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Decided to translate legendary words of great Carl Sagan to Serbo-Croatian (or Bosnian if you like) language. Added some photos too. Too important not to be translated into as many languages as we can.

Here’s full text.

Serbo-Croatian

—– Blijeda plava tacka —–

Za nekoga koji gleda sa ove daljine, Zemlja ne izgleda nimalo intersentna. Ali za  nas, je to je vec drugacije. Razmotrimo ponovo ovu tacku. To je ovdje, to je dom, to smo mi. Na njoj, svi koje volimo, svi koje znamo, svi za koje smo ikad culi.Svako ljudsko bice koje je ikad postojalo, zivili su tu. Sve nase radosti i patnje, hiljade samouvjerenih religija, ideologija, i ekonomskih doktrina, svaki lovac i tragac, svaki heroj i kukavica, svaki tvorac i unistivac civilizacija, svaki kralj i seljak, svaki zaljubljeni par, svaka majka i otac, djete sa nadom, pronalazac i istrazivac, svaki ucitelj morala, svaki korumpirani politicar, svaka “super zvijezda”, svaki vrhovni vodja, svaki svetac i grijesnik u istoriji naseg svijeta zivio je ovdje – na truncici prasine suspendovane na suncevoj zraci.

Zemlja je vrlo mala pozornica u prostranoj kozmickoj areni. Razmislite samo o krvi koju su generali i imperatori prolili samo da bi u slavi i triumfu, mogli da postanu privremeni gospodari samo malog djela ove tacke. Razmislite samo o beskrajnim okrutnostima koje su stanovinici sa jednog krajicka ove tacke pocinili nad stanovnicima drugog, jedva prepoznatljivog, djela, kako su cesti njihovi nesporazumi, kako su zeljni da ubijaju jedni druge, kake su zestoke njihove mrznje.

Nasa usamljenost, nasa umisljena samovaznost, obmana da mi imamo specijalnu privilegiju u Svemiru, je dovedena u pitanje ovim trackom blijede svjetlosti. Nasa planeta je usamljeno zrnce u velikom omotacu kosmicke tame. U nasoj zavucenosti, u svom ovom prostranstvu, nema nagovjestaja da ce pomoc doci od nekle drugdje da nas spase od samih nas. Zemlja je jedini svijet za koji znamo da podrzava zivot. Ne postoji nigdje drugdje,  bar ne u bliskoj buducnosti, gdje ljudska rasa moze da migrira. Posjetiti, da. Nastaniti se, ne jos. Voljeli ili ne, Zemlja je gdje mi moramo opstati.

Receno je da je astronomoja iskustvo koje pravi covjeka skromnijim i gradi karakter. Mozda i nema bolje demonstracije gluposti ljudskog samozadovoljstva od ove dalake slike naseg malog svijeta. Za mene, naglasava odgovornost da tretiramo ljubazno jedni druge, i da sacuvamo i njegujemo nasu blijedu malu tacku,

jedini dom koji imamo.

English

—-The Pale Blue Dot—-

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Look again at that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

Warning: Words nothing and something are used a lot in this article so I suggest reading it slowly and really trying to imagine what the sentence is trying to imply. To make it easier to spot, every time you see nothing in italics it will imply the state, and not the the word, in linguistic sense. For example the word nothing in the sentence  “today I did nothing” simply implies that today I did not do anything. But the famous question “why there’s something rather than nothing?” implies the state of nothingness which will be in italics. Same goes for the word something.

Let us first define nothing. Nothing is when there’ no anything. I am not talking about linguistic tricks here for the word nothing. Like mathematical nothing (zero) or logical nothing (I have nothing drawn on this paper). I mean nothing in the most literal sense of the world. No matter, no time, no light, no dark,  no space, no dimensions, no thoughts, no observers, no abstract. Pretty much, no anything. Nothing is simply put “the absence of everything. Still hard to comprehend? Of course it is… but will get to that later.

Is nothing a default state before the existence of anything? Was there really a “before”. Before there was something, was there really nothing? Is nothing a default state from which everything start existing (or got created)? Many assume that the default state of our universe has to be nothing, and that the something came right after. Meaning; at the beginning there was nothing. Nothing existed, not even nothingness, and then our Universe got created (or appeared) out of that nothing. Now, why would this have to be true? Is nothingness more natural state than something? Is nothing a default state? There is no good or logical reason to think that. As a matter of fact, the opposite is what’s probably true. Or at least what is known so far.

