First, take a mental deep breath. Second, read the context. Third, agree, disagree, or dismiss as an overreach not worth your time (in which case, you’ll say “All that, for this?”).
The All That
Ferromanganese nodules are one of the pelagic (open) ocean’s deep mysteries. They are generally concentrically accumulated accretions of heavier metals whose core is some small particle like a bit of shell that serves as a nucleus around which the nodules grow. Slowly. Really slowly. Maybe 3 to 10 millimeters per million years. Thus, ferromanganese nodules are usually small with the largest measured in centimeters. Now, here’s the mystery that surrounds these benthic nodules. In spite of a rain of detritus that falls through the ocean column, the nodules remain at the surface of bottom sediments, usually forming with a hemispheric band, a kind of equatorial belt or girdle, at the sediment-water interface.* How do they stay at the sediment surface? Why aren’t they buried by the detrital rain of particles that fall through the water? Some say fast currents along the bottom sweep the detrital rain from the nodules. Others say that organisms like holothurians that eat the sediment clean the nodules on the deep (miles down) abyssal plains. One problem with the latter explanation is that what goes in one end of a holothurian comes out the other end, so cleaning off one nodule might simply result in burying another. And as for the former explanation? Well, many of the fields of nodules occur in places where current velocities are very low; and even if the currents were capable of washing off one nodule, they would pile the sediments on another. A third explanation lies in the quantity of detrital rain and in the slow diagenesis of ocean floor basalts. Nodules abound beneath the so-called “ocean deserts,” vast gyres of pelagic waters with comparatively little surface life and, thus, with relatively little detrital rain precipitating upon the seafloor miles below. And as for clay formation through diagenesis of basalt, the dominant rock of the ocean, it is a slow process, so slow that many rocks moving from the ocean ridges during seafloor spreading soon get buried by deposits of the tiny shells of foraminifera, coccolithophores, and diatoms, effectively keeping them from undergoing decay. Of course, seafloor spreading plays a role, also, because nodules that form beneath one pelagic ecology move beneath another, sometimes at a rate, in the eastern Pacific at least, of 15 cm/yr. Mystery of mysteries, these nodules.
That, in a nutshell, is the essence of the nodule mystery and the context for what is to follow: Slow growth, but no burial in spite of a rain of detritus. Is there a human analog?
The This
How do you define Time? How do you define Existence? Tough to define either or both. But you already know that. If you are concerned that there’s a gap in your knowledge and understanding where a definition of time should lie, you are not alone. You stand with St. Augustine of Hippo on this. He said, “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.” Same for existence? I mean, think, what more can one say than that existence is, to use a Heideggerian term, the opposite of “no-thingness”? You might think that Being would be easy to define, given that you exist, that you have “being,” “are a being,” or “are a manifestation of being.” Anyway, here’s the mystery of mysteries: How is it that after about 2,500 years of philosophical thinking, the development of logic, and the exploration of all things physical and biological, that we haven’t come to a complete understanding of, again to use Heidegger’s terminology, Being and Time?
The nodules: After the ancient Greeks invented philosophy and geometry, the West’s intellectual life moved like a nodule on a spreading seafloor, moving from Greece to Rome and then slowly spreading throughout Europe and eventually the New World, remaining at the surface of intellectual life and slowly accumulating thin concentric layers of qualifications, many of them theological, such as the Neoplatonism as applied by St. (Bishop) Augustine of Hippo and Thomism initiated by St. Thomas Aquinas. Those nuclei of Greek philosophies that attracted slow growth with slight variations underwent some dissolution and destruction in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and then major dissolution in the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century, culminating in Martin Heidegger’s “rethinking” of philosophy centered on his idea of no-thingness and Being and on the “physical side, culminating with the “science” of physicists like Planck, Bohr, and Einstein, all three of who spent their lives rethinking the very nature of Space and Time and the question of a continuous or discontinuous universe.
Heidegger didn’t think that philosophy had advanced much over the centuries and that it had to be rethought in a new philosophical language, a new way for the mind to handle the old problems. He proposed some kind of poetic-artistic-aesthetic as an approach. If you read through some of his works, you’ll see references to both art and poetry, his way of taking dry logic out of the philosophical equations and of providing a new perspective. In short, he didn’t want to add another thin layer to the nodules on the bed of philosophy. He wanted to rethink philosophy and turn over, bury, or dissolve those old philosophical growths.** But in devising a language to handle the nature of Time, could he or anyone else do nothing other than develop a psychology of Time Consciousness?
