The Immensity of Space & Time

As a form form 5 schoolboy in Malaysia, I was enthralled by astronomer Carl Sagan's documentary miniseries on science called Cosmos shown weekly on RTM at that time. I subsequently devoured all his books, which besides the best-selling book adaptation of the series, includes Broca's Brain and the Pullitzer Prize winner, The Dragons of Eden. What sticks in my mind still after all these years is a small and beautiful dedication Carl Sagan wrote on the first page of Cosmos to his wife:

"In the immensity of space and time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with Ann Druyan....."

Or words to that effect, I cant' be precise as I am quoting from my rather unreliable memory.

Even though I live in Jakarta, I do not feel I am that far apart from my friends in Malaysia and other countries whom I communicate with frequently through SMS and e-mail. We, the Net generation are used to instantaneous communication - SMS, e-mail and online chat make us feel as if physical distances are of no bearing.

But we forget that we are able to communicate (two-way, that is) with each other because we share a common moment in time - we live in the same epoch. We are not able to SMS to someone in the Victorian era or chat with our descendants from the 22nd century. The separation of space has been conquered but the separation of time has so far been insurmountable.

Carl Sagan passed away in 1996. He even wrote a fiction: Contact, which became a bestseller and was made into a reasonably good movie directed by Robert Zemeckis, starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey as a very unlikely priest. But I am digressing.

Time travel and all its resulting paradoxes is a hackneyed sci-fi theme. But in mathematical physics, time is not treated very differently from space. Einstein has shown us that space and time are intricately linked and that the phenomenon of gravity is nothing but a geometrical property of the space-time continuum. Even eminent scientist like Martin Rees in a recent interview with the BBC, does not dismiss that time-travel is a theoretical possibility.

We all know the pangs of being separated from our loved ones whenever we are away from home for long periods. Imagine the pain of separation by time - it is unbreacheable: That is the premise of the love story Somewhere in Time, starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour which I happen to be able to catch again on HBO recently. It is not a movie that I would put on my top 10 list but the soundtrack by John Barry is unforgettable. There is also a recent Korean movie about a pair of lovers who communicate through mail across time but again I'm digressing.

We could remain stationary in space (or at least from our point of view, as the Earth, Solar System and the Milky Way galaxy are all moving) but we are constantly moving in time. In a previous blog entry, I discussed how each of us could perceive time differently. Blogging is an act of attaching thoughts to cyberspace, marked by time.

Let us marvel at the fact that, you and I now are sharing the same point in cyberspace and that our brief lifetimes happen to overlap within the vastness that is Time.