This has taken some, circular motion… to construct.
{Optional Reading Music - Jóhann Jóhannsson - The spelling Board}
I have asked myself why write this additional at all, but, as everything written, somewhere along the line the necessity to write it comes. One cannot move on until it is complete in one form or another.
So, we’ll structure the question of, circular motion, motion, otherwise known as time, which I’ve come to realise can only bring insurmountable unanswerable poignant-yet-insanity-inducing questions. We’ll stay away from the basic esoteric, ‘What is Time?’ And navigate instead via silk threads of logical linearity. In short, this piece on TimeBecomesMotion accompanies the previous short tale Shadows Smile, Time Doesn't - although Shaka’s perspective is his own. Not mine.
Discretionary Disclaimer: Perhaps, this is layered more simply or less simply than Shaka’s mind, but hopefully the linearity should, one hopes, lessen confusion and provide a perspective suitable enough to lead to an answer if one exists.
Now, Time Becomes Motion… What does this mean?
In essence, there is no simple answer, so firstly, I’ll revert to an analogy that leans on the image of ingredients coalescing into an edible cake, and later move to the concept of many silken threads intricately woven together to form a blanket. In both instances, the universe finds representation. Let’s begin with the cake. For your imagination, this cake, is a Victoria Sponge, with said ingredients:
225g Butter,
200g Castor Sugar,
1Tsp Vanilla Extract
4 Large Eggs (At room temperature)
225g Flour + 2Tsp Baking Powder
Pinches of Salt
75g Strawberry Jam + 180g Whipped Cream
Naturally, I stole this recipe from my stepfather’s secret anthology of recipes and printed it here, free of charge, this is useful for those attempting to create the perfectly balanced Victoria but I will not be presenting the process, that is word count allotted elsewhere.
We’re starting here because we know to some degree, that these ingredients alone, form nothing in themselves. They could sit upon a shelf or the inner chasms of a mildly cool fridge for weeks on end and create nothing. In short, as solitary ingredients, there is no movement (that our human eye is aware of), although all is moving on some level. Let’s not go there and instead continue stretching this already taut analogy.
When ingredients such as these, are mixed, melded, folded, combined and heated together, cooled and completed; a metamorphosis has taken place, and it begins the instant one ingredient is mixed with another. (Note; Dimensions in regards to size are not factored for the sake of the analogy playing out with a modicum of sense.) And specifically when it comes to cooling time, we can structure the layers perfectly. Symmetrical. Spherical. Top and bottom align with cream and jam to reveal our eponymous cake. What I am getting at, is while the ingredients are separated, while there is no union, or motion between them, their universe, or rather the cake, does not exist. Allow this through line to linger. We’ll come back to it.
Now, we’ll step away from this rather barren analogy of a cake briefly while it remains a tasteless depiction of a universe and settle on some core elements. The core themes here are, ingredients, individual ingredients, the mixing process, the heating and the cooling. But, instead of ingredients, we’ll insert atoms.
Yes, atoms. This is where we are going.
Individual ingredients of our universe; when bound, mixed, heated, cooled, formulated, structured and mystically reordered with fundamental laws (the same laws that determine our cake does not float in midair or become 2D once cooked), shape everything we know, all we see and everything we are. Everything, contains layers and layers of structured atoms in motion. M O T I O N structured in T I M E. Allow these words to ring beside one another for a moment while we run through the tricky convoluted part.
Before we enter our Alice-esque wonderland, we should acknowledge, that our cake (universe) exists because of the motion we apply to the ingredients, their motion and heated essence, form the cake. Motion, is the fundamental element here which begins the process; Begins, the time horizon of our cake… What I mean to say is this, Time begins with the process of mixing our collection of atoms, time begins at the outset of motion.
So, here is the Conclusion -midway through- Ingredients, in motion, craft time. Become Time. Time therefore Becomes Motion.
TimeBecomesMotion.
Just before we lean over the edge into this oblivion, I’ll add the get-out-of-jail-clause; this, my good friends is a perspective, garnered from reading and thinking and word-ing.
So. The beginning of known/perceived Time seems an adequate place to begin. This is the true beginning of this piece.
