RESURRECTION AND POSSIBLE REVERSAL OF TIME
Updated on 5/23/2018.
This page expands upon an earlier page about Time Travel, Rotating Superconductors, Ezekiel and His Wheels. The 37th chapter of Ezekiel calls to mind what would be seen on a film if an army were suddenly killed, fell to the ground, then started to rot and decompose. There’s just one problem – Ezekiel 37 describes what would be seen if the film were run in reverse. That is, it seems to portray resurrection as a process akin to the reversal of time. But while Ezekiel is interpreted by some as metaphor, 2nd Kings 20:8 -11 is a very different matter. The incident in question is as follows:
20:8. And Hezekiah said to Isaiah: “What shall be the sign that the LORD will heal me, and that I shall go up to the house of the LORD the third day?”
20:9 And Isaiah said: “This shall be the sign to you from the LORD, that the LORD will do that thing that He has spoken: shall the shadow go forward ten degrees, or back ten degrees?”
20:10 And Hezekiah answered” It is a light thing for the shadow to decline ten degrees, nay, but let the shadow return backward ten degrees.”
20:11 And Isaiah the prophet cried unto the LORD; and he brought back the shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had gone down on the dial of Ahaz.
The story of how Isaiah, with God's helps, reversed time (or the spin of the Earth) is also found in Isaiah 38:8, which states, "Behold, I will bring again the shadow of the dial, which is gone down in the sun-dial of Ahaz, to return ten degrees backward. So the sun returned ten degrees, by which degrees it was gone down."
STATISTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FIGURE 1. As per my usual protocol, no statistical significance was assigned to the axis term, here the 92nd lowest skip for RETURN (turn back) THE SHADOW in wrapped Torah based on the Hebrew in 2nd Kings 20:10. This is a higher ELS rank than I usually accept but the terms found justify presenting it. The first a priori key words sought were the protagonists of the story, HEZEKIAH and ISAIAH. Both are there at special case skips. For HEZEKIAH that’s +1 (the best case, although his name is not part of the Torah). Before adjustments for the ELS rank of the axis term, HEZEKIAH was found against odds of about 104 to 1. ISAIAH is at a special case skip against odds of about 130 to 1. RESURRECTION was found an ELS against odds of about 7.7 to 1. In the open text is a clear reference to time, although it was found a posteriori. Leviticus 25:50 has THE NUMBER OF YEARS LIKE THE DAYS. The a priori key word BACKWARD runs into and shares the last letter with THE NUMBER OF YEARS. The a priori word QUANTUM was sought due to the concept of quantum time travel, but none of these terms were statistically significant. After dividing the combined value of a priori terms and dividing by 92 to account for the ELS rank of the axis term, Figure 2 was found against odds of about 1,267 to 1.
The matrix below is based on the lowest ELS (skip -19,355: still wrapped Torah, requiring more than 1 computer pass through the Torah) of SUN DIAL (steps) OF AHAZ. On it the a-priori key word QUANTUM appears at skip +1. TIME is at skip +2. The odds against having QUANTUM at skip +1 plus TIME at a non-special case skip in the 184 letters with SUN DIAL (steps) OF AHAZ are about 740 to 1. Why search for SUN DIAL (steps) OF AHAZ as an axis term? Reversing the shadow on a sun dial could occur by reversing the spin of the Earth if an enormous gravitational field (like a black hole) passed nearby, but it would force the oceans out of their normal locations, and produce a truly catastrophic flood. Better is to reverse time locally. Perhaps this is why the Scripture indicates a specific location where time seems to be reversed - just at the sun dial of Ahaz. However, the current views of quantum time involve processes that occur on a subatomic level, not on a level of something as large as the steps of Ahaz.
There is one more ELS of SUN DIAL (steps) OF AHAZ in Torah at skip -97,564. In a 272-letter matrix based on it, the word QUANTUM appears at the same skip as the axis term. Odds against it being at a special case skip (+/- 1 or the absolute skip of the axis term) in a matrix that size are about 28 to 1.
If you are wondering about the picture of a sundial on the top matrix, vs. the one with steps on the second matrix, the Hebrew for Isaiah 38:8 is literally on the steps of Ahaz. The same Hebrew is used in 2nd Kings 20:11. The word for steps is also translated as degrees.
