Musings on a New Year
(Some thoughts at the dawn of 2004)
As the calendar turned another leaf to 2004, I was asked by two different friends on two different occasions whether I had done something special on New Year's Eve. I hadn't. Not being inclined to give such a plain and simple response, I sought refuge in a poem by the Hindi poet Agyeya which runs: 'Ek din, aur dinon sa, Aayu ka ek baras le chala gaya' (A day, like any other, took away a year of life in its wake). Though the poet had originally intended these lines for birthdays, they are equally relevant for New Year's Day or any other anniversarial occasion.
I have always liked these particular lines. However this time I somehow got about analyzing them. How can a day take away a year? At least within a single relativistic frame of reference, that is not possible. (Of course, if that day were spent in Brahma-Lok (*see footnote), or in a space-ship approaching the speed of light, countless years might pass by on Earth...but that is beyond the point.)
But let us ignore this argument. We assume that the day by itself does not take away a year. It is a placeholder for the year. But why? Time is essentially a continuum. New Year's Day, or any other anniversary, is an attempt at discretizing it. According to Nyquist's sampling theorem, if a periodic signal has frequency f, then one need only sample it at a frequency 2f to completely re-construct it. Now we are sampling with time period 1 year, but what actually is the frequency of Time?
Well, if one believes in the Oscillating Universe theory, one might say that the frequency of Time is 1/(time_period_of oscillation), as Time must begin anew after each oscillation (must it?). If so, aren't we sampling it a bit too often? But I happened to grow up believing the Big Bang Theory. In that case, Time began with the Big Bang. But is it periodic? (Alas...I regret my ignorance of Cosmology!).
I believe there is a view in the field of thermodynamics that the progress of Time is synonymous with the increase in the entropy of the universe. Thus Time will reach its maximum when the entropy of the universe reaches its maximum. Once that state is reached, Time will become meaningless as there would be nothing to mark its passage (This argument is derived from an essay by Isaac Asimov). Ah...physicists should have taken into account that we could always keep up the New Year tradition even in an absolutely disordered and chaotic universe, and thereby mark the passage of Time! Of course that can only happen if not everyone is like me.
But once again, things are getting intractable, so let us change track. The immediate question is: why do we want to discretize Time? The reason is the same as the reason why we digitize an essentially analog world! Analog information can take any of an infinite number of values from a continuum. Digitization reduces that to a finite set of discrete values, and makes things much more convenient. So we talk of years, months, days, hours, seconds in daily life, as this granularity is enough for normal purposes. But truly, what we call one year is actually an infinite number of infinitesimal units of Time. But by an argument similar to that of Zeno of Elea (**see footnote), how can we live through an infinite number of time units in a finite time (1 year)? So that means that the passage of Time is an illusion. And in that case, any celebration of the passage of Time contributes to the perpetuation of the illusion.
Alas, we poor mortals are caught in the grip of Maya (***see footnote)! Hence the New Year's Day tradition shall continue, despite being all wrong! In the same vein, mischievous people like me will continue to mix fact and fallacy to arrive at conclusions like this one!
*In Hindu Mythology it is said that even one second in Brahma-Lok (the abode of the God Brahma) is equivalent to many Mahamanavantras(aeons) on Earth. There is a story of a King who visited Brahma for a day, and returned back to find that generations had passed by and a new Yug (age) had begun on Earth.
**Zeno of Elea was a Greek philosopher who belonged to the Eleatic school. He argued that all motion was an illusion and that the universe was essentially static. His argument was: "Suppose you want to shut a door. Before you fully shut it, you will have to half shut it. Before you half-shut it, you will have to shut it a quarter, and before that an eighth, and so on, ad infinitum. But how can you move through an infinite number of distances in finite time? Hence all motion must be an illusion."
***Maya essentially means illusion.
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