Down & Dirty on Clean Energy

This is not a diatribe - and should not be taken as such - against clean energy.  Who doesn't want clean energy?  We love our cordless tools, flashlights, phones, cameras, etc. And, more universally, don't we just want energy? All forms of energy, from all sources, because machines - inventing them, utilizing them - are what separated us from all other living organisms on the planet.  Machines made us more productive, made us perform work that were impossible to do, made us advance our civilization, fulfill the ambitions that our ancient forefathers only dreamed about.

Now, in the strictest sense, there is no such thing as dirty energy.  At its fundamental nature, energy - kinetic, electrical, sound, heat, nuclear - is clean. The debate has always been about their  side effects, so to speak, and their residual impact after their application. Take sound, for example. A mother's hum or whisper soothes her sleeping baby; the distant crashing of ocean waves against the rocky shores may lull us to sleep; but a jackhammer, a loud rock band, the blast from a nearby cannon, will produce harmful decibels to deafen us temporarily or even permanently. It's the same sound energy with devastating side effects. 

The most basic and original form of energy since the beginning of time, a fraction of which were condensed to become matter, created the kind of universe we see today but a gamma ray burst, ultraviolet radiation that traveled through space a few hundred, even thousands of years ago, can alter or end life of any living thing billions of miles away.  Nuclear plants will provide power to thousands of homes for a hundred years but a nuclear bomb will annihilate a hundred thousand people in a few seconds.

From the moment Grog, the first caveman, who saw fire created by a lightning strike on a tree nearby, and keeping it lit by feeding twigs and branches to keep it going, and generations after him who found other ways to make fire, man harnessed the first artificially induced form of  energy. I wasn't personally there to witness Grog first hand, but that version is as good as any story anyone can come up with.

Firewood, for eons, was our primary source, alternatively a carrier, of energy. It has always been fuel (wood) plus oxygen plus source of initial ignition (F+O+i=Heat). If we must think about this, for millions of years, the way energy was acquired had always been through that shortest route.  Inefficient, yes, but its delivery was the shortest possible.  The point of this boils down, no pun intended, to accessing energy with the least amount of the proverbial "middleman" in between - metaphorically speaking, that is.

Energy today is largely commoditized, such that at every point of the hand off there is cost to be accounted for.  Let's get to it quickly.

Today, in a typical modern household, before we get to the (F+O+i=Heat), we begin with P (petroleum, exploring for and pumping it from the ground) + T (transporting the crude oil) + R (refining) + S (storage and shipping) + p (piping from provider's storage) + h (Home appliance: heater, stove and furnace), only then do we get to (F+O+i=Heat). So today, in a nutshell, this is how it has become for the modern Grog and Groga's family : P + T + R + S + p + h = (F+O+i=Heat).  At each point and in between is a cost.

Substitute h with C (car) and G (gas station), before we get to (F+O+i=Heat) which by the way is still the same heat energy (F+O+i=Heat) from the rapid, continuous, repeating explosions in each cylinder in every engine that propels the car, and we have the same equation working. Every item or element we add is a cost.

Now, substitute h with c (charger or charging station + B (battery for storing electrical energy before the motor) for the electric vehicle (EV).

We will not quibble with how we get to the battery by mining for lithium and other rare earth minerals from remote and relatively hostile places and horrible working conditions, to get to the manufacture of EVs. We will not quibble with the fact that to manufacture lithium batteries, we employ furnaces and machines that run on electricity generated predominantly from fossil-fuel-fed plants. It is true for all large scale manufacturing processes, which include making the entire body of the electric vehicle itself.

However, we will quibble with the all-or-nothing agenda to choose only one over another form of energy to the full exclusion of the other.  Such rhetoric as "end the fossil fuel industry entirely" and the numerous  slogans that activists come up with regularly - the printing and dissemination of them had become a business by themselves - is as unproductive as Don Quixote's quarrel with the windmill, as glaring an ironic metaphor  that image conveys to the misuse of land for the "almighty wind turbine".  Splattering egg and mashed potato on museum art to protest against oil by young activists when such waste of food could have fed a hungry child for a day somewhere in an impoverished corner of the world that these ignorant protesters pretend to care about from one side of their mouth, is another Quixotic insanity.

We quibble with getting rid of fossil-fuel-fed emergency vehicles that are the only go-to equipment during and post natural disasters.  Try using EVs during flood rescue operations.  Diesel powered earth moving equipment will not only clear roads and debris handily but they will do it with zero downtime to recharge batteries. Even a nuclear powered submarine has in its belly a standby diesel engine, in case its nuclear power fails.

