[Anita Linke]

I share Viola’s befuddlement.  I feel like I’ve wandered into a hall of mirrors.  Anything one can contemplate has more facets to it and more depth than I would ever have thought to imagine.  Looking at Time through the lens of philosophy and science, I feel lost.

There is only one aspect of time I still feel sure of:  that the past is not past.  Certain  moments that feel very rich and deep when one is young return to enrich the present when one is old.  But that has to do with neuronal impressions creating a subjective sense of time.  Sarbmeet says:  “Places are nothing but a pulsating moment of time.”  What a striking image!   The moment I reread it in my notes, it brought back an exhilarating place where I was with my husband decades ago in the Swiss National Forest in the Engadine: we were at a mountain lake, the air so pure it was almost unearthly, with all the senses struck by the pulsating intensity of the place.  But that moment is not past for me.  It’s intensity guarantees it a presence in my “now” whenever I choose to bring it back.

Wholes within wholes:  I accept it as true although I don’t feel any of the wholes that live within my body.  “We are story within story” — a way of envisioning that I had never thought of before.  “Spiritedness,” in families, is a push that comes from hormones, which are what goad animals to mate and grow the family.  I don’t see how to reconcile spirit and hormones.  If one said that love was urge to grow the family, I could understand:  love and spirit go together.  But hormones and spirit?

Time-constrained, I stop here, with numerous other confusions lingering in my mind.

[Anita Linke]

Hello. My name is Anita Linke. I have a liberal arts background — an ABD from Brown University in French literature. I am keenly interested in studying science as a layman and in seeking to know what we are in the most fundamental sense. My brother and my husband were research physicists at Bell Labs and that gave me the privilege of talking to scientists for thirty years about the articles I was reading in Science News, the Science Times on Tuesdays in the New York Times, and in The Scientific American, as well as in numerous books like The Universe Within by Neil Shubin. I am fascinated by numerous videos on You Tube such as “The Secret Life of Chaos” by Jim Al-Khalili and others with Frank Wilczek showing computer simulations of quarks and anti-quarks popping in and out of being. I hope that this forum will offer a format for communication with others who are also interested in these topics.

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