It's About Time

The past influences the future, but what if the future also influences the past and present? A rainy Neil Young concert led to thoughts on the quantum nature of time and why "now" is so significant.

Time flies

Time flies. Over 60 years after the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, it’s striking how little attention is paid to the fact that more than 500 bird species could vanish within the next century — unless we establish targeted recovery programs. Instead, today’s news is filled with stories about B-2 bombers, drone attacks, and nuclear targets.

Unless we shift our focus from destruction and devastation to regeneration and recovery, we will inhabit a depleted, impoverished world within this century. A century is one lifetime for a growing number of people on this planet. In fact, the number of centenarians is expected to reach 25 million by 2100. “Within a century” includes today, tomorrow, and the next 36,525 days.

We are running out of time, and what we do now matters. As physicist Max Tegmark writes in Our Mathematical Universe:

This brief century of ours is arguably the most significant one in the history of our Universe: the one when its meaningful future gets decided. I have no idea how we’ll be thought of, but I’m sure that we won’t be remembered as insignificant.

It may feel normal to prioritize immediate threats over long-term threats, but is it wise to separate the short term from the long term? This is a timeless question.

Quantum time

Many cultures do not share a linear understanding of the relationship between the past, present, and future. In some worldviews, time can be circular, the past can occur in the future, and the future can influence the past.

Not surprisingly, quantum physics also challenges a linear, unidirectional perspective of time. By introducing ideas such as time entanglement, non-local experiences, and backward causation, it invites us to question our assumptions about how time works.

I included a chapter on Time in the first draft of You Matter More Than You Think, but didn’t keep it in the final draft. This is because, at the time, I didn’t really understand the quantum nature of time. For example, according to some interpretations of quantum physics, the arrow of time at the subatomic level may go in both directions. What does a reverse flow of time mean for social change? How and why does time matter?

Time is subjective

In The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli describes time as a subjective experience: “In order to understand time, it is not enough to think of it from outside: it is necessary to understand that we, in every moment of our experience, are situated within time.” In other words, our experience is always embedded in a context.

For example, a week ago, my oldest son and his friends had an extra ticket to see Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts play an outdoor concert in Bergen. It was the Love Earth tour, and I was happy to join them.

It was a small, fairly intimate concert that opened with Sugar Mountain. I immediately time-traveled to the past, to my college days, remembering how my friend Jude and I sang that song together, thrilled that we had just bought front-row tickets to see him live, in concert.

Then he canceled the concert due to illness. We were so disappointed. I don’t know how many times I’ve said over the years, “I almost saw Neil Young.”

Seeing him now, decades later, altered my subjective experience of that past disappointment. It erased the “almost” and closed a circle of time. Sure, listening to Neil Young sing “you can’t be 20 on Sugar Mountain” rings different today, but it nonetheless felt like what Rovelli calls the intrinsic quantum indeterminacy of things: a blurred vision of the world that dissolves the line between past and future.

Time is Entangled

In the quantum world, time is entangled and the past, present, and future are correlated. This has many counterintuitive implications, including the idea that the future and present can influence the past. For example, in Quantum Mind and Social Science, Alexander Wendt discusses how our will, expressed as conscious intentions about the future, not only can inform the current collapse of the wave function (what we do now); it also plays a role in shaping our past - what we did.

As I understand it, this means that when we purposively focus on the results that we want to see in the future, we influence our actions in the present, which quickly become the past.

To illustrate, let’s go back to the concert. Bergen is known to be one of the rainiest cities in the world, and of course it rained. Neil Young played an old song I’d never heard before: Be the Rain.

We got to wake up,
We got to keep goin'.
If they follow us
There's no way of knowin'.

We got a job to do.
We got to save Mother Earth.

The health and well-being of Mother Earth will be decided by what we do today. Now. And today’s now will be history tomorrow.

Wendt emphasizes that the collapse of a wave function, or the moment of actualization, does not occur in time. Rather, “it is in collapse that ‘Now’ emerges, and with it the distinction between past and future.” The potential for change is always here and now.

We don’t know what the future holds, or if anyone is following us, but “we got to keep goin'.”

Time is Relative

Just as time is subjective and entangled, it’s also relative. When I saw the movie Rust Never Sleeps back in high school, I thought Neil Young looked old. After all, at that time he was twice my age. However, looking back at a clip from that movie today, he looks incredibly young.

Onstage in Bergen, Neil Young still looked old to me. But as my son pointed out, the audience looked pretty old too. Including me.

Hey hey, my my, it’s all relative.

It’s funny how words and music can transcend time. Listening to Neil Young sing Hey Hey, My My today, I notice that his music has been playing in my mind for years. For example, “it’s better to burn out, ’cause rust never sleeps” has motivated me to work hard consistently, whether in the name of the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, or global inequality. However, over time I’ve come to realize the dangers of burning out; even rust needs to sleep.

Time out

In Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad’s concept of agential realism recognizes that discontinuity plays an important role in change processes. Her point is that transformations do not follow a classical, linear model of time; they instead emerge from an accumulation of entangled moments — separate yet connected.

Following on this, I am going to allow myself a few weeks of discontinuity in this newsletter and take my first real summer vacation in years. No IPBES meetings. No editing books. Just time to relax. We’ll be visiting my mother in Florida, which will keep me thinking of the many species whose existence depends on our actions - including our political actions.

The lyrics from Neil Young’s beautiful and bittersweet song Birds remind me of what’s at stake, and why quantum social change matters:

When you see me
Fly away without you
Shadow on the things you know
Feathers fall around you
And show you the way to go
It's over, it's over....

Time is not linear, and “this century” is not over yet. It’s today that matters. We still have many pathways and possibilities for moving forward, and this is the time to remember that we are, in fact, significant.

Who has decided —who has the right to decide— for the countless legions of people who were not consulted that the supreme value is a world without insects, even though it be also a sterile world ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in flight? The decision is that of the authoritarian temporarily entrusted with power; he has made it during a moment of inattention by millions to whom beauty and the ordered world of nature still have a meaning that is deep and imperative.

- Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)

Artwork: Time - ©Tone Bjordam