In search of lost time

Everything's going faster and faster. With new technologies connecting everything to everything, we are always on the alert, under the pressure of events. Under this accelerating effect, we would no longer find a retreat in our lives to mature our desires and decisions more slowly.

We are born, we die, we call this interval time. Our naive perception of its flow, however, does not correspond to physical reality...

Time, this strange phenomenon, both remedy and cause of our suffering. If we had to give it a neutral definition, we would say that it is the duration that a phenomenon requires to be accomplished.

Until Newton, time was a simple, orderly and absolute matter. This was in line with our perceptions, it all made sense, in a nutshell. But since Einstein and his theory of special relativity, there has been divorce. Time is no longer dissociated from space, they even form a block: space-time, and it is not the same everywhere, it is local, therefore relative.

As a human being, it is difficult to escape this notion of past, present and future time. Time shapes the human personality.

I propose another look that could change your vision of time in your everyday life. Time is not real and what we consider time is nothing but changes that lead to the illusion of time. It is a human construct to help us differentiate between the present and our perception of the past.

"People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present and future is a stubbornly persistent illusion," said Albert Einstein.

Einstein did not reject the existence of time. He rejected the objective distinction between past, present and future. The difference may seem minor, but it is not.

Time, illusion or reality?

Can we draw assurance that time exists? For the future is not yet, Aristotle worries, the past is no more, and the present is only the point of passage between future and past.

Time may not be a fundamental entity and does not correspond to any measurable real physical dimension. According to some physicists, it could emerge to our perception within the framework of a perfectly static world.

We do not measure time directly, but indirectly, via other physical dimensions: the space between two movements of the hand of a clock, the vibrating movements of an atom, the movement of flowing grains of sand, the movement of the Earth around the sun?

Time is one of those notions without physical reality, an illusion fabricated by our brain to justify the succession of events, which are a series of causes and which we call "time". Moreover, time is not uniform: it flows at a different speed depending on where we are and how we move.

The laws of mechanics and electromagnetism lead to symmetrical solutions that are reversible in time. Some quantum gravity equations can be written without any reference to time.

The malleability of space and time means that two events far apart can occur in one order when seen by one observer, and in the opposite order when seen by another.

An experiment conducted by the team of physicist Antoine Suarez in 2001 observed that the order of events can be independent of time: that there is neither before nor after. Everything happens in the "now". This has led physicists to conclude that on a quantum scale, time does not exist.

The "time advance" is the direction in which entropy - disorder - increases and in which we store information. The growth of entropy orients time and allows traces of the past to exist. These allow for the possibility of memories, which maintain our sense of identity.

Reality is a complex network of events on which we project sequences of the past, present and future. The entire Universe obeys the laws of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics, from which the sensation of time emerges.

Time is an illusion created by the brain

Our brain is a creation of evolution, it is designed to analyze the information sent to it by the senses, respond to stimuli, anticipate and make decisions, all in a given environment. What we perceive is therefore not necessarily physical reality, but a useful reality for using the memory of our experience to anticipate and ensure our survival.

By integrating advances in quantum physics, the philosopher Etienne Klein helps us to untangle the game: there are in fact two conceptions of time that we tend to mix up.

We lead an existence punctuated by the course of time which, in passing, generates a succession of events, but which produces nothing but duration. Let's call it "horizontal time", the one that makes our hair turn white and gives us rheumatism. We live and feel this horizontal time, but it is not alone.

By integrating the advances of quantum physics, we see that time is also an arrow: it is also the possibility for things to change over time through our actions. This is "vertical time".

We experience both: the time that passes, the time that transforms us physically, and the present time, the "here and now", the time of experience and of the choices we make to climb this mountain that is life. Moreover, the very intersection of these two times represents the present time, the time to which we must give our full attention.

All we must decide is what to do with the (double) time that is given to us.

Chinese culture does not have a concept of "time" but of "season" (the moment) on the one hand, and "duration" on the other, and speaks of "in-between moments". What our mind records are moments that it calls "now". What we perceive as the passage of time is therefore only our passage through a succession of "nows".

At the end of the Essays, Montaigne suggests, not to live in the present, but "by the way". Discreetly, this apropos takes us out of the thought of time; it makes us consider the moment, not as a lapse of time, but as an opportunity.

In these famous "dead times", which are not dead, things begin to change and take shape. These dead times, which do not attract attention, which we disdain, are those that make us exist, here and now. Perhaps the emotion of time is precisely what time is for us.

Philippe Limantour

Executive Coach - Coaching with EY