Is there anything we know more intimately than the fleetingness of time, the transience of each and every moment?Īnd yet, Goldstein points out, Einstein’s physics actually counters rather than confirms this intuitive subjectivity of the human experience of time: The great yawning chasm between the “out yonder” and the “in here” is stretched even wider, on the Einsteinian hypothesis, since objective time - the time that is described in the equations of relativity theory - is lacking the very feature that seems to provide the essential stab to our subjective experience of time: its inexorable flow, ultimately lighting all our yesterdays the way to dusty death. On the contrary, on his interpretation, relativity theory offers a realist description of time that is startlingly distinct from our subjective theory of time. Goldstein examines the immutable incompleteness of our understanding of time, which preoccupied both Gödel and Einstein:ĭespite the popular distortions, to a certain extent encouraged by the vague suggestions of the word “relativity,” Einstein was … as far from interpreting his famous theory in subjective terms as it is possible to be. Einstein and Gödel on one of their regular walks in Princeton, New Jersey.
In the altogether spectacular Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel ( public library), philosopher Rebecca Goldstein - who has also explored the most intimate facet of our confounding relationship with time, the mystery of what makes you and your childhood self the same person - chronicles how the emergence of modern physics in the twentieth century, particularly Einstein’s theory of relativity, rattled our intuitive notions of time as a subjective experience.
And yet however convincing our intuitive sense that time is a mutable abstraction shaped by the subjective grab-bag of attributes and experiences we call the self, there remains the empirical nature of time as a measurable, observable, concrete dimension of reality - and the rift between these two conceptions of time is one of the most disorienting yet fascinating aspects of existence. Nearly a century later, Sarah Manguso - a Woolf of our own - tussled with the same perplexity in contemplating the pleasures and perils of time’s inevitable ongoingness. “An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length,” Virginia Woolf marveled at the extraordinary elasticity of how we experience time, which modern psychologists are only beginning to fathom.
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