First of all, It’s impossible for humans to imagine nothing. Even if you close your eyes and try really hard to imagine nothing, you will not be able to do it. Not only that you would have to imagine that there is no matter, atoms, light or the actual Universe, but you would also have to imagine that there is no space, time, thoughts or even an observer. Which in this case would be you, so nothing is contradiction in philosophical spectrum already. Moving on…

Can you image no space? Can you imagine spaceless …uhmm what…space? A state with no space? You can’t, because you still need an observer to deduct that kind of reasoning. Nothing, simply cannot be observed, because if it can be, then it would imply an observation from the outside. If we can observe nothing from the outside then you don’t have nothingness. If we can observe nothing from the inside, the same applies;from the inside of what?. What about with no observer? Of course not. It’s silly.
So why is it so hard to imagine it? It is hard because our conscious brain doesn’t know what nothing is. Our brain hasn’t evolved the need to know that. Nothing simply makes no sense whatsoever. In the whole history of human civilisation and the Universe, state of nothing does not exist. We have never encountered or dealt with nothing. Ever. Not even in the vacuum of space. We know that vacuum is not totally empty. But even if it was; even if you were somehow able to suck everything out of the vacuum, you will still have space and time left. Empty space doesn’t mean nothing. There’s still space left.There is no such a thing as nothing. So our brain doesn’t need to worry about it.
Now, many will say “but what if some intelligence created everything from nothing?”. But that implies that some kind of intelligence exited while there was nothing, it existed alongside with nothing,  immediately making the whole point silly. But lets say we did allow for existence of that kind if intelligence along side with nothing, then we would go into infinite regression. Who created the intelligence? Did that intelligence arose from nothing? Did  the intelligence always existed? How come that intelligence can exists? You might say “well it always existed”. (First Cause argument). Then I could say “ if the intelligence always existed, then we can use the same logic to say that the Universe (in one form of another) always existed. Why add unnecessary complexity? Why add the middle “man” where there is no evidence for it?

So why would we even start to think that there was nothing before something? Why would we even suppose such a question in the first place; when all of our senses, all of our data, all of our history shows that there was always (and still is) something. I bet you can’t name an event in our known history when there was nothing. Even the first law of thermodynamics confirms that. Law states that matter cannot be created nor destroyed. Let’s break that down:

matter cannot be created –  If nothing indeed existed, then matter would be absent and would clearly violate this law.
matter cannot be destroyed – matter can only change its form so regardless how hard we tried, there would always be something.

Then why in the hell would we ever assume that everything got created form nothing in the first place? when all our logic and data shows that something (in one form or another) always existed.
To me it looks like humans are never taking the simplest answer for granted. We have to invent problems and then find unnecessary solution for the same. Be that for religious or personal reason, I have no idea, but most of the times the simplest and the most elegant solution is the correct one. In our case, something always existed is the best and the most elegant solution. You also might have a hard time to wrap your head around “something always existed”, but when you really think about it long and hard, there is no other solution for now. Nothing simply does not make sense and I really don’t see a way around this.
So how else do we know that nothing never exited? Logic, deductive reasoning and data. That’s how. We know that the same way we know that Santa Claus doesn’t exist, has never existed and probably never will. No evidence or data whatsoever. No sane logic supports it. We know that it is true the same way we know that Hitler did exists. Tons of evidence for his existence. So why would anyone assume that Hitler did not exists and Santa Claus did? Because essentially they are using the same logic; discarding the current data while using the data that doesn’t exist, by trying to prove that something came out of nothing. In my opinion the sole question “why there’s something rather than nothing?” is meaningless. If there was indeed nothing instead of something, then we wouldn’t have any observers (you can’t have “something” while nothing exists at the same time) and would not be able to ask this question anyway. As Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy so eloquently put it  when asked the question; Why is there something rather than nothing? Their answer was: “Well, why not? Why expect nothing rather than something? No experiment could support the hypothesis ‘There is nothing’ because any observation obviously implies the existence of an observer.”

Internet. How information gets from one place to another? You fire up your browser and stuff appears pretty much right away. Lot of us take that for granted. Well, it’s not that simple really. It’s actually quite complex. So since the Internet, network engineering and security are part of my daily job, I decided to write up little story describing the whole process as simply as I could for a different perspective that you actually see in books . After I’ve finished this article, I’ve come to realize; Internet is even more fascinating than I originally though. Hopefully you’ll get something useful out of it, or at least kill some time.

Let’s say there’s guy named Michael who lives somewhere in Germany and who is an avid internet user. Michael gets up before the work, makes his coffee and sits on his computer to check the latest news. Michael wants to go to yahoo.com. He fires up his browser (IE, Firefox, Safari etc…) and lets say Google home page pops up. But since Micheal wants to go to yahoo.com, he types www.yahoo.com in his address bar and then he hits enter. What happens next? You might say: “well yahoo’s main page shows up.” True, but it’s not that simple really. Think about this; servers (computers with lots of storage and power) where yahoo pages physically reside, are located in Sunnyvale, CA and Michael is all the way in Germany. So Michael’s request will have to go from Germany all the way to USA. Once Michael’s request reaches Yahoo’s servers in California, Yahoo will have to send their front page to Michael. That main page will have to cross the western Europe, Atlantic and whole USA to reach it’s destination.

Here’s the whole journey step by step form Michael’s keyboard to yahoo’s home page and back.

