Yin, Yang and St. Augustine

Perhaps it was the full moon that made me read Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”, or my cyclical desire to think more about time in a structured way. In my previous postings and writings, I have often touched about the question of time, especially from a scientific angle where physics occupies a central role. Newton, Kant, Einstein and Bohr have helped me over the past many decades to enjoy the philosophical and scientific challenges of understanding space, events, time and unseen forces of attraction.  Delightfully, I have found daily applications of these concepts and ongoing wondering about our place in the vaster universe. Eventually, it has been my inner universe, sometimes equally too vast for me to navigate, that has found comfort in believing that there is an order and symmetry to existence, especially in appreciating the beauty of what and who surrounds us.

So, perhaps it was more than the full moon that lead me to read Hawking’s much acclaimed synopsis of the progress in our thinking from St. Augustine to Newton and Einstein with a special emphasis on “What is Time?”

 … The basic conundrum has always been about the origin of time. Is time absolute in that it has always existed? If so, it will have no end. But if there is a starting point for time then there will be an ending point too. I have found St. Augustine’s statement most concise about this. He said that the time was a property of the universe that God created, and that time did not exist before the beginning of the universe. This statement makes us, at least indirectly, related to the origin of time.

Picture of “time” on rocks in Prescott, Arizona. I was thinking about St. Augustine’s statement when I took this picture. Can one discuss the ravages of time without the presence of the rocks?

While many have proposed definitions or properties of time as philosophers and scientists, the breakthrough came with the introduction about a century ago of the concept of space-time by Einstein in 1915 through his general theory of relativity. In short, he rejected the absolute definition of time long accepted given the works of Galileo and Newton and proposed that time and space are inter-related and that space-time is not flat (i.e., absolute) but that it is “warped” and that it moves along curved orbits. Hence the way we measure time, as space-time, is relative to the measurer and his position along such orbits.

Like many, I have been challenged in understanding the space-time concept. Yet, as I was reading Hawking’s book, suddenly after many decades of relative apathy, my mind made an interesting connection between traditional Chinese medicine and the concept of space-time. Let me explain:

The Zen (or Tao) thinking when applied to medicine sees connections rather than “absolutes”. The general framework for the inter-connectivity of entities and concepts, rather than their independent and absolute characteristic, can be placed under the umbrella of the Yin and Yang. The Yin and Yang are relatively known to the West but the underlying principle may not be. Specifically the Zen philosophy deals with paired co-existing entities such as body and energy, and their paired manifestations regarding health, disease, happiness, etc. For example, the Yin is the internal world (universe?) of the body, while the Yang is the external manifestation of the turbulences within the Yin. When in Asia I am often told to eat certain foods that will make my Yin happy and my Yang more pleasing during human interactions. The pairing of the origin of food (shrimp from the cold and fluid to farm animals from the land, melon and spicy soups, etc) follows this pairing concept. And when the body shows sign of dis-ease, then the role of the traditional Chinese medicine is to understand what imbalance (i.e. harmony) was disrupted between the Yin and Yang and restore it.

… Paired co-existence and the issue of harmony. The body would collapse -- the Yang will show symptoms of dis-harmony within the Yin. Similarly our universe would collapse without that Newtonian harmony of masses having equal and opposite attraction and repulsion. Time cannot be understood as flat but as space-time that gets warped due to movement and position. Without space-time the change in our universe i.e., its expansion, could not be explained; without the indispensable connection between the Yin and Yang our body, that wonderful micro-universe we each cherish, cannot be understood, maintained and enjoyed. When harmony is disrupted, our genes may have shorter endings (telomeres) predisposing us to weakness in fighting external insults such as bacteria, pollution, stress, and we may age sooner. Our time of existence may be expanded forward making us age faster.

… I smile thinking that one day someone may define a new measurable entity in Western medicine called “Existence-time” and receive the Nobel Prize!!

Back to the question of the origin of time. Most of us look forward and not back perhaps making the question of the origin of time absolute, hence rarely indispensible for our daily living activities. We accept what harmony exists around and inside of us and we thrive at ameliorating it for a more enjoyable existence.

But there will always be those among us who look back while most look forth. It is the nature of our curiosity and while Eastern philosophies have for long recognized the inseparable co-existence of paired concepts, Western scientists are just discovering the importance of joint concepts to explore the spectrum from genetics to the universe and its black holes. After all Einstein’s revolutionary thinking happened only a century ago…

It was perhaps this idea of looking back by curiosity but looking forth by Epicureanism that made me take this picture while kayaking on a sunny day.

June 4, 2015

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015