The BACKWARD description mentioned earlier with respect to the film analogy can be seen in Ezekiel 37:1 to 14:
EZEKIEL 37:1. The hand of the LORD was upon me, and the LORD carried me out in a spirit, and set me down in the midst if a valley, and it was full of dry bones;
EZEKIEL 37:2. and he caused me to pass by them round about, and, behold, there were very many in the open valley, and, lo, they were very dry
EZEKIEL 37:3. And He said to me: ‘Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, You know.’
EZEKIEL 37:4. Then He said to me: ‘Prophesy over these bones, and say to them: O you dry bones, hear the word of the LORD:
EZEKIEL 37:5. Thus says the LORD GOD unto these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and you shall live.
EZEKIEL 37:6. And I will lay sinews on you, and you will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the LORD.’
EZEKIEL 37:7. So I prophesied as I was commanded; and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and a commotion, and the bones came together, bone to its bone
EZEKIEL 37:8. And I beheld, and lo, there were sinews upon them, and flesh came up, and skin covered them above; but there was no breath in them.
EZEKIEL 37:9. Then He said to me: ‘Prophesy unto the breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath: Thus says the LORD GOD: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.’
EZEKIEL 37:10. So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, and very great host.
EZEKIEL 37:11. Then He said to me: ‘Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel; behold, they say: Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are clean cut off.
EZEKIEL 37:12. Therefore prophesy, and say unto them: Thus says the LORD GOD: Behold, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, my people; and I will bring you into the land of Israel.
EZEKIEL 37:13. And you shall know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves, and caused you to come up out of your graves, O my people.
EZEKIEL 37:14. And I will put my Spirit in you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land; and you shall know that I the LORD have spoken, and performed it, says the LORD.
RESURRECTION IN TORAH AND TALMUD. The picture that the Torah paints of resurrection is again one that resembles the reversal of time. In Deuteronomy 32:39 we read, "See now, that I am He - and no god is with me. I put to death and I bring life, I wound and I will heal, and there is no rescuer from My hand." The Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin (91b) discusses this verse. It states, "Our Rabbis taught: I kill, and I make alive. I might interpret, I kill one person and give life to another, as the world goes on: therefore the Writ states, I wound, and I heal. Just as the wounding and healing [obviously] refer to the same person, so putting to death and bringing to life refer to the same person. This refutes those who maintain that resurrection is not intimated in the Torah." With respect to the arrow of time, the normal sequence would be healthy > wounded > still alive> dead. But the sequence in Deuteronomy 32:39 is dead > brought back to life > living, but wounded > healed. This again looks like a reversal of the arrow of time.
REVERSING THE ARROW OF TIME. Is Resurrection linked to the Reversal of the Arrow of Time? The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosphy offers the following appraisal of the reversal of time by Bradley Dowden of California State University, Sacramento. His comments are in black Italic font. My comments are in bold purple.
Could the cosmic arrow of time have gone the other way? Most physicists suspect that the answer is yes, and they say it could have gone the other way if the initial conditions of the universe at the Big Bang event had been different…
My Comment: There may be parallel universes. In those universes initial conditions may have been different enough to allow such conditions. Perhaps what we could look for should be conditions in which one these universes might intersect our own, at least in part, allowing a segment (our segment) to be affected by a reverse time field.
Crudely put, if all the particles’ trajectories and charges are reversed, then the arrow of time must reverse. A few physicists and philosophers have speculated that the arrow might reverse in our future. In this scenario, time would lose its uni-directionality as the universe approaches a state of equilibrium, but eventually the universe would evolve away from equilibrium in which the directional processes now go in the reverse order to the way they went before the reversal. This new era would be an era of reversed time, and there would be a period of non-directional time separating the two eras. If the cosmic arrow of time were to reverse this way, perhaps our past would be re-created and lived in reverse order. This re-occurrence of the past is different than the re-living of past events via time travel. With time travel the past is re-visited in the original order, not in reverse order.
Philosophers have asked interesting questions about the reversal of time’s arrow. What does it really mean to say time reverses? Would entropy flow change from increasing to decreasing [since if entropy continually increased as time reversed then a big crunch could not be the big bang in reverse]? If time were to be going in reverse only in some far off corner of the universe, would dead people there become undead,…
My Comment: This is the resurrection scenario.
and would the people there walk backwards up steps while remembering the future? First off, would it even be possible for them to be conscious? Assuming consciousness is caused by brain processes, could there be consciousness if their nerve pulses reversed, or would this reversal destroy consciousness?
