Perspectives in Biology and Medicine

OUTSIDE TIME AND INSIDE TIME WILLIAM GOODDY, M.D., F.R.C.P.* Ifwe banish this act ofcontemplation and contritionfrom our midst, then even now we are dead men and thefuture dead with us. For the endurablefuture is aproduct not solely ofthe experimental method or ofoutward knowledge alone. It is born ofcompassion . It is born of inward seeing.—Loren Eiseley, Man, Time and Prophecy. There is throughout the modern world an increasing pressure to make more use ofsomething—it is impossible to give a clear definition ofit— which we label with the verbal symbol, the neat, short, and supposedly adequate word "time." No one has more succinctly expounded the difficulty ofdefining time than St. Augustine inhis celebrated passage ofwhich this is my own translation : "What is time? As long as no one asks me, I know what it is; but ifI wish to explain it to an enquirer, then I do not know." One of the most famous comments on time is found in the famous, yet never read, Latin work, Newton's Principia of 1686 [1]. The modern scientist relies on Motte's 1729 translation [2], which is misleading. In my own translation, Newton's "Scholium I" reads thus: "I Absolute real and mathematical time, in itself and in its very nature, proceeds or flows steadily, without relation to any external thing you may care to mention, and, to give it another name, is called "duration." Relative, apparent, and common time is a perceptible, external form of measurement of some sort of duration derived from movements, either regular or uneven, which the layman uses instead ofreal time." In rather more modern times, we have the definition of Benjamin Franklin, who said, about 1750, in his "Advice to Young Tradesmen," "Remember, gentlemen, that time is money." In echoing these words today, it is possible to suggest that though there are important benefits * National Hospital, Queen Square, and University College Hospital, London. Author's address: 12 Connaught Place, London W. 2. 239 to be derived from it, there are severe disadvantages in too materialistic an application ofthis law. Over the past hundred years, the ever increasing technological accuracy in public and scientific chronometry—"outside time"—has increasingly invaded personal, private chronometry—"inside time"—thereby disturbing an infinitely old and fundamental process of biological evolution. If this contention is true, we must find all about us evidence of formidable new problems and stresses, the significance ofwhich we have hardly had time to determine. Instead ofwaiting many millions ofyears in order to be able to make a minute advance into places, circumstances, and modes ofthought very slightly different from those we now explore or tolerate, we proceed at amazing and possibly intolerable speeds (space/time qualities ) toward realms signified not by the man-determined value ofman's size, of io1 or ioJ, but by 1028 to io-14 (the remotest galaxy to the atom) in distance and size and by 10s2 to 10-28 (the universe to the electron) in mass. In so doing we are, invariably, and, it seems, of deliberate choice, removing ourselves from the intolerable task ofunderstanding ourselves as human units. It should appear increasingly obvious to anyone connected by his work with modern science, technology, and especially with medical practice that one ofour most pressing needs is to bring our various forms oftime perception from deeply unconscious, innate, automatic obscurity into a sensible study linking many apparently diverse orders ofmental and physical activities. We need to study the mechanisms by which, normally, the sense oftime and times is provided; second, the defects in the perceptions oftimes, which arise from disorders ofthe innumerable mechanisms from which any time sense is achieved; and third, perhaps most important of ail, the stresses arising from incompatibilities between various time systems which use quite separate methods ofcomputation for their creation. Ifwe feel inclined to suggest that the stresses implicit in modern scientific theory and practice are the responsibility ofsomeone else, we adopt an attitude unworthy oihomofaber in Oakley's dramatic phrase "man the tool-maker" [3]. For, whatever profession or branch ofa profession we follow, we adorn that profession only as representative of Homo sapiens, another tide hard to translate, perhaps "man concerned with...