1. Michael types www.yahoo.com letters into his browser .
2. Keyboard sends characters (letters) in forms of electrical signals via wire trough USB (or PS/2) port to a keyboard controller, which resides on Michael’s motherboard in his desktop unit on the floor.
3. From the keyboard controller letters go to Operating System (OS) which could be Windows, OS X, Linux etc..Lets say Michael uis using Windows 7. Windows 7 takes those letters and passes it to application which in our case is Michael’s browser.
4. Michael’s browser sees this request and says to the Windows 7: “oh you want to go to www.yahoo.com. Ok here’s what Instructions I need from you to display this page. Browser then sends these instructions back to the Windows 7“
5. Windows 7 sees the request and goes: I recognize this type of request. I need to send this down to my hardware and out. But before I do that let me pack it up for the long trip”. We will refer to this packaged request from now on simply as packet.” Windows 7 sends this packet down to its hardware or a Network Card. Network card is the place where you plug in your telephone or Ethernet jack, usually found in the back of your PC. That’s the final exit from Michael’s PC.
6. Network card sees the packet coming and says: “This packet is too big and I have no ability to send this as a whole, so let me chop it up to pieces first. Also, I really have no idea where this is supposed to go. All I know is that I need to label it and send it out to the next device. So network card splits our packet into smaller packets, adds destination address (yahoo) to each individual packet and sends the whole thing in streams to the closest device. Which is Michaels’  cable modem. Packets don’t leave network card at the same time. They go one by one. For the time being we’re going to follow only one packet.
7. Cable modem that is connected to Michael’s PC receives our packet, looks at destination address and says: “I really don’t care what’s in this packet and I cannot read it anyway, but maybe my owner knows so let me send it to him. That’s Michael’s local ISP (Internet Service provider). So cable modem sends out little packet on their way to Michael’s local ISP.
   
8. Our packet goes out of the modem trough coaxial cable, trough the walls, out of the Michael’s house, underneath his lawn, up to the telephone pole on his street, trough his neighborhood. Then our packet roams trough his city streets bouncing from pole to pole, going underground, above ground, until it finally reaches his local ISP’s headend. Headend si the place with antennas and where his ISP keeps all gear.
9. At local ISP’s headend, a router receives and inspects the packet and thinks to itself: Judging by destination address I know that yahoo.com is not here in the city so let me send this packet to my neighbor (another router connected to it) maybe it knows. So, router unpacks original packet and then repacks the packet in its own little suitcase and sends it on its way.Router does this for each packet it receives. It’s important to spend little more time on describing what routers are. Routers are quite fascinating little (or big) fellas. Routers are hardware based devices that ISP’s use to direct (route) traffic in and out of their networks. They act as a traffic cops. They get millions and billions of packets like these every minute, so they’re work extremely hard and they’re always busy. No breaks. They also have their own language that we call protocols, which they use to communicate with each other. Once setup, they get mind on their own. They use complex algorithms to decide where and how to route traffic, they do their own maintenance, they communicate with neighboring routers all the time, they notice when path gets invalid so they automatically choose next best path to destination. They can also recover from failures on their own. Routers are pretty much backbone of the whole Internet. They’re spread out all over the world. Every company and ISP has them.
10. Neighboring router will do the same. It will inspect our packet and send it to its closest neighboring router until our packet reaches the edge of Michael’s Local ISP’s network. Edge is where his local ISP ends, and larger ISP begins. Just like Michael’s smaller ISP provides internet connection to him, larger ISP provides Internet connection to smaller ISP and so on.This larger ISP could be medium sized ISP like Roadrunner or huge like Comcast or AT&T in US, or T-Online in Europe. Moving on.
11. Large ISP receives Michael’s packet and inspects it. It thinks: Ohh destination is not in Germany, it needs to go to USA, so let me send it to one of USA large ISP’s. Large ISP’s have reciprocal agreements between themselves. Meaning: I will forward your traffic if you forward mine. European Large ISP will choose shortest and quickest path to one of the USA large ISP’s. Lets say that it picked AT&T. What happens next is quite a journey for our packet.
12. In order for our little packet to go from Europe’s largest ISP to USA’s largest ISP it will first need to bounce from router to router, from ISP to ISP, from country to country. Juts like you would if you were to go on foot. It will go across France’s ISP’s and their routers. It will bounce across France’s countryside, from smallest to largest ISP’s just like it did in Germany. It will go trough English Channel all the way to Great Britain. It will never rest or take any breaks. If it runs into a broken path or no path at all, it will go around it and try another path.
13. Our packet will reach British ISP’s and will bounce around trough their picturesque country side, busy streets of London and other English cities. Always looking for shortest and quickest way out. If one path is blocked, packet will be routed to an alternate path by routers. In the end, Brits will send our little friend across the Atlantic via trans Atlantic cables.
14. It will travel via Cross Atlantic cables laid down approximately 60 years ago. Cables have been upgraded to a higher speed many times, and are getting upgrades all the time to keep up with demand.
15. Journey trough the underwater cables will be undisturbed and lot less chaotic than when packet traveled trough the cities. After Atlantic journey our little packet will finally arrive at AT&T somewhere on the coast of US. AT&T’s big routers will inspect the packet and its destination and will say: I don’t know exactly where yahoo.com is located but looking at the destination address I do know that it needs to go to Sunnyvale, CA. So let me send it to Comcast because I sent all my previous packets destined to yahoo via Comcast. Comcast apparently knows where this yahoo is, so I’ll do same with this packet too. Packet will then get forwarded trough AT&T’s huge network bouncing from router to router, from city to city, until it reaches Comcast.
16. Comcast routers will receive the packet and say: I am actually not Yahoo’s ISP but I do know who is. It is ISP called Level 3. So let me send it to Level 3 so they can send it directly to yahoo.
    
