The Yoga of Time Travel

This week I wanted to review a book I've just finished reading called "The Yoga of Time Travel" by Fred Alan Wolf PhD.

I was lent this book by someone at our Zen group. It piqued my interest as it's on that physics-spiritualism border. In true Amazon style, I'd give it 4 stars (out of 5): It's well written, has some fascinating concepts in there that were certainly new to me, he does a great job of explaining special and general relativity with regards to weird space-time effects and time dilation, and he attempts to connect all this to a number of interesting spiritual aspects. I'm not giving it 5 stars because it's obvious he hasn't gone very deep into the spiritual side of things (his understanding is noticeably superficial), and the connections he tries to make between the hard physics of time travel (what's allowed by quantum physics and relativity) and the spiritual experiences he discusses are not so easy to follow. Plus, he totally confused me in his discussion of transportable wormholes where two people remain holding hands but get separated by space and time!

According to his website and wikipedia, Fred Wolf got his PhD in theoretical physics at UCLA in 1963. His field of research was high atmospheric particle behavior following a nuclear explosion. As time went by he got interested in the relationship between human consciousness, psychology, physiology, the mystical, and the spiritual. Now he's nicknamed "Dr. Quantum"(!) and writes books on the relationship between quantum physics and consciousness.

One of the things in the book I found the most interesting relates to our perception of time. We all have those periods where it feels like time is going at a snails pace (e.g. waiting for somebody) or when time absolutely flies (e.g. when we're enjoying ourselves). As modern humans we have come to measure time using a clock - in the old days using the back-and-forth swing of a pendulum as the yard-stick (as it were), or nowadays the vibrations of an electrified quartz crystal (e.g in your watch) or the resonant transitions of electrons in an atom (in an atomic clock). But who's to say which is the truer measure of time? We have come to think our perception of time passing is distorted when what we feel is different to what the clock says.

And that brings me onto another of the things he discusses. What really is time? One of the first physical measurements that set the "direction of time's arrow" came at the beginning of the industrial revolution. It was found that hot things cool down and in doing so heat up cooler things; you cannot heat up a cold object without doing work (the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics).

"Put the thermodynamic arrow of time together with the energy required for manual labor and you come up with the time-clock punch - the means to measure the working person's wage. Linear time became the ultimate frame upon which Western culture determines its technological progress, its labor laws, and its riches, or lack thereof."

Later in the book he suggests that our internal concept of time arises through sequential focussing and de-focussing on particular points in space-time (a thought, action, moment of reality). "Our conscious experience consists of a sequence of these focal points, sites of more specific focus separated by sites of unfocussed possibilities." … "Focal points are places in space-time where objective awareness occurs and the more blurred sites are places where objective awareness diminishes but subjective awareness persists. [Converting] a possibility into a probability corresponds to the process that produces a focussed point or "sudden awareness", while a blurred site [represents] "unawareness" or unconsciousness."

In meditation, we encourage the de-focussing or blurring aspect, "letting go of fixed ideas I have about myself and others". Moving from a more blurred to less blurred state would represent moving forward in time, whereas increasing de-focus would conversely imply moving backward in time. Letting go implies increasing the uncertainty of an event in space-time, and, essentially, travelling backwards in time. "When we let go of old habits, we also move backwards in time... our subjective time-sense [runs] counter to objective time." - These connections between blurring and time travel are what I find less easy to understand.

Interestingly he says that travel backwards in time is not at all forbidden in quantum mechanics - and may actually be necessary for certain physical phenomena. He says that this naturally leads on to the concept of parallel universes (which he discusses quite a lot), and this is how we can solve the apparent paradoxes that arise through time travel.

After all this I'm definitely interested to read more from him, like his latest book "Time Loops And Space Twists" or "Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics" by Henry Stapp.