In the ocean of thought of all humans up to the present, has anyone definitively resolved the questions about either existence or time? Did Heidegger or those physicists define either time or existence to our satisfaction? Have we now a universally accepted explanation? Does it flow like water or lie in a path like pebbles in a wadi?
Curious about my own inability to have ultimately resolved the matter for you and all future humans, I turned to YouTube, the ultimate source of knowledge, for guidance, where I found a discussion on the subject “The Richness of Time” by physicist Brian Greene, neuroscientist Dean Buonomano, and cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky.*** Why tackle both subjects at once I asked myself? Let me see what the bright and learned have to say about time. As long as I exist, I can always address the question of existence, of Being.
I watched. And at the end, I asked, “What is Time?” because I still didn’t know, at least not in the sense that Augustine wanted us to understand by being able to explain. The neuroscientist mentioned the brain’s “spatializing of time,” and the cognitive scientist mentioned linguistic differences that make people express time differently in different cultures. Seems that we can discuss how we both view and handle time, but not define it. Here is a thought-nodule that has grown very slowly for 2,500 years by the accumulation of thin qualifications, usually none of which added anything new, even though the topic has remained at the surface of thinkers of all kinds.
Are you at the point of asking, “All that, for this?” If so, I can empathize. That’s where I was after watching the Greene-Buonomano-Boroditsky discussion. The thin layer that the discussion added to my “sense” of time is that the brain handles time spatially, Boroditsky apparently having picked up on the spatialization mentioned by her neuroscientist colleague on stage. And her examples make sense, since we orient timelines according to favored directions (usually left to right in western societies) and the flow of time as a river flows or as it moves from one cardinal direction to another or up or down, also dependent on our choice of metaphorical understanding. We "go toward the future," or the "future comes to us," as in "I've got a birthday coming up"; or we say the "past recedes" or that the past is some kind of continuously more distant repository, as in "That's buried in the past."
If you recall the opening page of this website, I mention that place is primary and that if I ask you to remember ten minutes ago, you really can’t do that separately from including place. You were, after all, in a place ten minutes ago, and the place, the space characterized by its components, lends images to your temporal experience. And of course, you can guess that the statement by physicists that time began with the Big Bang also meant that there had to be a somewhere, a physical somewhere, for time to exist and eventually for consciousness to arise to spatialize it.
Spatializing? We have enough trouble with the concept of Space, don’t we? Is it continuous or discontinuous? Do we also have a duality in our concept of Time? Do you picture seconds ticking in a jerky one-by-one on a digital clock or in the smooth sweep of a second hand on an analog watch? Is there a smallest unit of Space that is related to the smallest unit of Time? The Planck Length? Each length an individual grain like riverbed sand in the channel. Is that tiny length the starting point for all measurements of Time like seconds and minutes, those arbitrarily chosen units, including the smallest of all units physicists use, called Planck Time, the “time” light takes to travel a Planck length, or 5.39 times 10^-44 seconds? When we speak of “units” like seconds or even parts of seconds like the unimaginably small Planck Time, are we saying that Time is like that channel of individual grains and not like a channel of flowing water? I don’t know about you, but I can’t imagine either of the Planck units, but I can imagine that anything small can be composed of something smaller, and the physicists tell us that those two short units are just the points of departure for the ways in which gravity and the other fundamental forces work in our universe. So, even if Apple comes out with a new watch that reminds you to stand every so often, say every other unit of Planck Time, the company will attempt to increase sales the following year by having you stand every fourth half Planck unit.
If you are paying attention, you have noticed that I, like so many before me, seem to add little more than a thin layer of qualification to the thought-nodule as it continues to develop on the nuclei of the earliest philosophies. Or, maybe no layer at all. When I look over what I have written, what Martin Heidegger writes in Being and Time, and what Brian Greene and cohosts tell me about Time, I see nothing new about Time itself, but lots new about how we perceive Time or what it means to us. Instead of providing an ultimate definition of Time, I can suggest only this: We don’t have a mechanism in our brains to understand Time beyond recognizing 1) that we associate it with change that is independent of our experience yet simultaneously tied to it and 2) that we spend our efforts on how we deal with time, for example, spatially and linguistically.