17. Level 3 will receive packet and say: Ohh I know exactly where this needs to go. It needs to go to one of our customers; yahoo. Yahoo is located at so and so street address, so let me send it to them directly.
    
18. Yahoo’s modem (or some other terminating device) will receive our packet and will think: Someone is requesting our front page. This needs to go to one of our servers that it’s connected directly to me. So modem will forward the packet to the server where yahoo web pages reside.
19. Yahoo’s server (which is essentially PC with lots of storage space and some fast processors) will receive the packet but will not do anything with it until receives all other packets. It will wait. Remember point 5 above: network card in Michael’s PC chopped original packet into lots of smaller packets before sending them out. Not all packets took the same trip. Some went trough different lines, different ISP, even different countries possibly, but all packets have to arrive in order for yahoo’s server to know what the message is. Once all packets arrive at Yahoo’s server, only then, network card will assemble it into one entity that will be understandable and readable. From there it will see that yahoo’s front page (www.yahoo.com) is requested  so it will dig into their database and find yahoo’s front page and will package the page into similar packets like ours and send it back to Level 3.
20. Packets will have to make the similar trip back. All the way from Sunnyvale, Ca trough out the USA, across Atlantic, over the hills and valleys, back to Germany and finally back to Michael. It might not take the same path back, but it will be very similar.
21. Once the packet reaches Micheal’s modem, network card will wait again for all packets to arrive, assemble it into one entity and it will travel up to Windows 7 and into his browser and yahoo’s front page will be displayed to Michael so he can finally read his news and finish his morning coffee. Think about how many entities and devices were needed for all this. All of those ISP’s, routers, lines, under-ocean cables, different countries were engaged just because Micheal decided to click on Yahoo’s front page. Lets think about that little more.

Now you see that this process is very similar to process of how Post Office delivers their mail. Instead of physical address with street, city, ZIP, country, computers and routers use IP addresses and MAC addresses to communicate. But principal is the same.

Here’s interesting part: The whole journey above is for when Michael wanted to view yahoo’s front page only. So what would happen if Michael start clicking trough other yahoo’s pages? The whole thing repeats for every link, every page he clicks on yahoo. If he would to click on yahoo autos, packet has to make the same trip. If Michael would to click on yahoo shopping, packet would have to make the same trip in both direction, and the whole journey repeats on and on almost without a glitch. Things get even more complex when Michael tries to download or upload an image, movie or piece of music. I don’t even want to go into HD streaming and describe what happens there. Too mind boggling. Think about that for little bit.

And that is not even the most fascinating part. The really spooky part is that process I described above is extremely simplified of course, and usually fills up volumes and volumes to describe and understand properly. There’s a 1500 page book that basically describes the whole process above. Think about that: It takes 1500 pages to fully describe the whole journey. Now, here’s fascinating part: the whole process of our packet going back and forth (both direction) takes less than one second. Everything I said above, everything that is written in that huge book happens in milliseconds. Michael doesn’t even think about what needs to happen in order for him to get to the yahoo’s page. For him it’s almost instant. Reason that is almost instant is that our little packet travels really fast. How fast? Close to the speed of light fast. That fast! To put that in perspective, our packet can circle the whole earth, 8 times, in one second.

Our example was dealing with Yahoo which is a big company with army of servers and employees. But each of us can host web pages on our own computers or servers so others can find it. That’s what the Internet really is. Bunch of computers and servers connected together in a huge network sharing information. Information gets from one place to another via routers. They’re ultimate traffic cops. There’s no Internet owner. It just is.

Think of this:

• Newton worked out how gravity works and therefore opened the door for mechanics and industrial revolution.
• Faraday worked out electromagnetic forces and therefore opened the door for electricity, TV, telecommunication, the Internet etc…
• Einstein worked out nuclear forces and opened the door for nuclear physics, quantum mechanics, and how stars work, how time works, GPS and satellite navigations,  and many other things.

When you really think about it; those three above pretty much created the world we live in right now. I don’t know about you but I cannot think of any other more important scientists in the worlds history.

Problem that lot of people have when doing a research on something is that they’re going into research with predisposed ideology, so they only look for data that will confirm their already established views. If they took just a little more time to critically examine their views from different angles, lots of their long time established beliefs would be demolished in an instant. Which is not a bad thing.

Here’s a great article from NPR about evolution and scientist that actually studies it.