God said, “Let there be Light.” Scientific man interprets, 13.{some} Billion Years Ago, an infinitely dense combustible millimetre in length Light exploded, beginning Time itself.
Beginning Time for all Space, Energy and Matter.
This beginning waves through a timeless space to our present. Let us presume there was no time prior to this besides God’s time (interpret as you must), cascading before and into our own hypothetical origins where this formless journey begins to form-form and layer time. We’re in this hole, so let us continue down it.
Here, time is yet to exist or rather, it is at its smallest increment, increments we cannot fathom. This is where we find ourselves within this blackness, with a singular light of energy at its densest.
Milliseconds into our timeline and only millimetres of dense light energy, is already in motion and accompanied by heat. No ingredient (or atom) is created yet. Hold onto this differential for a moment and note that our cake ingredients were sourced and present on the kitchen counter and we know their origin, at least the supermarket we bought them, but it is not so in the creation of our universe. Atoms were formed out of the mixing. A curious happening I can only shrug at. Imagining combustion and motion alone creating ingredients, creating our atoms, is strange. But all is strange down here. Just to reiterate, there are no ingredients within this tiny early, young universe. There is only energy.
We’ve arrived.
Let’s name this our pre-ingredient phase, which cosmologically is within the Radiation Era of the Universe’s formation, where energy exists alone, initially. For us laymans, this energy is pure hotness (and much else). Note; There are two Eras, and we exist in the Post-Radiation Era, the Matter Era, but less on this for the moment, when we arrive there, this piece will end. For now, we’ll remain here.
Before we can step deeper into this wonderland of creation, time and motion, there are useful cosmological names to point out landmarks in time within our Radiation Era, called Epochs - these are as follows (you needn’t commit them to memory unless you are planning to create a cake);
Planck Epoch - Infinitely small and Immediately following ‘Let there be Light’ - Force of Gravity (is Gravity a force… erm…) Separates from the Superforce (Explanation below).
Grand Unification Epoch - 10^-43 (This number - is a minute measurement of time - The first marker) Remaining Forces of Nature are parted from the Strong Nuclear Force.
Inflationary Epoch - 10^-36 - (Yes, these numbers are small, we can’t imagine them) An expansion of our infinitely small Radiated Energy Universe grows from an Atom size to the size of a Grapefruit. (The universe we sit comfortably in used to be very small, the sort of thing you could hold in your hand, with the Infinity Glove perhaps.)
Electroweak Epoch - 10^-32 - The final Forces of Nature separate. Electromagnetic and Weak Nuclear Force.
Quark Epoch - 10^-12 - All of the early Ingredients of the universe are present. (We are no longer in the Pre-Ingredient phase)
Hadron Epoch - 10^-6 - Cooling of the Universe - (Our Cake universe is out of the oven, so to speak.) Quarks, (The subatomic particles that form the building blocks of atoms) bind together to create Neutrons and Protons (they are separate at this point)
(All these points in our universe’s beginning of time are extraordinary and incomprehensible, you cannot blink them into comprehension. These numbers are fibres of time. {Be aware unfortunately they are written without the proper formatting}.)
Lepton Epoch - 1 second - (This is a timeframe we can imagine although light can travel 186,000 Miles in this time…) Fusion of Neutrons and Protons to form Nuclei which is the basis of an Atom.
Nuclear Epoch - 100 Seconds - Creation of Nuclei and First chemical element created - Helium
The list is convoluted, so here is a brief layer of understanding.
The Planck Epoch consists of zero matter following ‘Let there be Light’, no ingredients, but instead, an infinitely hot and small radiation hub of energy containing our Forces, which begins time as we know it.
The Grand Unification Epoch follows, a term named for the collection of Forces, that are operating after Gravity parts from the ‘Superforce’ (All 4 forces combined). The other three, Strong Nuclear, Weak Nuclear and Electromagnetic remain as a collective until at the end of this phase, the Strong Nuclear Force Separates.
Now, Time, if you are following, has already begun, our time, this is our time, the birth of our time.
Within the Inflationary Epoch, also named Super Inflation, occurs precisely 0.000000000000000000000000000000000001 second/s following ‘Let there be light’. I would say that this is where time becomes motion itself, through the universe’s rapid expansion. Note: The universe was atom sized and became that of a grapefruit in size. Apologies, I cannot explain why this occurs, nor can anyone, our mathematics deems it must occur for our universe to exist as it does but the master hand at work hasn’t revealed this to any person I know of… but we can comment on the works, unfortunately we cannot know why the master paints what He does.
