Time - or eternity?

This is a recent article on the metaphysics of time on www.spirituality.com and I thought some here would find it interesting. I have no idea where to put it though - Scientific, Philosophy or Spirituality. It sort of belongs in all three, so mods, please move it if you like.

[url]Time masters[/url] This is from the introduction:

A lot of people think constantly of the future. Or the past. Or both—pinballing between the two. But that mind-set robs them of living in the moment. Still, they just can’t seem to let go. I’ve been there. I know how those mind games can shut you down.

So I called a couple of fellow Christian Scientists, Laurance Doyle and David Carico, both physicists, hoping to drum up a science-based discussion that could help others (and ourselves) become — Time Masters!

Astrophysicist Laurance Doyle works in Mountain View, California, at the SETI Institute (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence). He is also a member of the NASA Participating Scientists Program, where he’s in charge of detection of planets around eclipsing double star systems for the NASA Kepler Mission, an orbiting telescope launched in March. He lives in Menlo Park, California.

David Carico, a physicist and writer, currently teaches physics, astronomy, and mathematics at College of the Siskiyous and at Shasta College, both in Northern California. He lives in Weed, California, a little town at the base of Mt. Shasta, about thirty miles south of the Oregon border.

Doyle and Carico have coauthored a paper soon to be published in the refereed Open Astronomy Journal. Their paper reexamines the fundamental nature of time and shows how history might be changeable—yes, you heard that right. Paper title: “Quantum Uncertainty Considerations for Gravitational Lens Interferometry.

I met Dr Doyle once when he was a speaker at a youth holiday camp I was helping organise while he still worked for NASA. He really stretched your concepts of life and the universe – one of the most spiritual persons I’ve ever known. I remember him saying for instance, something like, "When we are reading a book what are we doing?" and explaining that if you look at it from a science point of view then you are examining wood pulp and ink and therefore you are missing the whole point because what we are actually doing is reading ideas. He translates everything back into the spiritual realm - the realm of ideas.

I also remember how he once tried to add up to infinity! It’s impossible. He then realised that Jesus had already made the great statement of infinity when he said “I and my Father are one”.

Here are some excerpts from an article titled "The metaphysics of space and time" which was an interview with Dr Doyle. Here, he is asked whether there is a link between the eternal realm and what appears as a human state of material things and he replies:

"I don’t – for the same reason I don’t think there’s a link between chalk and math, per se. If 2+2=4 is written on a chalkboard, the math isn’t in the chalk; the chalk is a finite way of looking at the truth…
……
You don’t find time turning into eternity, because the sum of all finite things doesn’t make the infinite, any more than the sum of mistakes makes a correct answer. So you can try to add up time to get eternity, but you’ll never get there. There isn’t a melding or an eventual evolution of material time-sense into an eternity time-sense. I think the eternity-sense exists, and time is a limited way of looking at things – a way that doesn’t coexist with eternity. It’s this limited way of looking at it that needs to be dispensed with."

"When people talk about the Big Bang, the origin of the universe, I always think of "2+2=4" And how old is that? We can talk about the origin of Roman numeral two’s, and we can talk about the origin of Arabic numeral two’s, because they’re symbols, but we can’t talk about the origin of the real two. So I would say time is dependent on matter - whereas an idea is not material and therefore doesn't involve time."

(from The Christian Science Sentinel Dec 30 2002)

Doyle also said:

"You're doing science when you take intelligence above the evidence of the senses.
....Nothing changed when you realised the earth was round. Nothing changed - you just went higher."

There's a really interesting little pamphlet called [url]Time Space Eternity[/url] (PM me to know where to get it in the UK) and this is from the second article - Conversation with Geoffrey Barratt:

I've realized that time, as Mary Baker Eddy revealed, is a calculation, or measurement of the human mind. So it's illusory, and not absolute. But physics is very much about measuring - measuring time, measuring space, measuring matter.....
But metaphysics deals with the immeasurable - with that which we can't measure, such as eternity....
Eternity and allness don't have beginnings - and they don't have ends.

...I think it is endlessly inspiring to know that eternity is timeless. And that opens up my thought.

Judy