Short excerpt:

“I believe evolution. It’s easy. It’s my life. I’m a paleoanthropologist. I study fossils of humans, apes and monkeys, and I teach college students about their place in nature.

Of course I believe evolution.

But that is different from believing in evolution.”

Full article can be found here: I Am Evolution

I just thought I’d share a paragraph from Richard Dawkins Ancestor’s Tale. Mr. Dawkins proves mathematically that we all share same ancestors. His logic is truly remarkable and undeniable. See it for yourself.

“All your ancestors are mine, whoever you are, and all mine are yours. Not just approximately but literally. This is one of those truths that turns out, on reflection, to need no new evidence. We prove it by pure reason, using the mathematician’s trick of reductio ad absurdum. Take our imaginary time machine absurdly far back, say 100 million years, to an age when our ancestors resembled shrews or opossums. Somewhere i the world at that ancient date, at least one of my personal ancestors must have been living, or I wouldn’t be here. Let us call this particular little mammal Henry (it happens to be a family name). We seek to prove that if Henry is my ancestor he must be yours too. Imagine, for a moment, the contrary: I am descended from Henry and you are not. For this to be so, your lineage and mine would have to have marched, side by side yet never touching, through 100 million years of evolution to the present, never interbreeding yet ending up at the same evolutionary destination — so alike that your relatives are still capable of interbreeding with mine. This reductio is clearly absurd. If Henry is my ancestor he has to be yours too. If not mine, he cannot be yours.”

Lets talk about something real. Atoms. Everything in the world that’s ever been, was and will ever be, is made of atoms. Period. You, me and everything else around us is made up of different kind of atoms. I remember standing in the middle of the mall the other day and thinking to myself: “Wow, all of this stuff came out out of the earth and ground?”. Everything we see is just collection of tiny entities call atoms. However, current atoms in your body are not the same atoms that were present in you, oh lets say 10 years ago, or even 10 days ago. That’s right. You’re only a temporary collection of assorted atoms. In other words, different kinds of atoms have to come together at some point in time just to form YOU; then to disband and be replaced by other atoms (at different times of course). Some scientists hypothesize that by the age of 30 all of the atoms in our body have been replaced by new ones; and that’s not even the strange part. Think of this: Atoms don’t age. They don’t just die. Radioactive atoms do decay but non-radioactive atoms are permanently stable as far as we can tell. After we die, atoms that make up our body are recycled. Some of them end up in ground, some in air while some end up in other objects. That would mean you might be made of same atoms as Hitler, Plato or even Jesus Christ was made of. You also might be containing same atoms that may have been in Great Wall Of China, bottom of the ocean, moon, dinosaurs and even Turkish hashish from Anatolia’s mountains. As a matter of fact, it’s a statistical certainty that you’re made of same atoms which some famous people were made of; or at least those atoms were part of you at some point in your life.

Question is: if atoms in our body are constantly getting replaced, then how come we don’t feel that kind of change? How come we don’t sense when our old atoms get replaced by new ones? Answer is two part I think. First, change is so gradual and slow that we really have no senses to feel this type of change. There are approximately 7*10²⁷ in a human body. That’s 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms. That’s a whole lot of atoms. Second, atoms in our body have to follow certain rules and paths. Think of water that makes up rivers and streams. Water is constantly changing and cycling, but the river itself always stays the same. It’s always (more or less) of the same shape. So, it’s the interaction between atoms that’s important and not the atoms themselves.

We’re made of the same stuff as everything in our universe is made of. Stars, galaxies, rivers, mountains, and everything we can observe are all made of same stuff. It’s just order of the stuff that makes up different shapes, molecules, cells, tissue and everything else material. That would mean that when we observe (or consciously thinking) our universe, essentially we’re observing ourselves. Carl Sagan once said: “We are the way for The Cosmos to know itself.” Think of that next time you go to Wall-Mart and are surrounded by all of that stuff.

Consider answering following questions about time (Do not just read these questions, but think about them for a little bit). I call them mind-benders.

• Can every moment in time of the past exists somewhere?
• Does past actually exists somewhere? If it does, Is it than stored somewhere?
• How about the future or present? Can future and present exist somewhere?
• Can you define present? How long does the present lasts?
• If you think that present exists, then where is it? If you think that past exists, then where is it?

When you really think about it answer is so simple that even child could understand it, so we conclude following: no past, present and future can exists without violating at least dozens of physics and logical laws; which in turn would imply that time does not exists.
Passage of time is just an illusion we made up to cope and measure the change. No more and no less; Everything else in between is work of our imagination, science-fiction writers and physicist with too much time on their hands. That is essentially what this article will be about. Just a thought exercise to see if we can have a logical world with no time existing.

Let’s first start with the quote:

” A famous philosophical argument says that, if the future were real, then it would be fixed now, and we would not have the freedom to affect that future. Since we do have that freedom, the future can’t be real”

What this quote is essentially saying is that predetermined future cannot exists because we’re the ones that are making it as we go along. If that kind of future did exist somewhere, than we would not be able to affect it with our own actions. So no matter what I did, my future would always remain the same.

