Is Time Responsive?

On the Oregon Coast there is a spot you can visit called Thor’s Well. The ocean waves come bounding in from the open ocean and are funneled down a chasm in the rocky shoreline. There is a point where, every so often, the waves will create enough concentrated pressure underneath an overhang of rock that water shoots up through a hole in the rock, forming a beautiful spout. 

This doesn’t happen every time, however. The right harmony must exist among the advancing and retreating waves to line up just so and create the right force at the right time to eject the water skyward. 

The waves on the ocean can teach us something about time. You may not have given any thought to the fundamental nature of time, because it just seems so familiar and obvious. We all exist together at a time we call “now”, and we can all agree on the distinction between past and future. Is there more to time and “Timing” that we should understand?

You might currently think of time as a single moment moving from past to future. Instead, think of time as a series of events, like the waves on the ocean. There are many competing waves, just as there are many competing histories vying for our attention. A happy family or not? A fulfilling job or not? A sustainable economy or not?

History unfolds in discrete moments. The Gulf of Tonkin incident, for instance, was a definitive moment in American involvement in the Vietnam War. The collapse of the US economy in Fall 2008 was a discrete series of events which was influential in Barack Obama’s election to the Presidency in November of that year.

Each of these events are like ocean waves, travelling many miles over the ocean, influenced by unknown storms and winds, only to arrive at Thor’s Well and create a spout, or not. Even at the last minute, though, there are other waves coming in from different directions which can alter the outcome. Based upon the conditions when the wave strikes shore, the water may be receding in just such a way as to cancel the incoming wave, and allow a different wave to strike, a different set of events.

Retroactive Event Determination

The point to focus on is not the wave itself, but its history. In the ocean analogy, there are many variables—the incoming waves, the receding waves, and the shape of the rocks—that affect the actual way the waves crash. It is altogether unpredictable, and it isn’t until the last minute that we know whether a wave will make a spout at Thor’s Well. 

It is at this point that the wave’s history also comes into focus. Sometimes, important and unexpected events come upon us, like a wave out of the ocean. That wave—such as the collapse of the economy in Fall 2008—has a long history that brought it to your door and made it crash. 

But the important thing to understand about responsive time is that other outcomes were possible. We could have experienced a different sequence of events in which the economy didn’t crash and Obama didn’t fare so well in the election. This would be a different wave with its own history on the ocean. Unseen events influencing the waves far out on the ocean can be adjusted, so that instead of one historical chain of events we experience another. The past, as we know it, is adjustable.

This is a process we could call “retroactive event determination”. I am not the first one to identify it. The physicist John Archibald Wheeler famously named it the “delayed choice” phenomenon, emphasizing that a later choice can affect an earlier situation. What is new in my research is the necessity that these principles apply more broadly, to systems as a whole instead of to each of the constituent pieces. If this is the case, then whichever wave we actually experience also brings with it a long history of circumstances which led to it. History is being written by choices right now.

Many doorways

Here is where the metaphor provides a truly hopeful view of life. There are times when we want to grow and expand, and we see various waves approaching us, some opportunities to grow, and other opportunities to stay the same.

Sometimes we make choices which keep us in our comfort zone. The ocean waves hit, and it is not that exciting future we hoped for. But our cognitive dissonance grows. We know we want more for ourselves, and so maybe we become more committed to stretching ourselves, like taking a new direction at work, or challenging a relationship that isn’t working for us, or getting involved in a political campaign. Although the last wave has already hit, there are new waves coming closer to shore. These, too, have been building momentum for a long time. They are already in process, but have yet to break.

When we understand that the past is not certain until the wave actually breaks on the shore, we see how much more is possible than we otherwise suspect. We cannot simply “switch realities”. Once an opportunity passes, we must turn our attention to new waves. But these waves, too, have been building for a long time. 

Life is giving us wave after wave of opportunity to live bigger, and each of these is built from months or even years of preparation. Each of these is a doorway we can walk through. For instance, if we are given the opportunity to take a class which helps us become more qualified for the promotion we want, many decisions were made by many people over the past year to offer and schedule the class, and make it possible. All of that becomes “true” only when that wave reaches shore.