There is obviously much more to quibble with those who aim for totally carbon-free  generators of energy,  but suffice it to say that the world is better off  finding ways to balancing the application of all energy - endeavor for cleaner fossil fuel vehicles along with EVs in a manner that allows for a meaningful co-existence instead of an all or nothing war where there will  not be one winner. EVs have a place in modern transport but it will not be able to do all; so why get rid of the alternative that is definitely more capable at meeting the demands of the heavy lifting, literally speaking, including dealing with natural disasters and mass transportation of massive loads, not the least of which is  air travel and hauling air cargo; and delivering goods and produce across land via 18-wheeler transport.

From the moment of creation, the Creator saw to it that from that moment on  matter and energy may be interchangeable but no longer shall either  be created or destroyed.  All matter, all energy, was and still are a blessing to all creatures. What is stored in a pound of coal, gas in a gallon of fuel oil, lightning sparks from ionized clouds, even the rushing water on a waterfall, wind as warm air rises and cold air rushing through, are all part of the energy from since creation, forever part of the universe. So it is with that premise that we must always widen our views, to include considering other ideas instead of narrowing it only to those who agree with us and reject and ostracize those whose opinions do not conform with ours.

Image below: Do we want this kind of solution?  Someone claiming to have run his Tesla for 1600 miles without having to use a charging station is clever but Quixotic. He installed a lawn mower engine that ran constantly to recharge his EV batteries.  Clever or foolish or he is not aware that there is such a vehicle called a hybrid that has been on the market for quite some time now.

This is what "Down and Dirty with Clean Energy" means.

Let's not be Quixotic with clean energy. 

Referring back to the first paragraph, we do not ban jackhammer, rock bands and cannons (Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture comes to mind). We've come a long way towards clean emissions from the days of the Model T, plants are spewing less contaminants to the environment from all kinds of pollutant reducing measures and stiffer regulations.

Car engines today are not only more efficient, they last longer and regulations keep them in check.  Meanwhile, the push for electric vehicles must be tempered with anticipating issues that could arise from discarded lithium batteries and other harmful rare elements associated with batteries after their useful lives. There are already widespread discarded lithium batteries just from flashlights and myriad portable tools and appliances.  It is not too inconceivable that the next generation of activists will be protesting against lithium wastes and their deleterious environmental impacts not fully anticipated and understood today.

One more word to those who claim concern for world catastrophe from fossil fuel, oil, the oil industry, gasoline engine, etc. If there is one universal truism, it is that 99%, if not all, that we worry about constantly, are likely to be superseded by something else we didn't quite anticipate.

We can't ask the dinosaurs what really worried them 67 million years ago but we can be certain it was not the asteroid that hit  what is now The Yucatan Peninsula.  That single event caused the ultimate extinction of the dinosaurs after reigning at the top of the food chain for 160 million years.

While the Biblical plague caused three days of darkness over Egypt, the year 536 A.D., described by archaeologists and scholars of historical catastrophe, as the worst year to be alive, had much of the world in darkness for a full 18 months, due to volcanic eruptions.  Think about climate change as a result of that.

As it turned out, severe climate changes have always been the recurring pattern to rule much of our history, to include six ice ages and alternating global heating, long before there were cars and trucks and fossil-fuel-fed industries.  And don't forget what ended the reign of T-Rex.

The war on fossil fuel is as foolish an errand as that of The Man from La Mancha. If he had only listened more to the wisdom of Sancho Panza - his "uneducated" sidekick.

You Think Witches Are Scary?

Halloween as traditionally celebrated may not be totally global but without exception, in any country or culture, there are enough stories and widely held tales to make many a childhood nightmare part of growing up.  

The scary witch in black loose clothing, cape and pointy hat straddling a broomstick will not hold a candle to the "aswang" where I grew up. From the other nearby islands they even evolved into taking different but no less menacing forms.

They're mostly female but the occasional male is more fearsome and unforgiving. During the day, they live normal human lives as regular members of the local community.  At night, when everyone is asleep, the "aswang" will go to a secluded place, usually thickets of vegetation of banana trees or bamboo.  There, the "aswang" will sprout bat-like wings and proceed to separate her upper body, from the belly button up at the waist, then off  she will fly away for a night of marauding menace, leaving the lower body unattended, both legs standing still. Before sunrise the "aswang" will come back to the same spot to reunite with his or her lower body, back to  human form to the unsuspecting community.  

What did they hunt for? And how?  

They would fly to the towns or barrio away from their own community, which they typically leave  alone and unharmed.  However, that is not to say that other "aswangs" from the other towns will not be doing the same thing.  So, just because the local "aswang" will fly somewhere else, no one is safe in any town or barrio.