We all know stories and science fiction novels about traveling back  in time or further into the future. We also know about time travel paradoxes. Most famous being grandfather paradox. It goes like this:
If you went back in time and killed your grandfather, you would not exists since he would not be able to have children of his own. He would be dead and you would’ve never been born. But, if you weren’t born you would not be able to go back in time to kill your grandfather in the first place since you didn’t exist, but obviously you do exist and you did go back in time and you did kill your grandfather. This creates a logical paradox and big inconsistency in logical thinking. But we’ll come back to this later in the article.
There’s another paradox which physicist don’t talk about, but to me it seams like even stranger paradox than the grandfather one. I’m sure someone else though of this but I’ll just state it. It goes like this:
Today is 2008, and let’s suppose you went back to 2006 to meet yourself. Now there’s two of you. How would that be possible without violating Conservation of Energy Law, which states that matter cannot be created nor destroyed. It can only change forms. Obviously since there’s two of you occupying same space and time, one of you was created. Either that or you are leaving copies of yourself on every instance (frame) in time which would violate the law even further.

Another example: Imagine taking the whole earth back with you to only yesterday. You would now have two earths in the same orbit! You would have increase in mass and God knows how would that affect the space in our Solar System. You might try to counter this argument by saying that it would not be possible to take anything with you back in time; But with that logic you wouldn’t be able to take yourself back in time either, so time travel would still not be possible.

Let’s take that little further and say that from 2006 you wanted to jump to 2000 and look up yourself there too. Now there’s three copies of you. Two copies of you exist in the year 2000 and one that you left in 2006. Or would that 2006 copy of you just disappear? How would that actually work?
It gets even more complex and illogical if one wants to define instance. What’s one instance? What is NOW? Is it one second? One microsecond? Nanosecond? How about picosecond? You can pretty much go to infinite regression and make no progress of defining NOW.
It seems that we’re creating problems that don’t really exists, and and then trying to find a solution for it.

Einstein wrote extensively in his papers about time. The whole premise of General Theory Of Relativity revolves around time. However, Einstein did claim that traveling to past is not going to be possible. I happen to agree with that, but for different reasons. Einstein’s relativity claims time is directly correlated to mass, speed of light and energy (E=MC2) and that nothing could travel faster than light. Faster you go (higher your velocity), slower the time passes for you.
If you were to ever reach speed of light you would have to become one dimensional and would have no mass. Like photon particles. Time would then stop for you. You would not be affected by time. Just like light is not affected by time. It is one of the constants in universe. But you would never be able to catch up with the light anyway.
If you would to travel along side of light; It would not matter how fast you were going; from your perspective, light would still be going 186,000 miles per second. For example: If you were to travel close to the speed of light (185,000 miles per second lets say), light would still be going 186,000 miles per second respective to you. Not only you would never be able to catch up with it, but it would look as if you were just standing still and light is just zipping by you regardless of your speed.
Now, in order to go back in time you would have to travel faster than the speed of light and have negative mass. Einstein believed that is not possible.

Lets now see solution for all these inconsistencies and paradoxes. New speculative-theory which states that time does not exists solves this and many other problems. It states that time is just an arbitrary concept we made up and it’s only a measurement of change. Nothing more. Every kind of change for that matter. Just like a mile is measurement of distance. Mile doesn’t really physically exists. Same thing with time. Time as a physical or multidimensional entity doesn’t really exists. We use concept of time to measures changes in our body, motion, aging etc. Nothing more.
Without time there’s no grandfather paradox. Here’s how:
You would not be able to go back in time to kill your grandfather because your grandfather is here! There is no such a thing as “before”. Maybe your grandfather is not alive right now, but in whichever form, he is definitely here. Yes he was alive 20 years ago, but right now he is physically HERE, in a different form, made of different particles, but that doesn’t mean that there’s another copy of your grandfather existing back in 1950′s or 1968 or any year you happen to pick. What we are witnessing is the changes in your grandfather, from the fetus do the worm food.
The only proof of your grandfather existing in the past you have is memories of him. Having memories of your grandfather don’t mean he still exists in the past. If you for example look at a photograph of your grandfather to remind you of him; would that mean that your grandpa from the photograph still exists somewhere? And if he does exists somewhere in time; that would mean that every other instance of your life also exists somewhere in time. And we just showed that you really cannot define the instance.
Here’s another example with photograph: Lets say you pick up the photograph of yourself, and in that photograph you have a black eye. That black eye has healed so far. But does it mean that your black eye from the photograph still exists somewhere? I think we can see false logic here. Your black eye cannot exists because the eye you’re reading this text with now, and the black eye from the past are actually the same eye. The only difference is in change. Black eye has healed (dead cells got replaced by healthy ones etc…) and turned into normal healthy eye, but it’s the same eye that always occupied the same space, your head.
We’ve created paradoxes like “grandfather’s paradox” only because we assume that there are multiple copies of your grandfather you can go back to. I think it is more natural to assume that time as a physical entity does not really exists, and that the only way to go back in time is to UNDO the changes that affect you and your surroundings. That would mean to put everything (and I mean everything) back the way it was let’s say 20 minutes ago. You might as well say “going back in change” instead of “going back in time”.
I will give you analogy for this example but before I do that let’s define what it means “to age”. To age simply means cell death. Your cells are dying and getting weaker and weaker so you have sense of aging. That’s it. Time has nothing to do with it. Time as a physically (or logical) entity cannot make you age. Death of cells is the only thing that takes place. The only reason you feel weaker as you age is because of billions and billions of your cells are dying ever day but they don’t get replaced by the same amount. Remember this since you will need it for the next experiment.