Thanks to Einstein, we know that Time is relative, not just for individuals, but for the universe, that it changes under the influence of mass and velocity, that one twin staying on Earth will age faster than a sibling traveling at the speed of light to a distant star, and that our car navigation systems would be useless without correcting for differences in velocity and gravity between Earth and the orbiting satellites. We know of “Time’s Arrow,” the unidirectional “movement” toward the future that is irreversible. We know that we experience Time differently under different circumstances, that it appears to slow during an accident or while a pot of water boils—that is, if we watch. That at the end of a life, it appears to have flown by rapidly, as we say, tempus fugit, that we can’t believe summer is here already, or winter, or Christmas, or a 20th anniversary, or even that on Monday, Friday seems far off during working hours, but on Friday the week seems to have gone by too fast.
We seem to know much about our relationship to Time and how it affects us. But we still have many questions. We know what Time is—unless someone asks us.
*For a picture of nodules, see: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303108085_Deep-ocean_ferromanganese_crusts_and_nodules Ferromanganese nodules are also called polymetallic nodules because they contain not just iron and manganese, but also some other precipitated metals.
And for similar nodules in Lake Michigan, see: https://wgnhs.wisc.edu/minerals/ferromanganesenodules/
For a terrestrial analog called desert varnish, see: https://www.livescience.com/31332-desert-varnish-images/2.html
**If you read through the Initial Reports of the Deep Sea Drilling Project, you will see that nodules found east and northeast of the East Pacific Rise are larger on the surface than under sediments. Apparently, but by no means surely, nodules that undergo burial seem to have undergone some decay, rather than further growth. The largest nodules (maybe 3 cm or so) lie at the surface. However, the sampling is small if one considers the vastness of the abyssal plains and the diameters of a relatively few cores of sediment. By comparison, imagine taking a 4 to 6 centimeter diameter core of Manhattan and no more, and then describing the entire island on the basis of that one sample. If the core went into Central Park you might describe Manhattan as an idyllic garden of walks, fields, and trees, but if the core went straight through the Empire State Building you would describe the island as a steel-stone-and-concrete place filled with unexplainable gaps where the core passed through offices.
***”The Richness of Time.” Online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJWvEbeBps
The All That
Ferromanganese nodules are one of the pelagic (open) ocean’s deep mysteries. They are generally concentrically accumulated accretions of heavier metals whose core is some small particle like a bit of shell that serves as a nucleus around which the nodules grow. Slowly. Really slowly. Maybe 3 to 10 millimeters per million years. Thus, ferromanganese nodules are usually small with the largest measured in centimeters. Now, here’s the mystery that surrounds these benthic nodules. In spite of a rain of detritus that falls through the ocean column, the nodules remain at the surface of bottom sediments, usually forming with a hemispheric band, a kind of equatorial belt or girdle, at the sediment-water interface.* How do they stay at the sediment surface? Why aren’t they buried by the detrital rain of particles that fall through the water? Some say fast currents along the bottom sweep the detrital rain from the nodules. Others say that organisms like holothurians that eat the sediment clean the nodules on the deep (miles down) abyssal plains. One problem with the latter explanation is that what goes in one end of a holothurian comes out the other end, so cleaning off one nodule might simply result in burying another. And as for the former explanation? Well, many of the fields of nodules occur in places where current velocities are very low; and even if the currents were capable of washing off one nodule, they would pile the sediments on another. A third explanation lies in the quantity of detrital rain and in the slow diagenesis of ocean floor basalts. Nodules abound beneath the so-called “ocean deserts,” vast gyres of pelagic waters with comparatively little surface life and, thus, with relatively little detrital rain precipitating upon the seafloor miles below. And as for clay formation through diagenesis of basalt, the dominant rock of the ocean, it is a slow process, so slow that many rocks moving from the ocean ridges during seafloor spreading soon get buried by deposits of the tiny shells of foraminifera, coccolithophores, and diatoms, effectively keeping them from undergoing decay. Of course, seafloor spreading plays a role, also, because nodules that form beneath one pelagic ecology move beneath another, sometimes at a rate, in the eastern Pacific at least, of 15 cm/yr. Mystery of mysteries, these nodules.
That, in a nutshell, is the essence of the nodule mystery and the context for what is to follow: Slow growth, but no burial in spite of a rain of detritus. Is there a human analog?
