by Paul Bernstein, Ph.D.

This year at professional conferences in Oxford, Paris and Prague, as last year at academic gatherings in Germany, Italy, and Greece, European astrophysicist Metod Saniga explained to his scientific colleagues how the NDE research of Raymond Moody, Kenneth Ring and PMH Atwater has helped him to develop a mathematical model of time that seems to offer solutions to problems that have vexed scholars since Einstein.

Poster announcing the international Advanced Research Workshop on the natureof time, co-directed by Dr. Saniga.

In brief, Dr. Saniga takes seriously the testimony of NDErs when they describe being in a realm where “time stops”, and where some of them “see the past, present, and future all at once.” To this occurrence of what he calls “the Pure Present”, Dr. Saniga adds the experience of mystics, clairvoyants and others who’ve experienced suddenly being in the future, and still others who describe being drawn involuntarily back into the past.¹ Saniga uses these “anomalous experiences” to show that a single mathematical model can account for both the conventional and the extraordinary ways that humans experience time. Yet the model also remains compatible with what is known about time throughout the physical universe, and even sheds interesting light on the possible nature of time and space at the very early period of our Universe just after the Big Bang.² 

References

1 Metod Saniga, “Algebraic Geometry: A Tool for Resolving the Enigma of Time?”, in R. Buccheri, V. Di Gesù and M. Saniga (eds.), Studies on the Structure of Time: From Physics to Psycho(patho)logy, Kluwer Academic / Plenum Publishers, New York, 2000, pp. 137–166. Available online at www.ta3.sk/~msaniga/pub/ftp/mathpsych.pdf .

2 Metod Saniga, “On an Intriguing Signature-Reversal Exhibited by Cremonian Spacetimes,” Chaos, Solitons & Fractals 19 (2004), page 741. Available online at www.ta3.sk/~msaniga/pub/ftp/signtrevs.pdf .