Going 20 minutes back in “time” in a world with no “time” experiment

I have been thinking of an analogy to use here to accurately describe what happens in a world with no time so hopefully following analogy will explain it well. As you read following scenario please try to visualize events happening.

Imagine yourself siting in the middle of a small room on a wooden chair.
There’s nothing in the room but you, four walls, ceiling, floor and that wooden chair.
You absolutely are not doing anything but motionlessly stare at the wall.
It seems that nothing is happening and that time is standing still. But that is not true. Atoms in your body as well as atoms and molecules in walls around you and chair underneath you, are in constant motion and are changing constantly. Even the air around you is in constant motion.
After 20 minutes, wooden chair breaks and you fall and bruise your butt. The act of chair breaking is the only thing you’ve been aware of in those 20 minutes. If chair did not break you would not be able to tell the difference between minute 2 from minute 5 lets say, but since now you have a reference point (chair breaking), it seems like some time did pass and you would be able to pin point differences between minute 2 and 5. It would be easy because you would use breaking of a chair as a reference point. Keep with me here, we’re almost done.
Now ask yourself: What would it take for you to go back in time when chair was whole and your butt was bruisless? Can you guess by now? No, not a time machine or a worm hole.
To truly go back in time, all you would have to do is to revert changes back to way they were 20 minutes ago. And that includes everything: the chair, your body, floor, ceiling, air molecules and four walls around you.

• That would mean putting back and re-arranging every molecule back where it was.
• Every atom in that broken chair would have to be repaired and reassembled the way it was 20 minutes ago.
• That would also mean you would have to cure your cells from aging and revert them to state they were in 20 minutes ago. Cells don’t just disappear after they die. They turn into energy, so you would also need to convert some of the lost energy back into cells. That would also cure your bruise.
• You would have to rearrange your neurons in your brain to reflect original state which was 20 minutes ago, which would in turn erase your current memories.
• Every molecule and atom in the walls, ceiling, floor and air around you would have to be rearranged, converted and reverted back to the 20 minutes ago.

Once everything is done, you could say that you truly went back in time without time. Then there would be no difference between you (and the room) right now and you 20 minutes ago. None whatsoever. You went beck in time without time really existing. But that would only apply to you. Outside world would still be unaffected by your molecule rearrangements and would continue aging and changing, but you would be 20 minutes younger.
Of course in current practice all this is impossible and irreversible without using up godly amount of energy. Just imagine the feat of trying to revert changes just for the room example!
That is exactly why we have grandfather’s paradox. If your grandfather is dead right now, the only way to see him alive is not go back in 1950′s, but to revert changes that lead to his death. And that includes everything. Going back in time with a time machine would created logical paradox which doesn’t make any sense since it would require multiple copies of grandfathers to exists which violates not just logic but our fundamental laws of physics. We only have illusion that time exists because we use it to measure the actual change. It’s simple as that.

I realize that some of these examples are really simple and maybe point of view a true realist would have, but sometimes in order to see the truth, we need to oversimplify things to get past the clutter and fog.

This is the point where you ask: “What about relativity? If there’s no time, how come that we’ve observed that time does slows down for a person in motion?” Good question, but that’s illusion too. Person’s perception of time slows down because everything in his/hers body slows down as they go faster and faster. That includes: heart rate, brain neurons, cell division, cell death, protein forming and the whole enchilada. At this stage person’s perception of everything slows down. Relativity also treats time as one and the same entity as space. If there’s no space there would be no time; so “no time” theory would not affect relativity at all. Think about it. If there’s no space than it would be impossible for matter to exists. If there’s no matter and space, there would no occurrence of any changes taking place and time would still not exists.
The fact is that time still remains more of philosophical question than anything else.

I am going to try to explain basic differences between scientific theory, law, facts and hypothesis. There are lot of misconceptions about these so I thought I’d try to explain it as best I can.
I am no scientist but I do have friends (from both sides of Atlantic) that are so I pick their brains every once in a while. Also, I still remember this from the science class when I went to school and I did great deal of researching about the subject through out the years.
Amazingly, scientific theory is something all scientists agree on, with no exception regardless of geographical location. So this article will not be me speculating. These are coming from the actual scientists themselves.
We all heard following phrase: “Oh it’s just a theory and not a fact.”
Theory in every day life is indeed just a speculation, but in scientific world theory is something totally different as we will see from the following article.