The This
How do you define Time? How do you define Existence? Tough to define either or both. But you already know that. If you are concerned that there’s a gap in your knowledge and understanding where a definition of time should lie, you are not alone. You stand with St. Augustine of Hippo on this. He said, “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.” Same for existence? I mean, think, what more can one say than that existence is, to use a Heideggerian term, the opposite of “no-thingness”? You might think that Being would be easy to define, given that you exist, that you have “being,” “are a being,” or “are a manifestation of being.” Anyway, here’s the mystery of mysteries: How is it that after about 2,500 years of philosophical thinking, the development of logic, and the exploration of all things physical and biological, that we haven’t come to a complete understanding of, again to use Heidegger’s terminology, Being and Time?
The nodules: After the ancient Greeks invented philosophy and geometry, the West’s intellectual life moved like a nodule on a spreading seafloor, moving from Greece to Rome and then slowly spreading throughout Europe and eventually the New World, remaining at the surface of intellectual life and slowly accumulating thin concentric layers of qualifications, many of them theological, such as the Neoplatonism as applied by St. (Bishop) Augustine of Hippo and Thomism initiated by St. Thomas Aquinas. Those nuclei of Greek philosophies that attracted slow growth with slight variations underwent some dissolution and destruction in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and then major dissolution in the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century, culminating in Martin Heidegger’s “rethinking” of philosophy centered on his idea of no-thingness and Being and on the “physical side, culminating with the “science” of physicists like Planck, Bohr, and Einstein, all three of who spent their lives rethinking the very nature of Space and Time and the question of a continuous or discontinuous universe.
Heidegger didn’t think that philosophy had advanced much over the centuries and that it had to be rethought in a new philosophical language, a new way for the mind to handle the old problems. He proposed some kind of poetic-artistic-aesthetic as an approach. If you read through some of his works, you’ll see references to both art and poetry, his way of taking dry logic out of the philosophical equations and of providing a new perspective. In short, he didn’t want to add another thin layer to the nodules on the bed of philosophy. He wanted to rethink philosophy and turn over, bury, or dissolve those old philosophical growths.** But in devising a language to handle the nature of Time, could he or anyone else do nothing other than develop a psychology of Time Consciousness?
In the ocean of thought of all humans up to the present, has anyone definitively resolved the questions about either existence or time? Did Heidegger or those physicists define either time or existence to our satisfaction? Have we now a universally accepted explanation? Does it flow like water or lie in a path like pebbles in a wadi?
Curious about my own inability to have ultimately resolved the matter for you and all future humans, I turned to YouTube, the ultimate source of knowledge, for guidance, where I found a discussion on the subject “The Richness of Time” by physicist Brian Greene, neuroscientist Dean Buonomano, and cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky.*** Why tackle both subjects at once I asked myself? Let me see what the bright and learned have to say about time. As long as I exist, I can always address the question of existence, of Being.
I watched. And at the end, I asked, “What is Time?” because I still didn’t know, at least not in the sense that Augustine wanted us to understand by being able to explain. The neuroscientist mentioned the brain’s “spatializing of time,” and the cognitive scientist mentioned linguistic differences that make people express time differently in different cultures. Seems that we can discuss how we both view and handle time, but not define it. Here is a thought-nodule that has grown very slowly for 2,500 years by the accumulation of thin qualifications, usually none of which added anything new, even though the topic has remained at the surface of thinkers of all kinds.
Are you at the point of asking, “All that, for this?” If so, I can empathize. That’s where I was after watching the Greene-Buonomano-Boroditsky discussion. The thin layer that the discussion added to my “sense” of time is that the brain handles time spatially, Boroditsky apparently having picked up on the spatialization mentioned by her neuroscientist colleague on stage. And her examples make sense, since we orient timelines according to favored directions (usually left to right in western societies) and the flow of time as a river flows or as it moves from one cardinal direction to another or up or down, also dependent on our choice of metaphorical understanding. We "go toward the future," or the "future comes to us," as in "I've got a birthday coming up"; or we say the "past recedes" or that the past is some kind of continuously more distant repository, as in "That's buried in the past."
