Timelessness and Tragedy

A BEYOND BORDERS column by David Krakauer, President of the Santa Fe Institute.

John Harwood patent for an automatic wristwatch movement. (image: The Watch Library, MIH, L’Horloger, Public Domain, via Monochrome Watches)

Every conception of time includes both a theory of change and a theory of permanence. Whereas dynamics and disorder have dominated scientific theories of time, science has paid less attention to what is timeless. The arts and mythology often treat the timeless as more important than the “timeful.” Much as we seek to explain the origin and role of time, we would like to understand the origin and value of timelessness.

The year 1872, viewed through the lens of three pivotal publications, encapsulates a few of the inevitable tensions that exist between temporal change and temporal stasis.

The first is Ludwig Boltzmann’s “Further Studies on the Thermal Equilibrium of Gas Molecules,” in which Boltzmann presents an equation for the time evolution of an ideal gas and demonstrates that its equilibrium solution is described by the Maxwell distribution. Boltzmann showed using his H-theorem that, regardless of the initial state of a gas, the solution to the equation ultimately converges on the maximum entropy distribution. In this way, Boltzmann sought to explain the inescapable mechanistic basis of the second law of thermodynamics — that the future is a shuffled version of the past.

The second publication came from a young professor of classical philology at the University of Basel, Friedrich Nietzsche, in the form of his monograph The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche’s thesis is that Greek tragic drama was born when the timeless world of ideal forms or “dreams” combined with the reality of human existence. The hybridity of great tragedy is described through Apollonian representations tempered by a Dionysian chorus — the symbol of the collective and chaotic will of the people.

The third is Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, a dystopian satire on the projected implications of evolution, as described in The Origin of Species, on the formation of a society. Charles Darwin’s mechanical view of nature, with its claims to timeless laws, is satirized in the response of the Erewhonians to the discovery of a pocket watch:

“But by and by they came to my watch . . . They seemed concerned and uneasy as soon as they got hold of it. They then made me open it and show the works; and when I had done so they gave signs of very grave displeasure. . . . a look of horror and dismay upon the face of the magistrate, a look which conveyed to me the impression that he regarded my watch not as having been designed, but rather as the designer of himself and of the universe; or as at any rate one of the great first causes of all things.”

For Boltzmann, nothing could be timeless; for Nietzsche, everything excellent need be born of the atemporal confronting the temporal; and for Butler, mechanized time is an assault on timeless values. And these three synchronous contributions to the dialectic of permanence and change are part of a far larger debate weaving together mythology, history, and science.

In the Lotus Sutra, time measures the slow revelation of enlightenment and yet the Buddha declared that there is no time, only an “eternal now.” For Isaac Newton, time is absolute and used to measure motion — and yet within his theory the past, present, and future have no meaning. For Edward Gibbon, social change in civilization follows from the stubborn foibles of human character — Gibbonian psychology is timeless. Georg Hegel argued that time was a timeless form of pure intuition and yet supports an historical and dialectical process of inexorable improvement. For Charles Darwin, evolution describes the temporal acquisition of adaptive order within a selective framework that is timeless — uniformitarianism. Henri Bergson equated time with conscious “duration” — far removed from the scientific quantification of motion, to be captured by the subjective experience of mental movement assayed by a timeless intuition.

Through a series of meetings, the Santa Fe Institute plans to explore the dual nature of time as a means of capturing what changes and what does not. How theories of change make strong assumptions about properties that are static and to states approaching equilibrium. We are interested in how historical theories typically ignore time and replace it with events, sequences, and contingencies. And why humanity’s greatest achievements and insights are ennobled as timeless — free from decay, corruption, and perhaps even replacement.

— David Krakauer
President, Santa Fe Institute

From the Spring 2025 edition of the SFI Parallax newsletter. Subscribe to our monthly e-Parallax, or email “news at santafe.edu” to request quarterly home delivery in print.