Is it possible that the whole concept of time breaks down?
Can we see future?
The answers to all of these questions are considered to be No. if you any layman these question, he will directly say that these are ridicules question and it is impossible to do so. If you ask these questions to the likes of Steven Hawkins and Albert Einstein, they may give you some very complicated theory and you will find yourself more confused than you were before asking the questions. Either way people will say that the answer of these questions will lie in some complicated physics equations and theories.
But I beg to differ. I think that answers to these questions could very well lie in completely field; our ability to collect and process information, things we already know.
Confused…?
Let’s start with basics. We know that if we drop a ball, it will hit the ground. How can we say that? Were we able to see the future? Were we able to travel through time? Even though the answer to all these three questions is no, still we were able to claim with certainty that ball will hit the ground. One can even argue the event of ball hitting is so certain that it is as good as already happened. The reason for the argument seems trivial, the universal laws of gravity. Everyone knows them, and we know they never fail. So what has happened here, we know the information of ball being dropped and we also know how to process this information and hence we came to the conclusion that the ball will hit the ground even before it actually did. So were we able to see the future? One can argue that in a particular sense, YES.
Let’s take another example. We all know about the weather forecast that various meteorological departments across the world do. Are they more accurate today or were they more accurate 20 years ago. Anyone would claim that indeed they are much better and accurate today with respect to 20 years ago. But if we compare their accuracy from today to (say) 20 years from now, even in this case we would argue that we will certainly be much better 20 years from now than we are today. How can we say so? This is because in 20 yrs time we will undoubtedly have more ways of gathering weather information and thus will have more information and also will have better ways of processing the information.
We can clearly see that with more and more information and better and better ways of processing that information we tend to know more and more about the things that are going to happen in future that too more preciously.
Now think of a scenario, what if there is some one or something (say a computer) that has all the information there is in the world. And it also has all the ways of processing that information. I know that such thing in not possible today as we do not know many things that happen in this world. But slowly and slowly we are learning new and new things about the world. So it would not be wrong to presume that in the near future we will be able to understand the world completely; Whether it is our DNA encoding or whether it is different antics of monsoon. With more understanding and knowledge we can predict the future more accurately.
So with all the information in the world, can’t we predict the future with a certainty which was reserved for past events only. I think we can.
Now if we know what is going to happen tomorrow, who will be born, who will die, how much rain would fall, what would be the temperature. Will time have any significance left? We already know what will happen, so how does it matter that the particular event has taken place or not.
Then time would be reduced to just one of the variables in our life. Time has been often called the fourth dimension, but it rarely shows any similarity with the other three. But after this event, time would be like the other three dimensions, very much predictable. In true sense the time will halt as the meanings of present, past and future will no longer be the same as they are today. They will merge together to form one entity. The fact that a particular event is happening, already happened, or going to happen will have no meaning at all as we will be looking at the big picture and consider things as a whole and not in terms of present, past and future.
This is something to ponder over. As we do not have much time left before this imaginary scenario becomes a reality.
