Op-Ed: I do not despair at our observations on the shape of time
An essay from a fictional future, where a novel discovery unsettles long-held beliefs on the question of will.
Naturally, at the end of time, it was delightful to discover the seeds of its beginning; perhaps, even more so than having found the origin of space seamlessly stitched to its edge. Eliot, a poet from the antiquity of Anthropic Age, wrote in his Four Quartets, 'the end of all our exploration will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.' The shape of time, as it turns out, echoes Eliot's views (at a 7.8σ confidence interval!). And, like Eliot, I find no reason to despair in the face of it, only another source of abundant awe that is now made measurable.
When Eratosthenes advocated that the hitherto unbounded expanse, which he identified as the World, was wrapped upon a finite circumference, I imagine a boast of the Hellenistic times may have been: human reason can now, with an unprecedented completeness, grasp the World Order. Whether Reality itself is infinite remains, as ever, unknowable. We can always move the goalposts for a satisfactory answer by embedding ourselves into loftier ontologies of realms beyond experience. But insofar as the universe's shape and size can be cast into well-defined forms, operationalized into numbers and checked against our instruments, most of us have settled on an answer. Bowing to centuries of our careful cartographic efforts, the bewildering vastness of space has revealed itself with great precision. Much to the dismay of contrarians who long for a limitless expanse, the prevailing scientific consensus favors a paradigm that models the universe as an Ouroboros, coiled into a strange pretzel, finitely folded upon itself.
The similarities in proclaiming a finite planet and a finite universe are, surprisingly, abundant. In both cases, certainty emerged not from a single epiphany but from a slow trickle of fragile clues. I often wonder how many must have gambled away their entire careers in the Era of Exploration. I think of the crew that set off for Argelander Outpost hoping to catch the slightest anomalies of a once-in-a-lifetime cluster transit, only for an unpredictable quasar flare to blind their view. How many times have the correct ideas reincarnated, only to fade once more under institutional amnesia? Whether we speak of Earth or the universe at large, even the faintest scientific conviction had to be hard-won, mined gradually from a deep ditch of noise and uncertainties, against the wretched winds of distractions and disappointments. But discovery alone is never the end. What follows, always, is the harder part: the radical revision of our worldview that finitude demands.
Like the sound of an exploding star which arrives only after the flash, leisurely riding the pressure waves of the interstellar medium, so too dawns upon the civilization a need to integrate the 'new' reality that it finds itself within. The new worldview makes itself known in the private, quiet moments; gazing out of a window while drifting through a stellar cluster, staring at the patches of dark, and knowing, full well, that sky is a limit. Often what draws everyone's attention, however, tends to be the louder voices. Hobbyists and fanatics, adventurers and pilgrims, travel merchants and entire planetary councils, feel drawn towards embarking on a sacred journey. They hope that the ultimate meaning of their lives rests in witnessing the 'Wonders of the Whole'. And, of course, there are those who (much like me) find such proposals to be ridiculous, irresponsible wastes of energy (now firmly established as exhaustible). Yet, I suspect many who disagree on much else would accept this: the sociological wake of discovering the finitude of time is far more destabilizing. It will be more divisive, more urgent and more demanding of an integration into our shared decision-making.
The situation is further exacerbated by the historically uncharacteristic manner of the discovery. We seem to have accidentally stumbled upon a loop, one that our apparatus of reason and science forces us to interpret as Time. It is as if we first learned of the spherical Earth not by tracking banal motions and anomalies in the sky, but by finishing a circumnavigation in an otherwise completely routine voyage. The closed time-like curves that form the through lines of our cosmology have been uncovered, all at once, with a dizzying concreteness of physical proof. Now, just as suddenly, we are expected to make peace with it, to dissolve our primal instincts, to reorient millennia-old traditions and to rebuild a scaffolding of purpose within which we can cushion our ephemeral lives.
From what I understand, the central problem of ‘Temporal Pessimism’ is the total annihilation of all contingency, the sense that nothing could go differently because it never does. There is a silent horror in the inevitability of the future, and in knowing it will happen over and over again. In such a world, agency is a mere mirage and our lives execute a sterile performance. This idea sits at the heart of those afflicted like a singularity, corroding away their internal coherence into irrecoverably lost voids of meaning. Although scientifically impenetrable still, investigations into the ability to generate and exert our 'wills' freely have now been brought to the forefront and rendered completely obsolete. Existential nihilism of times long gone surfaces again, mockingly asserting 'try ignoring me now'. So tremendous is the influence of Temporal Pessimism that large theological sects have released statements against COMPACT collaboration for sharing their findings, citing ‘a disregard for the civilizational collateral at stake’. But to call truth an infohazard is no shield against its implications.
As is often the case with vast and nebulous mysteries, disagreements carve out deep ideological divides, from within which it is easy to lose sight of the other. Although a malignant singularity elsewhere, in my valley of beliefs 'Temporal Pessimism' registers as nothing more than a loose cluster of unreasonable anxieties. But I know the walls of reason, mighty as they may seem from afar, are often only a blanket of fog, ready to be parted with the slightest puffs of scrutiny. Thus, I make no pretense of wanting to convert those who lament a loss of free will on confronting the Cycles of Time. Still, I cannot help but puzzle at the oddity of the reflex and the metaphors subsequently summoned. Why imagine ourselves as helplessly adrift in a tempest of time? Is it not far more compelling that in a bundle of worldlines, weaving the tapestry of our universe, somewhere and somewhen is us? From my ravine, I fail to understand what superior free will one could be so eager to demand. Especially, given that our wills, whatever they may be, are categorically fused with the global structure of spacetime.
For those who feel Temporal Pessimism as a chilly wind that leaves them numb, or those who feel it like a shadow that dulls the vibrancy of joy, I suppose no remedy lies in words or rhetoric. Perhaps, the delight in inevitability is made apparent only through an internal and ineffable maneuver, some form of non-symbolic, non-conceptual shift in perspective. What I offer is merely this: an assurance that there is a vantage, grounded in some invariably incomplete architecture of reason, from which our closed time-like curves no longer feel suffocating. Why one would choose to strip experience of its real, immeasurable variety and, instead, reduce it to a bland deterministic cage---devoid of texture, beauty or surprise---remains beyond me. The salient aspects of our experiences, worthy of all our wonder, lay not in what time forbids but in what it facilitates: structures that endure long enough to coalesce memories, form thoughts and distill meaning, simultaneously transient and, also, eternal.
Perhaps, after all, recurrence may not rule out variation; it merely raises the question of whether and where it hides. We may yet glimpse quasi-periodic shears, subtle distortions that shift each return along an uncharted axis, suggesting that novelty can still slip through the net. If so, time may not trace neat loops but spiral densely through dimensions unseen, leaving eternity spacious enough, stretched unconfined, composed of discoveries that we can not yet name.
Coda
Thank you for reading all the way to the end.
I should mention that the COMPACT Collaboration is a real group of cosmologists working to revive interest in cosmic topology. You can read more about their efforts in their short technical paper or in this popular article by Quanta.
Also, Friedrich Wilhelm Argelander (after whom I named the fictional outpost) was a real astronomer based in Bonn, who devoted his career to measuring the positions and distances of over 300,000 stars.
this was a “source of abundant awe” :)