We’re attempting to be brief, but we must go a little deeper before the way out comes.
Back to our scolding grapefruit sized very very dense universe parading swiftly through its evolution of time, space, matter etc.
Amongst this intensity of heated infinity soup, we find our first ingredients. Subatomic particles. Electrons, Quarks, Anti Quarks. If you have never come across quarks before, there are some subatomic particles out there for you to discover. (diagram above). Think of them as building blocks. There will be no explanation here other than to say, these are the foundations of all atoms in the universe, you, and I.
Here we come to motion and hopefully the subtle use of our analogy… With ingredients present, the mixing, threading, folding occurs. We’ll bounce between the threading of a silk blanket with infinitely minute threads and our cake we mentioned above. We are in a phase of our timeline following the Electroweak Epoch, where all our Forces separate, refer above.
Now onto the Quark Epoch. This is where we find our ingredients aligned, they’re not only upon the kitchen surface of space but continue to mix, coalesce. Or if you prefer these threads are weaving together. Layers of silk weaving into something structured, but our mixture is too intensely hot to form anything useful. They need to cool, separately, to combine later. And within the Hadron Epoch, this cooling occurs.
Remember, our timeline is small, very small, but we have sourced the ingredients from a singularity, bound the ingredients, and placed them (although they are forever in the oven) within our oven-oven. Now, the layers of the cake universe cool before we apply definite structure to it or layer it, let’s say. Finally, within the final moments of this Radiation Era, we come to the Lepton and Nuclear phase where the Neutrons and Protons combine, to create Nuclei which creates our origin forms of our Cake. Our Cake Universe has been expanding ever since, and continues to do so, expanding, creating, mixing, coalescing, moving within Time.
All of the above, not the writing, but the Radiation Era Epochs, (we haven’t breached the Matter Era Epochs which are depicted after the tiny Radiation Era as seen below) occurred, within a single second. One second gone. One second in time, did time know it had begun following that first utterance of ‘Let there be Light’? This is the question. And we required much of the information to pose this question, including the excess detail. When does time begin counting time, if not at the first moment of, movement, motion…
In closing, although much of the reason we had to run through this process was to show a perspective, we also know that the beginning of our universe is theorised not solely by the modern scientists but our ancestors, religious or otherwise that also whisper of how it began. These theories and beliefs differ greatly but this is not our goal to define what belief or scientific theory reigns true. It is this question of Time becoming Motion that is at the core of all above. I ask you, can time exist without motion?
Finally, we are an interesting species with interesting ideas, we each share our own gods and our own views. My view, so it is within this, is that only a Creator, could create this masterpiece we tap-dance on.
Additionally, randomly… there was a note I left out, about the inflationary epoch and the speculated scientific numerical number of 10-36 (recall the error in format) and the year 1036AD; a time within British history concerning Harold I whom ruled in England at this time and survived an attempt from Alfred Aetheling (Edward the Confessor’s brother) to seize the throne… it didn’t quite gel… Harold did have him blinded by his captor, the Earl Godwin of Wessex, Alfred died shortly after… but mentioning it now, seems to, not-quite-gel, and it has nothing to do with time. Just a memory as far as history is concern...
Final note: Let us just reflect on this process briefly and acknowledge from the standpoint of the beginning of the perceived/known universe, what we associate time to be. Time, seems to coincide with creation, or rather, with motion, did time begins at ‘Let there be Light’ and the formation of energy into atoms, atoms into structure. If we acknowledge that time indeed began here, are we saying that time, can only be represented by motion itself?
TimeBecomesMotion. MotionBecomesTime.
Actually, what of Memory?
TimeBecomesMemory no? And it began with a wink of light.
Adieu
{p.s. A second part is possible, but we shall see if time allows. We’ll return to a tale or two before then.}
{p.p.s. The DALL·E 2 image didn’t quite cut it but I wanted to use it anyway, it is an interesting tool to mess around with but I do prefer actual human creative artists at this moment in time.}