. The phenomenon we experience and call time is a sequence of moments, each called now.
You’ll want to first read Your Very Own Personal Holodeck and Two Incompatible Physical Models before this post.
Movie projectors and modern televisions
Olde time silent movie projectors and modern television screens all work the same way. They draw a sequence of still pictures fast enough that the human eye, brain, and everything in between assemble it into a smooth motion animation. Anything above 16 still pictures per second will produce this effect in humans out of nothing but snapshots of one moment in time.
The rate at which a projector displays independent still pictures separated by a shutter is called the frame rate, measured in frames per second (fps). Originally, silent films were displayed at around 20 fps plus or minus however fast the operator actually cranked that moment. Today, flat-screen televisions often render 120 updates per second (without blacking the screen in between), a refresh rate of 120Hz.
Film-based projectors would display entire images, but modern televisions and computer monitors are grids of pixels. A pixel, or picture element, is a small rectangular-sized glowing region of the larger grid. Often we would see (screen resolutions) grids of 1024 x 768 or more recently 3840 x 2160 pixels. It’s the pixels that actually need to update 120 times per second now. When each pixel is updated on time with all the others (i.e. refresh or redraw) at the frame rate, then the grid of pixels displays or presents a smooth animation or video that is very convincing to the eye.
Our visual systems smooth over discontinuities in both time (i.e. the time between refreshes or redraws) and space (i.e. the space between columns of pixels and rows of pixels). Under the usual conditions, we effortlessly see the desired animation without even realizing the discontinuities are right in front of our faces.
Now, now, now, now, now
It seems that yet another place the channels agree is on the nature of time, or more correctly, the non-existence of time.
Time doesn’t exist for the broader non-physical perspective from whence we all came. More to the point, time doesn’t even exist for us in the way we think it does. We get the effect of time because we observe the states of physical objects around us as they evolve. Objects evolve their locations in predictable ways, and they evolve their internal states to produce various useful phenomena.
- Rotating wheels are used in classic clocks
- Oscillating crystals are used in digital clocks
- Resonating atoms are used in atomic clocks
Objects evolve over a sequence of now‘s.
Abraham says that all we get are a sequence of now‘s. Bashar and Ramtha both invoke a movie projector analogy in which we get a sequence of still frames, but really this is the same thing but more specific. Seth says our point of power is in the present. Classic Seth.
Everything exists now.
Every channeled source
Back to the film projector analogy, every frame is another now, another one moment in time. Sure, the previous frames appeared seemingly in the past while subsequent frames are yet to come. In reality, though, the whole film reel exists simultaneously and “always”.
Planck units
As we’ve seen, modern physics has some really interesting things to say about the world of the very small. The Planck time is a unit of time, roughly 5.39 x 10-44 s, where anything shorter is meaningless. Similarly, the Planck length is the shortest measurable unit of distance, roughly 1.62 x 10-35 m. Divide the latter by the former and you get the speed of light as that’s the fastest anything can travel from place to place.
As an aside, these Planck constants are often defined in terms of or similarly to the reduced Planck constant ℏ which is used in the site’s logo.
This isn’t a theoretical-only discussion. Everything we see and touch is made out of stuff that has these limitations. In fact, our bodies exist within the same limitations, but more to the point, our sense organs and brains do as well.
It’s true that the Planck scales are far too small to ever register in any human awareness. But still, it should be clear that the same effect with movie projectors would apply. Our brains would smooth over the discontinuities and present a smooth and continuous view of the world to our awareness.
Film projector reality
You can see where we’re going with this. This all suggests we might exist inside of a film projector style reality as the channels claim. We’re satisfied with the smoothing-over of the discontinuities of space as a necessary feature (if the length scales didn’t render it moot). However, smoothing over the discontinuities of time probably doesn’t need to happen. If the brain is the receiving mechanism of consciousness into this physical environment, but it’s only available within the frames, then any consciousness focused through the brain should be unable to detect any sort of moment outside of any frame.
It’s not just a limitation of the brain. No experiment should be able to detect the gaps of “time” between the frames either. Any physical processes or observations used in such an experiment simply wouldn’t exist between the frames. The most we could say is that time and space smaller than these quantities are meaningless, which is pretty much where we’re at in modern physics.
We think it’s been hypothesized already but can’t remember the physicist who proposed it (comment if you do!). There should be at least one consequence of this model. Any movement of the most fundamental subatomic particles would have to be discrete. Such a particle would have to blink out of existence at its former location and reappear at its new location in the next frame, just like on a computer monitor. This would actually imply that subatomic particles always move at the speed of light or not at all.
Physicists collectively just prepared to object. They want to know “With respect to what frame of reference?” Indeed.
Individual personal holodecks
We’ve already seen this. Our earlier post Two Incompatible Physical Models already solved the frame of reference question. According to the model described in the post, all of our personal experiences occur inside a personal holodeck-like environment. This environment includes everything personally experienced as well as everything used to build that experience.
It’s within our personal holodeck that there’s a grid of pixels. Computer science sometimes calls these voxels for volume elements, instead of the typically two-dimensional pixels, but we think that sounds pretty dumb. The distance between the rows, columns, and layers of pixels is the Planck length. The refresh rate is the reciprocal of the Planck time (as measured inside the environment).
The owner of the environment stays centered within this virtual environment. Every other locally recreated participant can move with respect to the owner’s frame of reference.
It’s all about timing
An interesting aspect of this is… timing. If these personal holodecks are a model of how our non-physical inner beings gain their footholds into this shared physical (uni)verse environment, then how do these same non-physical beings coordinate their presumably limited attention “inside” this environment? Wouldn’t this occupy all their focus “around the clock”? The repetitive task of producing the next moment would be very cumbersome.
No, the shared reality doesn’t exist between the frames. An eon could pass before the next frame, and the humans inside wouldn’t know the difference.
Ah, you say, but the frames and refreshes are on a per-occupant basis. The shared aspect linking all the personal holodecks is a different animal.
You’re quite correct, well done! The shared aspect is a smooth and continuous representation of the world of the very large. In continuous systems such as the shared link, synchronous and asynchronous updates produce essentially the same result. The outside participants can focus into this environment whenever they choose. They don’t have to update the link in any particular order, and they don’t have to all participate with the same frequency. It’s probably fair to assume that they participate far less often while their physical counterparts are sleeping.
Wrapping up
What we just covered brings up a couple of new questions.
If the whole reel of film always exists in one vast “now”, then how does free will exist? Our subsequent post The Mechanism of Free Will covers it.
Also, the discrete model of motion above is kind of interesting. Does it force the physical (uni)verse to exhibit known properties like Special Relativity or General Relativity? Wouldn’t that be neat? Ramtha has said the motion of particles is of the blink out and reappear elsewhere sort, but there’s no reason to say for sure the grids of pixels are rectangular or of uniform density. Still, it’s an interesting proposition.
