The Norns, Fate and Einstein’s Loaf of Spacetime

Most of us don’t associate Norse mythology with Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, but maybe we should, especially when contemplating the idea of fate.

Norse mythology assumed that the future is fixed and we must adapt to fate, aka, wyrd or urdr, as best we can. The play a key role in this mythology, determining the fates of individuals, including the certain time and place of their deaths.

Our Modern Myths of Time, Fate and Freewill

Today, most of our common modern narratives tell a different story. Christianity tends to posit that we have free will and that God judges us based on the actions taken during our lives. Likewise, our modern society, including our penal system, assumes that we all make choices for which we should be rewarded or punished. This is, I think, especially part of the credo of cultural conservatives, as opposed to liberals, who are more likely to believe the destinies of individuals are strongly influenced by genetics, family backgrounds, socioeconomic status, and more.

How does all this jive with modern science? That depends. Science is in constant flux because it’s based on the interpretation of data stemming from millions of observations and experiments. But one of the most prominent and respected of today’s scientific mythologies is the idea of spacetime, which as was originally conceived of by Albert Einstein. (Okay, you can also make a case for Hermann Minkowski, but that’s a digression.)

Spacetime is based on the counterintuitive idea that space and time are part of a single continuum. That is, time does not exist separately from space. Our day-to-day experiences suggest that time is the same everywhere: here, on a edge of a light beam, in a black hole or on the other side of the universe.

But it’s not. Time is highly variable, passing differently depending on location, gravity, speed and other variables.

I know this intellectually, but it’s not the basis of my intuitive understanding of the the universe.

The Great Loaf of Spacetime

I was watching a Nova program called The Fabric of the Cosmos: The Illusion of Time. (I can’t embed that original video here, but you can access the link to see the whole show. There are, however, Youtube excerpts, including the version embedded in this post.)

In the accompanying clip, at around 4 minutes and 15 seconds (or about 22 minutes in the original video), host and narrator Prof. Brian Greene, author of the The Fabric of the Cosmos, elaborates on the “now slice” of the great loaf of spacetime.

Bud and the Itchy Alien

Yes, the loaf of bread conceit is a bit corny (or is it yeasty?), but I’m fascinated by the part about how the present moment (that is, the “slice of now”) compares for two individuals: one is a newspaper-reading dude (who we’ll call Bud) sitting on a bench at a gas station on Earth, and the other is a antennaed, somewhat itchy (nice detail, that) alien 10 billion light years away.

According to the show, when both of these individuals are “stationary” along a parallel slice of spacetime, their “now” moments line up. That is, Bud and the tentacled alien exist in the same moments of time. (I don’t know exactly how this is supposed to work, given the constant movement of the cosmos, but let’s call it a thought experiment dumbed down for a popular audience).

But then, Greene posits, the itchy alien gets on a bicycle and starts rolling away from Bud at typical bike speed. What happens? Greene narrates:

Since motion slows the passage of time, their clocks will no longer tick off time at the same rate. And if their clocks no longer agree, their now slices will no longer agree either. The alien’s now slice cuts across the loaf differently. It’s angled towards the past. Since the alien is biking at a leisurely pace, his slice is angled to the past by only a minuscule amount. But across such a vast distance, that tiny angle results in a huge difference in time. So what the alien would find on his angled now slice—he considers as happening right now, on Earth—no longer includes our friend at the gas station, or even 40 years earlier when our friend was a baby. Amazingly, the alien’s now slice has swept back through more than 200 years of Earth history and now includes events we consider part of the distant past, like Beethoven finishing his 5th Symphony: 1804 to 1808.

Bicyling into the Future

Okay, so that’s weird, right? Time travel by velocipede.

But, according to Greene, it can get weirder yet.

Watch what happens when the alien turns around and bikes toward Earth. The alien’s new “now slice” is angled toward the future, and so it includes events that won’t happen on Earth for 200 years: perhaps our friend’s great-great-great granddaughter teleporting from Paris to New York.

Wait, what?

Thanks to scifi stories and high school science class, most of us are at least vaguely familiar with the idea that time runs at different speeds for folks hanging on a planet and folks traveling at, say, something close to light speed in a rocket ship. The idea is that the faster you go, the slower your speed relative to folks who are moving, well, not so fast. So, if you zoom around at 99.5% of the speed of light for five years and then come back to Earth, 60 years would have passed on Earth. Thus, time travel into the future, assuming you can figure out how to sufficiently speed yourself up, is perfectly allowable in Einstein’s universe.

But the idea that the you could bicycle from hundreds of years in the past to hundreds of years into the future (relative to some other far-flung guy named Bud) is, well, surprising to me.

I realize that the alien, unless he can figure out instantaneous transport across billions of light years, can’t actually travel into Earth’s past or future, but here’s what gets me: this thought experiment suggests that the future is fixed. Spacetime is already mapped out, not just for today and yesterday but for tomorrow as well. Because the future is just a matter of your location in the (apparently) already baked loaf of spacetime.

Maybe I’ve misinterpreted. Feel free to watch the video yourself and see if you can draw some other conclusion. And maybe Greene’s interpretation of spacetime is itself flawed. Or maybe there are, via quantum uncertainties or the hypothetical multiverse, lots of different alternatives.

But, assuming I understand this correctly, our futures–and therefore our fates–are fixed. Which brings me back, after a lengthy, freewheeling detour, to Norse mythology.

Wyrd, Urdr and Our Present Age

As I’ve noted in a separate post, the word word wyrd is typically viewed as a word for fate in Norse mythology. It’s also one of the names of the most widely cited of the three Great Norns, the woman I think of as the eldest norn.

But there are experts such as professor Jackson Crawford who take issue with using the word wyrd for fate. He notes that, although it’s a word used in Beowulf, it’s actually just an Old English translation of Urd or Urdr, which he prefers to use both as the word for fate and the name of the eldest norn. In The Tollkeeper, of course, she is the character known as Urd.

So, how did the Norse tend to view urdr or fate? In a succinct but typical usage, stanza 30 of the Poetic Edda poem called “Hamthismal,” one of main characters says, “We earned honor here, though we are fated to die today – a man will not live one day longer than the Norns have decided.”

While believing that their future was fated, the Norse also tended to believe that reputation and honor hinged on how a person met their fate. Daniel McCoy, author of The Viking Spirit, writes, “[T]he Vikings believed that one’s fate was hardly more important than what one did with one’s fate – that is, the attitude with which one met whatever fate had in store. There was no honor in merely passively surrendering to fate. Instead, honor was to be found in approaching one’s fate as a battle to fight heroically – even if it was a battle one was ultimately doomed to lose.”

Our Choices in a Multimythic Society

In past ages, myths and religions tended to hold societies together. In the more multicultural societies of today, myths mesh and merge, bump up and even clash with one another. I don’t know if there’s a word for this, but let’s call it the multimythic society.

I live in the U.S., where we are definitely multimythic when it comes to our understandings of time and destiny. To the degree you believe in one of those realities (that is, the notion of free will), you can decide for yourself which mythology you want to adopt. Even if you believe that your future is somehow already engraved in the intricate whirls of galaxies and darkness, you can adopt the Viking attitude of dauntlessness and defiance. There are likely worse fates amid the great existential uncertainties of a multimythic cosmos.

Nebula IRAS 05437+2502. Links Sahai, R., Claussen, M., Morris, M., & Ainsworth, R. 2009, Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 41, 456 Rosen.



Images: From Hubble Space Telescope: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/multimedia/index.html

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