Spritual Writings by Shawn Nevins

Eternity in an Hour

Shawn Nevins,

Eternity in an Hour

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour

~ William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence” (1803)

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While one may intuit that William Blake’s poetic observation is true, in this instance science as well offers evidence of the “Eternity in an hour.” The camera first froze time over 150 years ago, and now the camera is offering yet another window into our perception of reality. The California Institute of Technology developed a camera that shoots 70 trillion frames per second (“fps”). By comparison, most films are shot at 24 fps, as this comes close to being perceived as “normal” by the human eye, and sports broadcasts might utilize a 1,000 fps for slow-motion replays.

The technology behind this 70 trillion fps camera is beyond my patience for understanding, as are its eventual uses. However, one particular article appealed to the mystic in me, as the author noted that:

At these frame rates, you could make a movie about one guy shooting another and build a multi-part franchise out of the time it took the powder in the cartridge to explode. The thing can shoot seventy trillion frames per second – but if it were capable of recording a full second, it would take ninety-two thousand years to watch on the big screen.

If a second contains 92,000 years of information according to this camera, how much more unrealized detail is in that second? While this new camera does not reveal eternity in an hour, it does show 331.2 million years in an hour (3,600 seconds/hour x 92,000 years/second). Yet, as the author of the original scientific paper notes, “cameras' imaging speeds fundamentally limit humans’ capability in discerning the physical world.” With camera speeds advancing from 10 trillion frames per second only 2 years prior to this announcement, who knows what the future will bring, except more evidence that the world is not what it appears to our human eyes.

But we already know more than the camera likely ever will. Being an analog structure, the human eye has no frame rate, and we are still discovering the limits of perception. There are many accounts of time slowing down in extraordinary circumstances such as during accidents, for example. Is this phenomenon the lifting of some obscuring layer of consciousness such as the hyperactive survival mechanism that John Wren-Lewis hypothesized prevented us from realizing our True Nature? Clearly, William Blake saw a truth in time that was not normally visible.

As can you. As do you.

Go out tonight and stand under a darkened sky. Consider for a few minutes the arc of stars above you. Relax. Let the dark hold you. See if you can spot the fuzzy patch of light that is Andromeda. It’s one of the furthest objects detectable by the human eye. The photons from that galaxy originated 2.5 million years ago and travelled millions of trillions of miles until they reached your eye, whereupon they transformed into this image you are seeing right now. Feel the profound miracle of this chain of events.

And somewhere out there in the universe, millions of trillions of miles away from you, perhaps some other being is staring at the Milky Way galaxy, and you resting in our solar system’s tiny corner of that seeming vastness, resting in another vastness, and in another. And that someone staring at your location right now is seeing the light of millions of years before you were born. Yet they and you are both here and now. Right now. How could this very moment not contain multitudes—infinitudes of perceptions and perceivers? All happening “now! and now! and now!”

References:

  1. “At 70 trillion fps, this is the world’s fastest camera”

  2. “Single-shot ultrafast imaging attaining 70 trillion frames per second”

  3. “Unblocking a malfunction in consciousness” John Wren-Lewis,

  4. Any galaxy or star will do, but if you want to locate Andromeda, see, “Andromeda galaxy: All you need to know”

  5. For how photons from a star strike the eye, see, “Mammalia retinas can respond to single photons”

  6. For the phrase “now! and now! and now!” see, “The Darkness of God,” John Wren-Lewis

  7. Photo by Paul Hanaoka on Unsplash