My Comment: The “trick” to a Creator making resurrection work would seem to be (1) reverse time to bring dead bodies back to life, then (2) stop the reversal, and let time move forward again, thus allowing consciousness to reignite from that time on. The most supernatural aspect of this feat may be that since the time of death for each person resurrected differs, the degree of time reversal required to bring each person back would differ, requiring selective time reversal "fields."
Supposing the answer is that they would be conscious, would people in that far off corner appear to us to be pre-cognitive if we could communicate with them? Would the feeling of being conscious be different for time-reversed people? [Here is one suggestion. There is one direction of time they would remember and call “the past,” and it would be when the entropy is lower. That is just as it is for us who do not experience time-reversal.] If Aristotle were correct that the future, unlike the past, is undetermined or open, then wouldn’t the future of people in the time-reversed region be open, too? But it is like our past, so what should we conclude from this? Should we conclude that our own past might really be undetermined and open, too, that is, that our past could change? And there are other questions. Consider communication between us and the inhabitants of that far off time-reversed region of the universe. If we sent a signal to the time-reversed region, could our message cross the border, or would it dissolve there, or would it bounce back? If residents of the time-reversed region successfully sent a recorded film across the border to us, should we play it in the ordinary way or in reverse? Would any interaction between their region and ours upset their delicately constructed world and cause their entropy to increase?
POSSIBLE ROLE IN MARS OF PHOBOS IN REVERSING THE ARROW OF TIME. As was written above, Isaiah 38:8, "Behold, I will bring again the shadow of the dial, which is gone down in the sun-dial of Ahaz, to return ten degrees backward. So the sun returned ten degrees, by which degrees it was gone down." What does 10 degrees represent? Since sun-dail shadow moves 15 degrees per hour, 10 represents 40 minutes of time. In forty minutes an object or bit of energy moving at the the speed of light (186,282 miles per second) can move about 106,614,120 miles. Mars has a minimum distance from Earth of 36,400,000 miles and a maximum distance from Earth of 249,900,000 miles. The distance that light covers in 40 minutes is thus between these two extremes of Martian distances from Earth. This raises a question about the nature of the monolith on the Martian moon Phobos that was revealed to the public by Buzz Aldrin.
THE SPEED OF UNIVERSAL EXPANSION VS. THE SPEED OF LIGHT. Perhaps when we try to understand the nature of time, we should start with a discussion of the nature of light, how light and time are interrelated, and discuss why the universe appears to be expanding faster than light speed, and how its changing rates of expansion might affect the arrow of time. But first we need to look at what seems like a simple question, although the answer to it often changes. Just how big has the universe gotten in the scientifically estimated 13.7 billion years since its creation? The comoving distance from Earth to the edge of the observable universe is about 46 billion light years in any direction. The observable universe is thus a sphere with a diameter 93 billion light years. In Big Bang cosmology, the observable universe consists of the galaxies and other matter that we can in principle observe from Earth in the present day, because light (or other signals) from those objects has had time to reach us since the beginning of the cosmological expansion.
A. The Hubble Constant. The Big Bang was not an explosion from a single point, with a center and an edge. Hubble's Constant is the ratio of velocity to distance in the expansion of the Universe. The picture below shows a 78 billion lightyear across square piece of a Universe (based on Hubble's Constant or Ho = 50 km/sec/Mpc, Omega = 1) at 6 different times. Omega or Ω is the ratio of the density of the Universe to the critical density which the density of the Universe necessary so the expansion rate of the Universe is just barely sufficient to prevent a recollapse. Numerically the critical density is 3Ho2/[8*pi*G] or 19*[Ho/100]2*10-30 gm/cc.
Update Note: Hubble's constant changes a good bit from one source to another. For example, in An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics the figure is 71 km/sec/Mpc. A NASA web site offers a figure of 72 km/sec/Mpc.
Each dot represents a "galaxy". Two of the galaxies have a ring of red photons moving out from them. Most of the photons are Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) photons that were present since the Big Bang but which have been traveling freely only since 0.0003 Gyr after the Big Bang. These photons always travel at the speed of light relative to the galaxies near them. As the Universe gets older, the galaxies do not expand but the distance between the galaxies gets larger. The photons emitted by one galaxy do indeed spread out through the Universe, but photons from other galaxies can still be seen.
The animation [left] shows the evolution of the galaxy density, positions and the photon positions within the 78 billion light year box. However, all parts of the Universe started with CMBR photons, not just the two green galaxies.