Vulnerable homes are those with thatched roof of nipa fronds, such as ours when I was growing up.  The "aswang" would alight at the top of the roof where a child or children are sleeping on the floor below. She then separates the nipa  ever so slightly for a good look.  Then, once she finds her victim, she would release through her funneled lips  a thin, continuous strand of her saliva through the slit on the roof into the child's mouth or nostril.  This takes away the child's spirit from the body. By morning, the child is dead. The "aswang" will come back later in the week, during wake. That is when she will devour the body from the inside.   It will take several night trips before the "aswang" is finished. The village people who attend the all-night wake are told to remain awake because even if only one person is up, it will keep the "aswang" from completing the task, but invariably everyone doses off, which enables the "aswang" to devour its victim through its long tongue from the rooftop.  The family and the villagers will take to the cemetery a body empty from the inside except for banana stalks and coconut husks  that the "aswang" replaced it with.

Then there was the famous "Tio Gimo" (nickname for the formal Spanish name of Guillermo) from the other island across from ours.  He had several attractive daughters, fair skinned with light brown hair - typical of mixed Spanish and native blood. Many young men would be lured into calling on the young maidens' home lorded over by "Tio Gimo"; Tio actually means "uncle", obviously endearing as it sounds.  These men, always from out of town, will never be heard from again. "Tio Gimo" and his daughters were "aswang" who had evolved into a different form by preying on love-struck adult males instead of young children.

Listening to these stories, we were too young or perhaps even too scared to question how people knew of the story if nobody ever came out alive.

Something we did know, however, was how to defeat the "aswang".  One will have to find the lower half of the "aswang" as she forayed into the night. Pouring capfuls of salt or vinegar or a combination of both over the exposed lower half prevented the flying  "aswang" from reuniting and reconstituting herself or himself into a full human form again. At night when all is quiet, we occasionally hear a distant and faint wailing or moaning sound.  We were told by the elders that an "aswang" somewhere was pleading to allow its body halves to be put back together.  We will not sleep well that night.

The "tamawo" was something else.  

One side of the lot where our nipa hut stood, was where the edge of a pond began, part of a larger watery world of  mangrove - muddy, dark, as vegetation obscured the sunlight from getting through. From our lot stood a huge tree. One of its main branches leaned as an overhang over part of the pond that was clear of aquatic grass and water lilies.  It was a perfect spot to fish. With one or two of my friends we would go up there, straddling horseback-riding-like on the huge branch, with our bamboo fishing poles, tiny hooks and wiggly worms in old rusty tin cans, excited to snag perch and mud fish just below the opaque water.  We were careful to always ask for permission in hushed tones addressed to whichever spirit was present every time we go there. We cannot see the "tamawo", of course, but they're bound to be there because that part of the pond was where their vessels would come to dock.  

The "tamawo" is invisible to everybody, except to some of the elders who are gifted with extraordinary eyesight.  They would tell us that the "tamawo" would leave us alone, in peace and free from harm, if we don't offend them. When asked what the "tamawos" look like, the gifted elders told us that the "tamawos" are pale skinned, almost white, but they have one distinguishing facial feature.  They do not have a philtrum - "the vertical groove on the surface of the upper lip, below the septum of the nose".

When we were out on that tree or anywhere else we ventured out in the field or thicket of wild berries and such, not only were we not to forget to ask for permission to pass, we were not to point at anything or our fingers would fall off. At the pond, it was often that we see a kingfisher a short distance away, perched on a drooping branch, watching for fish below.  The kingfisher had striking features of a pointy beak and plumage of beautiful colors of blue, green and red with a tinge of orange.  Not only can we not point at it, it was best to leave it alone. More than likely it was a "tamawo's" pet. 

In fifth grade, a beautiful classmate of ours did not come to class one day.  We heard later that she passed away  the night before. Our teacher took those of us who wanted to go to her wake. She was the quiet type who pretty much kept to herself, except to be with one or two close friends.  Though not very sociable, her pretty face and a rare but unemotional smile framed by long curly dark hair made it hard to ignore her. 

We were told she was taken by the "tamawo" away to their  invisible outer world, adopted to live among them.  There were many unexplained childhood death when we were growing up.  Half of them were attributed to the "tamawo" and the other half predated upon by the "aswang".

The "mantiw" was one that no one had ever seen but they were around when it was windy. During the night, of course.  They have long legs because everyone can hear them running over the homes, but not touching any of the structures; but they'd come by so fast  disturbing the air to rush out and back, accompanied by a whistling, sometimes roaring, sound. There could be a herd of these "mantiw" running, especially when it was raining, as if they were either fleeing from or going after something.  But nobody could see them and they were not known to harm anyone.