If you recall the opening page of this website, I mention that place is primary and that if I ask you to remember ten minutes ago, you really can’t do that separately from including place. You were, after all, in a place ten minutes ago, and the place, the space characterized by its components, lends images to your temporal experience. And of course, you can guess that the statement by physicists that time began with the Big Bang also meant that there had to be a somewhere, a physical somewhere, for time to exist and eventually for consciousness to arise to spatialize it.
Spatializing? We have enough trouble with the concept of Space, don’t we? Is it continuous or discontinuous? Do we also have a duality in our concept of Time? Do you picture seconds ticking in a jerky one-by-one on a digital clock or in the smooth sweep of a second hand on an analog watch? Is there a smallest unit of Space that is related to the smallest unit of Time? The Planck Length? Each length an individual grain like riverbed sand in the channel. Is that tiny length the starting point for all measurements of Time like seconds and minutes, those arbitrarily chosen units, including the smallest of all units physicists use, called Planck Time, the “time” light takes to travel a Planck length, or 5.39 times 10^-44 seconds? When we speak of “units” like seconds or even parts of seconds like the unimaginably small Planck Time, are we saying that Time is like that channel of individual grains and not like a channel of flowing water? I don’t know about you, but I can’t imagine either of the Planck units, but I can imagine that anything small can be composed of something smaller, and the physicists tell us that those two short units are just the points of departure for the ways in which gravity and the other fundamental forces work in our universe. So, even if Apple comes out with a new watch that reminds you to stand every so often, say every other unit of Planck Time, the company will attempt to increase sales the following year by having you stand every fourth half Planck unit.
If you are paying attention, you have noticed that I, like so many before me, seem to add little more than a thin layer of qualification to the thought-nodule as it continues to develop on the nuclei of the earliest philosophies. Or, maybe no layer at all. When I look over what I have written, what Martin Heidegger writes in Being and Time, and what Brian Greene and cohosts tell me about Time, I see nothing new about Time itself, but lots new about how we perceive Time or what it means to us. Instead of providing an ultimate definition of Time, I can suggest only this: We don’t have a mechanism in our brains to understand Time beyond recognizing 1) that we associate it with change that is independent of our experience yet simultaneously tied to it and 2) that we spend our efforts on how we deal with time, for example, spatially and linguistically.
Thanks to Einstein, we know that Time is relative, not just for individuals, but for the universe, that it changes under the influence of mass and velocity, that one twin staying on Earth will age faster than a sibling traveling at the speed of light to a distant star, and that our car navigation systems would be useless without correcting for differences in velocity and gravity between Earth and the orbiting satellites. We know of “Time’s Arrow,” the unidirectional “movement” toward the future that is irreversible. We know that we experience Time differently under different circumstances, that it appears to slow during an accident or while a pot of water boils—that is, if we watch. That at the end of a life, it appears to have flown by rapidly, as we say, tempus fugit, that we can’t believe summer is here already, or winter, or Christmas, or a 20th anniversary, or even that on Monday, Friday seems far off during working hours, but on Friday the week seems to have gone by too fast.
We seem to know much about our relationship to Time and how it affects us. But we still have many questions. We know what Time is—unless someone asks us.
*For a picture of nodules, see: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303108085_Deep-ocean_ferromanganese_crusts_and_nodules Ferromanganese nodules are also called polymetallic nodules because they contain not just iron and manganese, but also some other precipitated metals.
And for similar nodules in Lake Michigan, see: https://wgnhs.wisc.edu/minerals/ferromanganesenodules/
For a terrestrial analog called desert varnish, see: https://www.livescience.com/31332-desert-varnish-images/2.html
**If you read through the Initial Reports of the Deep Sea Drilling Project, you will see that nodules found east and northeast of the East Pacific Rise are larger on the surface than under sediments. Apparently, but by no means surely, nodules that undergo burial seem to have undergone some decay, rather than further growth. The largest nodules (maybe 3 cm or so) lie at the surface. However, the sampling is small if one considers the vastness of the abyssal plains and the diameters of a relatively few cores of sediment. By comparison, imagine taking a 4 to 6 centimeter diameter core of Manhattan and no more, and then describing the entire island on the basis of that one sample. If the core went into Central Park you might describe Manhattan as an idyllic garden of walks, fields, and trees, but if the core went straight through the Empire State Building you would describe the island as a steel-stone-and-concrete place filled with unexplainable gaps where the core passed through offices.
***”The Richness of Time.” Online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJWvEbeBps
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