It’s important for a somewhat educated person living in 21st century to know what scientific theory is and be able to name basic differences between Law and Theory. This is elementary knowledge but people forget these things quickly. That’s why “Are you smarter than a Fifth Grader” show works so well.

Lets take matters from the beginning and see how scientists form theories.

Chronological step by step:

1. Observational Facts – Are collection of data through observation methods. If I drop the ball from my hand it will fall to the ground. If I repeat this many times, I will get same results over and over. Ball will fall to the ground every time. This is an observational fact. Some more observational facts: Rivers running in certain direction, bees pollinating flowers, etc..
2. Law – Getting back to ball fall. if I get same results with other objects after repeated experiments, I can form some kind of law with probable certainty. This is Newton’s Law of Gravity. However, this law does not explains why did ball drop on the floor. It just describes the event. That’s it. There’s not much difference between law and observational facts. You could in a sense say that Scientific Law is just body of predictable observational facts. Nothing more.
3. Hypothesis – After the law is formed, scientist will try to explain it by observation and repeated experiments. Eventually they will form different hypothesis. Hypothesis are ideas that could be falsified, changed and modeled as the new evidence comes in. Does the ball falls because earth is bigger than the ball? Does the ball falls because there’s an invisible force that is attracting the ball towards the earth? Will the ball fall at the same speed in vacuum? Etc… Scientists will continue to hypothesize until there’s no new evidence to dispute their hypothesis. But they’re not done yet. Hypothesis has to pass scrutiny of grueling tests under different conditions and repeated experiments. All of those experiments has to conform to their proposed hypothesis every time. If they don’t, hypothesis is thrown away and the scientist moves on.
4. Scientific Theory comes the last. Only if hypothesis passes all of the above stages, it can be formed into Scientific Theory. Scientific Theory is crowning achievement in science. In science, there’s nothing higher than theory. It’s Creme De La Cream. You can describe Scientific Theory as following: Theory is a comprehensive explanation of natural world that is supported by factual observations, independently testable and repeated experiments. Theory is explanation. So theory contains facts and laws. Laws and facts are part of the theory.

But it doesn’t end there. Theory then has to be peer reviewed. It will be bombarded by skepticism from other scientists with their own hypothesis and theories from same field of studies.
Who do you think is the major debunker of scientific theory? It’s other scientists. They will try to debunk and disprove new theories and replace them with theories of their own all the time. It’s a constant battle.
Every scientist wants to get recognized and possibly get Nobel Prize, but you don’t get Noble Prize by just confirming already established theory. You want to debunk it and replace it with better theory or at least make a noticeable correction (like Einstein did with Newton’s) worth the Noble Prize.
Scientific theories are constantly evaluated, peer reviewed, bombarded and critically examined by other scientist. That’s how we get well established theories. Just imagine scientific theory that passed all that scrutiny and criticism for hundred years. It’s the closest thing to the truth and explanation of natural world as we know it. That’s why all well established theories are almost unshakable and last for long time. Theory of Evolution and Cell Theory are one of them. Plate tectonics, General Relativity, Atomic Theory are all examples of well established theories.

Theory Of Evolution (by Natural Selection) being the most criticized and attacked, withstood test of time for 150 years! That is more testing, evaluating, examining, collecting evidence than any other well established theory we have.
The fact that some us (who don’t practice science professionally 14 hours or so a day, every day!) just don’t believe part (or whole) of it has nothing to do with theory being true or not. As long as it’s accepted within scientific community (you know… people who dedicated their whole lives to theories like these) theory will remain true. Public should be educated of course, but if you as a non-scientist want and try to debunk or argue some theory and you think you have the knowledge, roll the dice, write the paper and see if your thesis withstands same scrutiny as the theory you’re trying to debunk.
I cannot just tell to the carpenter how to make a table. Especially If I have never picked up a wood saw in my life.

Scientific Theories are less certain than laws. That’s true, but that’s only because law is just bunch of observational facts. Nothing else. It’s meaningless without the theory. It doesn’t provide any explanation. Theory of Evolution for example can never be a fact since it’s comprised of many facts and biological laws. It’s like a deck of cards. Theory Of Evolution being the deck and cards being the facts. It would make no sense to call the whole deck “a card”.

As the new evidence comes in theory will get tweaked and improved. But that’s the beauty of it. It will get modeled into comprehensive set of explanations of our natural world.
Think about this. Even if you see, with your own eyes, something that contradicts well established theory, it would not mean much. Eyes can deceive and we all know that brain is the best 3D software there is. Schizophrenics for example see and hear voices that ARE real to THEM. That doesn’t make it real. Scientific method is the only and the best way we know how to explain actual reality since it requires independent testing under different conditions regardless if public agrees with it or not. It’s up to science and teachers to explain their theories so we can understand them well. I agree that is something scientists and teachers have not been doing a great job at, but that’s for the whole new article.