The "kapri" was another harmless creature but no less sinister. We never asked but I've always wondered why those who were "allowed" to see them always described them as male.  There seemed to have been no female "kapris".  The "kapri" is a giant, about 10-12 feet tall, who resided in big abandoned homes. They have a hairy body, large head with disheveled crusty hair, over large piercing black eyes.  Once, a bunch of us young kids and older teenagers and one adult went to an abandoned home because there was a "kapri" there.  The adult and an older teenager who could see the "kapri" described the creature to us.  The "kapri" was reclining his giant body with his back against the wall, legs splayed on the floor, smoking a huge cigar.  Yes, "kapris" were known to smoke cigars!  And the reason we go there to "gawk" at a creature we could not see was because the "kapri"  too was  a harmless denizen of the dark realm.

Up to this point of my musing, I was re-telling from memories of my childhood.  What follows below are those from sources that are at least two to more times removed from  directly hearing or experiencing them.

Many islands away up north of the archipelago were  creatures that those in our island felt fortunate to not have to deal with them.  I will only mention one here.  The "tikbalang" has a huge torso, hairy and muscular, an ugly face and disproportionately longs legs like those of a giraffe's. We were told it indiscriminately preyed on anyone - adults and children - who wandered through the open field or empty streets late in the night.  Its hunger and appetite for human flesh rises with that of the waning and waxing moon, when the night is dark.

In the capital city in the main island was a story that today would seem to follow a universal pattern.  It is the "Lady in White".  One major street, Balete Drive, so named because  one giant tropical tree species - Balete - stood in one corner, and there used to be several of them along that road.  There are so many versions of the story, episodes too long to cover here but what was consistent was that a Lady in White waiting by that tree would hail and get into a taxi, or privately driven car, in the middle of the night. After that, the stories would turn into so many different terrorizing versions.  Actually, this story may have started from way back when the method of conveyance was still a horse-drawn carriage. 

Photo of a Balete Tree

Below is a representation of what "witnesses" described what the lady looked like.

In the southern islands, at the university where I went, the school hospital had one prevailing story of a Lady in White, presumably the apparition of a deceased nurse, doctor, or previous patient. The reader will note that such stories abound in different parts of the world, across all cultures.

As I said in the first paragraph, we outgrew the stories by about the same time we learned there really was no Santa Claus, some later than others.  Whatever the effects were on the other children I grew up with, I am in no position to assess.  For me, those stories that included episodes from the comic book version of The Twilight Zone (we had no TV then) were what pushed me to the sciences by the time I got into my freshman year in high school. I embraced physical science, math, algebra and geometry because elements of those subjects were provable, and as in geometry, postulates and theorems and proofs of congruence, shapes whose areas and circumferences can be solved, etc. without any ambiguities.

But I wondered why the stories, even to this day, in many parts of the world, remain in circulation. Is it because fear is just a natural  human instinct, stoked by so much we do not and cannot know?

I was scared of moving from home for the first time to go to college. Integral calculus scared me after I failed it the first time I took it.  College graduation was a happy time but we were all scared about not getting a job.

Potential recession, the threat of war, crime, waiting for medical test results, all of these feed into our capacity for all sorts of mental anguish from what seems like our instinctual nature to be fearful.

I feel that those stories that I seem to remember so well, though I cannot vouch with a hundred per cent accuracy of my recollections, may have actually prepared me in how I dealt with all kinds of fear later in life. For example, I knew that the "mantiw" that our elders would tell us about came during the monsoon season when rains would be accompanied by high winds. That explained for me the whistling and roaring sounds, which were much too fearful when one lived in a nipa thatched home.  The death of young children - so difficult to comprehend or accept - which could only have been caused by the "aswang" or "tamawo" is not a good accounting of the fact that the childhood mortality rate could have been explained by inadequate health care and prevention during those times.

Imagine what it was like for our early ancestors to be fearful of so many things beyond their comprehension. But fear must have been and still is a survival tool. As children, our learning brain with a default feature to be fearful of the unfamiliar perhaps have yet to discriminate between and among a lot of stimuli.  

The question is why adults relish the idea of scaring young children.  There are a lot of reasons, I'm sure. It is fun. It is passing on an initiation tradition of the time they too had been scared. It is a way to get the kids to behave or be wary of unfamiliar environments. Who knows?

All of these can be relegated to superstition because who doesn't have one? We eventually outgrow almost all superstitions and  childhood lore we hear, but woe to those who do not.

I think it is best to quote Carl Sagan, from his book, "The Demon-Haunted World" (Science as a Candle in the Dark):

"..when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness..."

"The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”

I hope I have redeemed myself for subjecting the reader to some of the ghoulish recollections of my childhood.

Always Two Sides to a Story

The story of humanity is almost always filled with them. 

Fritz Haber, awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918, was and still is hardly a household name. He was reputedly credited by historians then and  now (still), as the man responsible for the death of millions and the savior of billions  of people in the history of mankind - "detonator of the population explosion", as alternatively described by sympathetic historians. Nevertheless, the average person  has no clue who he was.

