Is time irreducible, fundamental, an ultimate descriptor of bedrock reality? Or is our subjective sense of flowing time, generated by our brains that evolved for other purposes, an illusion? As Tegmark puts it, "There've been so many things in physics that we thought were fundamental that turned out to be mere illusions, that we're questioning everything - even time." But many ideas about how the world works that humanity had taken for granted have required a complete rethink. The idea that time is not real is counterintuitive. If you're a topical expert - researcher, business leader, author or innovator - and would like to contribute an op-ed piece, email us here. At the deepest foundations of nature, time is not a primitive, irreducible element or concept required to construct reality. To many physicists, while we experience time as psychologically real, time is not fundamentally real. Time is a prime conflict between relativity and quantum mechanics, measured and malleable in relativity while assumed as background (and not an observable) in quantum mechanics. … I would prefer to say that general relativity is not the final theory than to say that time does not exist." … It confuses me, because time seems to be real. "We live in a world of unfolding and becoming," he said.įotini Markopoulou-Kalamara, a theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute, said, "I have the distressing experience of physicists telling me that time is not real. Polkinghorne rejects the notion of the static block universe of space and time together. And, therefore, that argument focuses on the way observers organize their description of the past and cannot establish the reality of the awaiting future." It is a "mistaken argument," he said, to use relativity to assert that time is an illusion, "because no observer has knowledge of a distant event, or the simultaneity of different events, until they are unambiguously in that observer's past. John Polkinghorne, a quantum physicist and Anglican priest, believes that the flow and direction of time are real and relentless. As he puts it, all the "evidence we have for time is encoded in static configurations, which we see or experience subjectively, all of them fitting together to make time seem linear."īut not all physicists are ready to demote time to second-class status. From change, our brains construct a sense of time as if it were flowing. To Barbour, change is real, but time is not. "Isaac Newton," Barbour noted, "insisted that even if absolutely nothing at all happened, time would be passing, and that I believe is completely wrong." Without that change, we wouldn't have any notion of time." I'm looking at you you're nodding your head. Julian Barbour, a British physicist, describes time as "a succession of pictures, a succession of snapshots, changing continuously one into another. When you try to discuss time in the context of the universe, you need the simple idea that you isolate part of the universe and call it your clock, and time evolution is only about the relationship between some parts of the universe and that thing you called your clock." "The essence of relativity is that there is no absolute time, no absolute space. So, time - the time we know since we learned to tell time on a clock - seems to disappear when you study physics, until you get to relativity. "It's called an external parameter - the independent parameter in the equation of motion. "Time is out there," said Andreas Albrecht, a theoretical cosmologist at the University of California, Davis. The only reason I feel like I have a past is that my brain contains memories." But all I'm ever aware of is my brain state right now. We have the illusion, at any given moment, that the past already happened and the future doesn't yet exist, and that things are changing. "So life is like a movie, and space-time is like the DVD," he added "there's nothing about the DVD itself that is changing in any way, even though there's all this drama unfolding in the movie. "We can portray our reality as either a three-dimensional place where stuff happens over time," said Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Max Tegmark, "or as a four-dimensional place where nothing happens - and if it really is the second picture, then change really is an illusion, because there's nothing that's changing it's all just there - past, present, future. So, are we being misled by our human perspectives? Is our sense that time flows, or passes, and has a necessary direction, false? Are we giving false import to the present moment?
0 kommentar(er)
