Blog Post #10-Beyond Time

The podcast, Beyond Time, produced by Radio Lab consisted of quite a mind-boggling discussion. I found the concept of time making two or more things one very interesting to think about. The piece the speakers described in the beginning of the podcast where the two metals would eventually defuse and become one. This made me view art as a sort of unnatural force that constantly swims up the stream of time. Many ideas and other theoretical concepts arose from this first discussion. The points that stuck out to me the most about time were the ideas that moments always exist and that they never go away, even after we encounter them. I found the contrasting opinion interesting as well, because it was in favor of free-will as opposed to this rigid idea of predestined moments that “denies the poetry of change.”

I was interested in these various theories and contradictions about how time effects the human existence, or if it really effects it at all. The belief that parallel universes exist in which every human choice is represented and has the potential to happen grew from a study of quantum physics and begins to break away from the common sense of chronological events as we know them. In a sense, the idea that all choices and occurrences exist simultaneously destroys the norm of a linear narrative like we are used to. I imagine us hopping from universe to universe and picking an action or thought that waits there for us before we move on to the next. Yet, at the same time I realized how outlandish that would be because of how constrained my mind is to a ordered time sequence. This discussion seemed to redefine narrative as something that constantly exists, but that we experience at different times due to the previous things that occurred in our lives.

These concepts are really interesting to me because I believe in a God, an eternally existing higher power who lives outs idea of time, and I have had to think about the concept  eternity and free will a lot in my life. I was reminded of the argument about predestination and free-will that has gone on for years in the church, but I also remembered that no one has ever really come to a conclusion because the ideas are mostly above tangible human understanding. I found it really interesting that these theories were produced and being explored by scientists because science and religion often take different sides.

 

http://www.radiolab.org/story/91504-beyond-time/

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