by Paul Bernstein, Ph.D.
This year at professional conferences in Oxford, Paris and Prague, as last year at academic gatherings in Germany, Italy, and Greece, European astrophysicist Metod Saniga explained to his scientific colleagues how the NDE research of Raymond Moody, Kenneth Ring and PMH Atwater has helped him to develop a mathematical model of time that seems to offer solutions to problems that have vexed scholars since Einstein.
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| Poster announcing the international Advanced Research Workshop on the natureof time, co-directed by Dr. Saniga. |
In brief, Dr. Saniga takes seriously the testimony of NDErs when they describe being in a realm where “time stops”, and where some of them “see the past, present, and future all at once.” To this occurrence of what he calls “the Pure Present”, Dr. Saniga adds the experience of mystics, clairvoyants and others who’ve experienced suddenly being in the future, and still others who describe being drawn involuntarily back into the past.1 Saniga uses these “anomalous experiences” to show that a single mathematical model can account for both the conventional and the extraordinary ways that humans experience time. Yet the model also remains compatible with what is known about time throughout the physical universe, and even sheds interesting light on the possible nature of time and space at the very early period of our Universe just after the Big Bang.2
References
1 Metod Saniga, “Algebraic Geometry: A Tool for Resolving the Enigma of Time?”, in R. Buccheri, V. Di Gesù and M. Saniga (eds.), Studies on the Structure of Time: From Physics to Psycho(patho)logy, Kluwer Academic / Plenum Publishers, New York, 2000, pp. 137–166. Available online at www.ta3.sk/~msaniga/pub/ftp/mathpsych.pdf .
2 Metod Saniga, “On an Intriguing Signature-Reversal Exhibited by Cremonian Spacetimes,” Chaos, Solitons & Fractals 19 (2004), page 741. Available online at www.ta3.sk/~msaniga/pub/ftp/signtrevs.pdf .
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Because the same mathematical principles can connect all these different experiences—both physical and psychological— Dr. Saniga asserts that any attempt to dismiss non-ordinary states of consciousness like NDEs “as pure hallucinatory phenomena would simultaneously cast a doubtful eye on the very role of mathematics in our understanding of Nature. To the contrary, it is mathematics itself...that tells us that it is far more natural to expect all these ‘unusual’ perceptions of time to be simply as real as our ordinary (‘normal’) one.”3
Dr. Saniga’s model cannot be fully described without using the specialized mathematics known as ‘algebraic projective geometry’. And since most of us have not been trained in that math, I am forced to risk oversimplifying his explanation a little bit here, in order to share it with the general public.
Recall how we all commonly think of time, as we go about our daily lives: time seems to be a simple ‘arrow’ or straight line running from the past, through the present, and pointing toward the future. However,
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| Geometric representation of NDErs’ experience of time as “pure present” |
as Dr. Saniga points out, the fundamental equations of physics do not really insist on such a one-directional experience of time:
It is a well-known fact that the fundamental equations of physics are time-reversible, i.e. they do not distinguish between the past and future. Moreover, the very concept of the present, the now, has no proper place in the temporal of physics at all; this holds true whether one is talking of classical physics, quantum mechanics, or relativity theory.4
References
3 Metod Saniga, “Algebraic Geometry ...” Op. cit., page 159 [or page 23 inthe online form].
4 Ibid., page 137.
