This Moment

Yesterday I discovered Photosynth on the internet. Microsoft asked people at the inauguration to photograph the moment of Obama’s swearing in, and has assembled the results in four dimensions. Zoom from the monument to the capitol, turn around, and see every angle of “the moment”. From 100,000 points you can navigate the scene of the inauguration in/out, left/ right, up/down and before/after. Yes, a time dimension -- a sequencing that becomes part of the fascination.

A “Simultaneous” photo from 100,000 points of a moving event has all the echoes of Einstein’s thought experiments at the train station of the special theory. And Photosynth’s ease of moving both in space and time hints of the possibility of a way to conceptualize the spacetime of the general theory.

This morning I awoke in the middle of dream images of the 4-D photo array, flashes of color and associations dancing in my head. And in my consciousness a single question, “How does the future impinge on the present to become the past?”

This struck me as some kind of insight. That time is an arrow is a given. But that it flows from past to future is not. Is the present but the transparent surface of the future on its one-way boundary flowing to the past? If so, then time is the vibration that impels everything possible into actuality at this boundary, this moment. This inauguration.

Our future, becoming now.

Zphx