Fritz Haber was a brilliant German chemist, credited for his invention of a process to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen gasses. Ammonium nitrate is a major component in the  production of fertilizer. On the other hand, it is also the same compound used to make explosives.  There lies the two sides of what Haber had accomplished. 

There are many other similarly themed stories, of course, but this is  interesting and truly a fascinating one. As sometimes the case, it is about one side of a story which can lead to the opposite of the other. 

Let's back up for just a bit. I am convinced that what Haber had accomplished was a significant story from which so much is owed by  all of humanity today,  if by that we mean sustaining the life of 7 billion people and rising.   Before we get to the other side of Haber's story, let's examine how and why historians think that what he accomplished triggered the population explosion. As such, it is how world population got up to the 7 billion mark and growing, instead of one curtailed to perhaps a mere 2 billion due to recurring famines in many places around the world, had Haber not come up with a solution.

For millions and millions of years the natural order of the earth's ecosystem begins and ends with nitrogen.  99% of the earth's atmosphere is mostly made up of just two elements - 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen; the remaining 1% is made up of .93% Argon., .04 % carbon dioxide, and a miniscule amount of six other trace elements.  And water vapor in the form of clouds.  A simplified illustration explains it in brief.

All animals, which include us, need more than just oxygen to survive. We need protein to grow and maintain good health. Protein must have nitrogen in it in the form of amino acids.  NH2 is a derivative of ammonia. How do we get it?  Note from the illustration that the upper left arc of the cycle is lightning. It takes the energy of lightning to break the bonds of a nitrogen molecule, allowing for individual nitrogen atoms to combine with  hydrogen to make ammonia (NH3). Hydrogen by weight is miniscule as part of atmosphere but because it is the lightest element, there is plenty of it in terms of number, especially as in water vapor  in the clouds.  Lightning produces tons of ammonia which is then brought down by rain onto the soil below.  From there it is processed by bacteria into a form that is absorbed by plants.  We eat vegetables, fruit and meat from livestock that eat plants and grasses.   Nitrogen as in bat guano, and other animal manure, gets recycled into direct fertilization of the soil where plants grow. That's how we get nitrogen into our system.

The nitrogen cycle worked for millennia with nary a hitch. Nitrogen finds its way back to the atmosphere as a product of other microbial activities in the ground. 

That cycle worked for much of history.  Until that time when humans  broke the nitrogen cycle.  Yes, because we consumed but no longer returned the nitrogen to the ground. When people settled down to form enclaves, then towns and cities that grew into large population centers, sanitation soon forced waste to the sewers and garbage dumps for otherwise compostable waste matter, thus breaking the nitrogen cycle. The cycle still happens in the wild but as cities and nations grew in size and population, farmers who are still expected to grow food and raise livestock needed fertilizers to keep the cycle going.

Fritz Haber found the solution in  a process he pioneered together with another chemist, Max Born, to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen.  Haber's collaboration with Bosch, now a large chemical company called BASF, raised the production of fertilizer into  an unprecedented  industrial scale. Haber was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1918.

"The ability to produce much larger quantities of nitrogen-based fertilizers in turn supported much greater agricultural yields and prevented billions of people from starving to death."

What is the other side of Haber's story?

"Haber is also considered the "father of chemical warfare" for his years of pioneering work developing and weaponizing chlorine and other poisonous gases during World War I, especially his actions during the Second Battle of Ypres."

The genius of one man's story had two sides when his synthesis for producing ammonium nitrate also enabled cheaper method to produce explosives. In 1995 a Federal building in Oklahoma City was destroyed by a devastating explosion - a horrific case of domestic terrorism that killed 167 and injured over a thousand people.  The explosive used that was in a parked truck was from a combination of liquid fertilizer and diesel fuel.

Whether in the larger picture of global history or politics, or in the micro world of our individual lives, there are often two sides to a story and sometimes a chosen  path can lead to unforeseen trajectories.  

Alfred Nobel became a very wealthy man from his invention of TNT. But he gave up quite a bit of his wealth  to fund what later became the annual event that is the Nobel Prize upon realizing that TNT that he envisioned was the answer to speed up construction of roads, earth moving capability to reshape mountains and to tunnel through them so as to connect from one side to the other, mining for minerals that were not easily accessible, dam building, etc., also became a weapon of war.  

Computers, smart phones, live streaming and social media in general have had one side of technology make life easier, enabled more efficiency on all aspects of modern life and allowed for connectivity among people from across town, provinces, states and across the globe -  instantaneously. That is one side of its story.  The other side, of course, has reflected and magnified the darker side of the human character.  Technology is also a tool for scam artists; to bully and inflict psychological distress among the youth, etc. and a very long list of so many others that two decades ago were never deemed possible as a means to cause havoc on society.

