I know, this is a big topic, but I’ve been thinking about it for a while and when I think about something this much I have to talk about it. The reason I think about History and Time and how they unfold is that it comes up so often in conversation, on television and in news stories, etc. The topics of my interest are these questions: Are we in control of our own history? Is time travel possible so that you could theoretically go back and fix any you might have made? Is history important and can we learn from it?
So, of course, just to be different, I'm going to deal with these questions starting with the second one first. I recently saw a report on the latest thinking in physics on PBS, one of those things hosted by Neil DeGrasse Tyson I think. In the report, they discussed a newer view of time and its progression that to me makes significantly more sense than the version where time is a line that can be bent, perhaps to a point where you could manipulate a timeline and bend it completely back upon itself (causing a loop that would allow travel back in time). In this new version, time builds up as a series of fragmentary moments that build up, each one dependent on all the moments that came before them. These moments flash into and out of being, and once they’re gone they’re completely gone. You can’t go back to them. These moments may progress more slowly somewhere else than they do here where we are, but that’s irrelevant to our reality. Someone could go away (close to a black hole, for example) and come back and be able to notice this slower movement. But they cannot affect moments that have already passed. As my friend Ben Dominguez once said to me, “If time travel were possible, we’d already know it because we would have had visitors from the future already.” So, where time travel has proved to be a fun thing to imagine in movies, TV and books, I’m sorry, it just won’t work the way they imagine. That’s my belief, anyway.
So the next question is regarding control of what happens to you. Or maybe the better way to look at it is “can I do anything to affect what happens to me?” And I think the answer here is clearly yes, you can. There are going to be random things that happen to or around you that you can't control or predict, for sure. But there are also decisions that you get to make that will lead you in the general or the specific direction you want to go. I look back on my own forty years so far and I can clearly map out how the decisions I made or we made have put me on the path to be exactly where I am/we are. There were detours and road blocks and even complete mindset changes along the way. But at every step of the way, there was also me and us making decisions about how to react to both the bad and the good things that have happened. I think our decisions were far more influential in the overall picture of how our life has ended up right here than any of the events that have happened along the way.
Now, as for history's importance. Let's say that time does progress the way the PBS show says it does. Doesn't that mean that history is gone, vanished and irrelevant? Well, it may be gone, but it is informative. History is how we got here and history tells us how things tend to work and especially how people tend to behave. Events turn out to be pretty predictable when you have a pretty good idea of what our fellow humans will do faced with a similar set of circumstances and events. If you want to predict the future, the most reliable predictor tends to be the events of the past. I have used this to my advantage as much as I possibly could in my life. For example, I never invested in the dot com boom, believing that it was an unsustainable bubble as it turned out to be. History says that investment markets go through up and down, boom and bust cycles. Individuals get too exuberant and the market happily goes along for the ride because it makes them tons of money on the way up and on the way down, too. My own personal history is also informative because I can see how I myself and those around me tend to behave and then I can plan accordingly. It's not perfect, but it works pretty well.
That's all for now.
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