Every ruined relationship, a marriage broken up, governments failing to manage a nation, companies going bankrupt, wars erupting, etc. all have at least two sides to the story. However, it does seem to defy at times whether one is more right or more justified than another. It is also obvious at other times when one side is clearly the bad story.  What defies explanation, however, is why?

Is it perhaps because all of these  are "all baked in", so to speak, to the nature of duality in the universe? By duality, to mean light and darkness, pain and relief, sadness and happiness, and a lot more examples of two sides to a story, and then we get to the most profound duality of all - good and evil.

Religious leaders, theologians, philosophers and, yes, politicians, have much to say. What, as individuals, have we to say?

The two sides to a story can also mean that on every road we travel on, many times in a lifetime that road of life  always takes us to a fork, an intersection, a cross road, and our choices are what will determine in the end where our individual journey takes us.  

We are fully equipped to make those decisions.  But whatever you do, don't take the advice from the ever memorably lovable Yogi Berra, who said, 

And, unlike in baseball where a batting average of .250 is pretty good, and .300 makes you a superstar, we all need to do better than .900 when batting for life.  Arguable, but, hey, we don't aim for a below-average life, do we? 

Yesterday Today Tomorrow

Do you feel like you are always pressed for time?  Or, do you feel like you have too much time on your hands?  Does one have more than another?

Yesterday, today, tomorrow; how different is each from one another? They're merely past, present, future tenses of time.  However, let's pause for a moment and ask, what is time? Is time absolute or is it just an illusion? I purposely avoided commas in the title because those three tenses are just segmented but continuous frames on an infinitely rolling reel of  film. Now, I just obligated myself to explain that, don't I?

But, for a much spicier question, why does time "flow" and only in one direction? 

Please don't be discouraged along the way for what seems so complex of a subject because towards the end there is a method to the madness of this musing, as I often like to say - if only to stretch and flex one's mental muscle, so to speak.  Or, at least, tickle some of your slumbering brain cells into active wakefulness. For sure, some of what we think is difficult to understand is actually easier  than we think. Painlessly, I promise.

There is this to ask first, "Is time universal?"  In other words, if there are beings on a planet orbiting the nearest star to us, Proxima Centauri, only 5.9 trillion miles away, will they perceive a second, a minute, or an hour as "flowing" or "running" at the same rate that it does on earth?"

The quick answer is:  No, they will not. In fact, neither will anyone on Jupiter, Venus or Saturn,  or anywhere else in the entire cosmos. On a neutron star,  where a teaspoon of its material weighs 5.5 billion tons (about 900 Egyptian Giza-size pyramids, according to one calculation by someone with too much "time" on his hands), time may not even "move" a second, the way we perceive a second "to move" here on earth.  This gives new meaning to the term "local time", doesn't it? More on this in a bit.

The long answer is that earth time - seconds, minutes, hours, days, years - were established arbitrarily. A day, for example, is how long it takes for earth to rotate on its axis, allowing for equal but alternating exposure of its one side facing the sun (daylight), and the other side facing away (night time). Then early "timekeepers" subdivided one rotation into 24 segments, giving us the standard 24-hour cycle. It could easily have been, say, 20 hours or 10!  {Actually, many hundred million years ago earth was spinning much faster than it does presently, a day would have been indeed  20 hours long - hours as we "measure" them today}. Each hour was then subdivided further into 60 minutes, then 60 seconds.  That's all it was.  Arbitrarily. Local to earth and nowhere else. 

{And get this: Recently, like a two weeks ago, scientists just found out that earth is spinning faster than previously "clocked" by 1.59 milliseconds. If this keeps up we may someday need a leap second to compensate for the speeding rotation!}.   Like, anyone really cares.

Now, the ancients also figured out that it took  earth approximately 365 days to make one complete revolution around the sun.  Although at first people then believed that the sun revolved around the earth.  

With the exception of the Chinese, Jewish and the Mayan calendar, the entire world uses the Gregorian calendar today.  It was in October 1582 that Pope Gregory XIII made a small modification on the then widely used Julian Calendar.  As was then determined by the astronomers of that time, the year was not exactly 365 days. It was 365.25.  Pope Gregory XIII reduced the year to its present period of exactly 365.2425 days. There was and continues to this day approximately one quarter of a day each year that must be accounted for; otherwise, the accumulated "error" will build up to a ridiculous calendar "drift" that will render the calendar useless.  So, every four years that amounts to, again approximately, an entire extra day.  Hence, we have a leap year to account for it. And for anyone born on February 29 .. well, it's complicated.

Okay, we got that out of the way, so, are the present, the past and the future just illusions?  

The present technically, in the shortest interval of "time" possible, is that moment when the past ends and the future begins, instantaneously, as we perceive them as being different one from the other. But, literally and instantaneously, that shift happens in less than a blink of an eye, or using an atomic clock, from microsecond to microsecond (as in a millionth of a second to the next millionth second). By the time we say, "Give me a second", it's over!  The present moment is ephemerally fleeting, at best.

Here's  something to think about first.

The past is established as something we can never go back to while the future is beyond reach until it happens!  So yesterday, we can remember and everything significant that happened then can be read in yesterday's papers or on the internet.  Unless you are the fabled Merlin, of King Arthur lore, who can remember the future, tomorrow is nothing more than a gazillion probabilities, if we try to anticipate what potentially awaits everyone  from around the globe of over  7 billion people  and every conceivable possibility one field mouse escapes its predator, or what and how many flowers in a meadow one particular butterfly will land on. Until it "happens", nothing is ever certain. 

Using the reel of film analogy, the past is a series of exposed frames, the present is as it is being presently filmed (though quickly at perhaps 24 frames per the arbitrary second), the future are blank frames yet to be exposed.  Time is merely an accessory to the events being filmed.

Time that we think we are able to measure is something we cannot store, save and spend later.  Unless we associate it with observable physical changes, like a ball rolling down an incline or an egg breaking into a bowl, time by itself has no meaning, it is without physical form, body, color and texture.

Time has no effect on what will occur because events happen whether there is a clock, timer or any other "time" measuring instrument. Instead, "time", if we are to give it a character role - a literary extravagance, in a manner of speaking - is a bystander, just like we are if we were just watching what is happening around us.  We can choose to ignore it but events will continue to occur. Time and you and I, who are expecting for a sunrise or a sunset, are all bystanders! There is nothing we can do but wait. Well, not if instead we elect to be doing something, which "time" has no ability to do at all.

Wait, isn't the act of waiting an acknowledgement of "time running"? No. One is waiting for an event to occur, not for time to "pass" to cause an event to happen.  The brain, in an effort to sift through or to make sense of what it is witnessing, is forced to process the sequence of events,  the cause and effect phenomenon; that is, putting the cause ahead of the effect.  But "time" is not the reason for events happening, except as a marker of the order and sequences by which events occur. Blunter still would be that "time" as a bystander is not an observer, such as we are. We have consciousness, which time doesn't. That's the difference.  So, time is not real? Physically, no; but perceptively, yes. Bear with me a little bit longer.

Notice that when one is busy doing something, as in something really interesting or engrossing, time "runs" much too fast versus sitting idly, not doing anything. It is exacerbated when one is  waiting for someone to arrive, who is already running late.  Time seems to "run" at one particular pace when we are painting the room but excruciatingly a lot slower when we're waiting and watching for it to dry.

Furthermore, when we were children, summer seemed to last a lot longer than the summer we experienced as adults. As children our mind was not quite as heavily laden with lots of so many things to worry about, plan for and sort through, as adults do. Children's perception of a slower passage of time  than how adults perceive time is best explained by another film analogy. A thick spool of film about to unwind is that of the child's. As the film unwinds from the wider diameter of the spool it would seem to move slowly.  By the time it gets closest to the inner diameter of the spool, closer to its center, the film will now seem to be moving faster, as one perceives that there is not very much left to unwind. 

That is the film of life.  The thinning of that spool is what seems to give people much grief.  Why?  How about if we think of it this way?  If we allow ourselves to be just mere bystanders, such as "time" is, then yes we see the spool getting smaller. 

Ready for the "method to the madness" I referred to in the fourth paragraph above?  

The film of life consists of two spools and the lens  in between.  The forward spool where developed frames are wound is the written part of our story - that scroll of life already lived and experienced.  We look to those as we have lived and experienced.  They are not to be repositories of regret or guilt.  We should be grateful to have had that much film accumulated in that spool.  There is no reverse motor that drives the spool, so forget the do over.  

The lens in between is where the film gets developed in the present tense.  That is also where we are allowed to change directions.  But, most importantly, that is where we get to enjoy our experiences. However, there is no such thing as a free lunch, so the lens will also develop our aches and pains, our moments of anguish and grimaces that are best and soon reposited to the forward spool.

Whatever we do, it should not be to look at the other spool of film. We do not need to see how thick or thin the remaining film is in that spool.  Instead, we focus on what is running across that lens. That is because today is all there is where we get to do what we like to do.  It is no longer possible to do anything at the forward spool.  The other spool is all about what could probably happen.

So yesterday, today and tomorrow are each a frame in the film of life.  But today is all there is. There is nothing we can do about yesterday, we cannot touch tomorrow, so we are left with today - the only place where we can do anything, including where we dream, plan and prepare.  So, we make the most of it before it becomes yesterday because soon tomorrow is here. Therefore, we cannot just be bystanders today.  That is the job for "time"!

Below is just elective reading for anyone willing to over stimulate his or her brain cells, but definitely not required to make any more sense of Yesterday Today Tomorrow.  But Michael Jordan and Shaquille O'Neal will help.

That is one thing for time to be perceived differently by different people or observers.  But what if time, as we've come to understand it, really moves at really different rate - slower for some, faster for others, in real terms.

And so it was that one clever fellow, named Albert, postulated that time is relative!  He's been in the news lately because the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has proven once again another theory or two of his.

“Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity.”

It is widely accepted that Einstein said the above - a tongue in cheek commentary on relativity - but I don't know if he really was the one who said it.  

One thing Einstein did postulate that was counterintuitive but later was proven true is that time  "moves" at a different  rate between two observers who are moving at different speeds relative to one another. This phenomenon is real because if we don't account for the difference, navigation via GPS, how emergency and police locate where accident or crime victims are with pinpoint accuracy would be impossible (assuming, of course, their cell phones are on). These devices (including our car GPS) emit and receive signals to and from satellites circling the globe. However, the clock on the satellite and our phones move  at  different rates, so somewhere in Colorado Springs, a "correction" is constantly being done to synchronize the two clocks at regular intervals. Otherwise, in just a short period of "time" without the correction, your GPS navigation  will be useless.

If you thought clocks "running" at different rates are such a complicated concept, it is not!  Old Albert  used trains and flashes of lightning for his mental analogy/thought experiments but I can't find any locomotive graphics so I used the ones below. No rocket ships yet in 1903-05. 

 

Imagine Michael Jordan (MJ) dribbling a basketball down and up the ceiling inside a rocket ship (top drawing) that is speeding through space at half the speed of light, say.  {The drawing shows a mirror and detector as a photon of light bounces from the mirror above to a detector below, so just imagine it to be a basketball}. Shaquille O'Neal (Shaq) was watching him wheeze by from another ship (bottom) that was either slower or stationary relative to or in the opposite direction to MJ's ship.  MJ sees the basketball going vertically up and down as he dribbles it, hitting the ceiling and down to the floor and back endlessly (possible in zero-gravity). Nothing unusual and no different from you tossing a coin while sitting on a plane going at 400 mph. The coin drops back to your hand straight down.  That's because MJ and the basketball, you and the coin are going at the same speed in your respective flying machines.

Shaq, however, sees the basketball taking a much longer path as it goes up and down because relative to him the rocket ship is wheezing by, so the ball traces an inclined path as it goes up the ceiling, and an inclined path the other way as it comes down the floor, as shown by the middle drawings. 

So, what gives?  Both are observing the same thing but they perceive it differently. To Shaq, the basketball takes a longer path than how MJ sees it. Yet, it is the same event!

Reason: From MJ's perspective, watching the ball go up and down vertically, time "runs normally" as if he were on the ground; however, where Shaq is concerned,  "time" must be running slower for MJ since the ball is taking a longer path. 

Actual experiments using identical atomic clocks - one on the ground and another on board a flight on a 747 jet around the globe - had shown that the one on the plane had slowed down, albeit very minutely, but slower nevertheless. But if it were possible for an astronaut to travel at, say, even just half the speed of light, he will come back to find his twin brother an old man, perhaps even bed ridden, while he had aged only a year based on the clock/calendar on board his space ship.  If the astronaut took a longer trip, say five years at an even faster speed, he may come back to find his brother and an entire one or two future generations of his family all gone.  It is as if he had leaped-frog to the future. That phenomenon is, of course, fondly labeled by scientists as the "twin paradox".

A photon of light that reaches our telescopes after leaving its source, be it a star, another galaxy, etc. some millions or even billions of years ago, is still the same photon. Unaged. Not by a nanosecond.

Now, if you were a photon of light, streaming through the cosmos, you too will not age,  you will not grow old, become literally eternal, for sure.  It will take another musing to explain why it is impossible for you or I to travel, at the speed of light, so let's get that fantasy out of our mind. For now, anyway.  

So, what is time then? We've established that time is arbitrary.  It is also local. But as arbitrarily as we've made it, relative motions of observers perceive it differently, and then gravity also affects it.  Those living at sea level will age a bit slower than those up in the Himalayas. Twins Peter and Paul work at the Sears tower.  Peter works at the top floor.  Paul works at the basement parking garage. Peter will age sooner (will be older than Paul) after a certain time.  That is the other weird part about the flow of time.  Gravity affects the passage of time.  A massive gravitational field like inside or at the black hole, will cause time to not only slow down but perhaps to not move at all.  This is what complicates the correction that the navigation system must do.  The satellite is moving fast but it is also farther away from earth where gravitational field is stronger so the correction algorithm must account for it. 

This is exhausting.  So, enough for now.