SUMMARY:
Within the last three months two recent issues of leading science magazines - New Scientist (NS) and Scientific American (SA) – support the main contention I have been advancing since starting these blogs over a year ago.
For both these eminent magazines now also regard the problem of time and its real nature as one of the greatest possible scientific importance, one largely ignored by scientists so far, but now increasingly requiring to be resolved.
The treatment of time in both NS and SA also supports another contention I have advanced (Blog 1) – that our understanding of time at this stage resembles a jigsaw as yet unformed. This is because they both discuss various temporal facets presented by different specialist authors – some 12 in NS and 20 in SA – but with no great connection or unity between them all.
Still their authors largely agree that some new outlook on time is now sorely required. Or, in jigsaw terms, we are probably still missing some new centrepiece of time understanding, one round which all those currently disunited temporal facets could be fitted readily.
In this blog I will therefore review both of these new presentations, highlighting some of their main points relevant to new time understanding overall.....
1 – New Scientist – October 8 2011
This issue is introduced by renowned Oxford quantum theorist David Deutsch, who suggests that “a conceptual breakthrough in one of (time’s puzzles) might solve them all”. And he reiterates the growing consensus that “the notion of the flow of time is a nonsensical misconception despite being deeply imbedded in common sense.”
In like vein other articles quote Einstein’s famous observation that “time is nothing but a stubbornly persistent illusion”, and Julian Barbour’s observation that “there’s remarkably little agreement on what time is: we can recognise time but do not understand it.”
Not even Einstein however really get to grips with the source of the supposed illusion: if time is not really “flowing past us”, then why do we all have such a strong impression that it does?
Relativity contradicts Quantum Theory
Others stress the basic and great disparity, between time as treated in quantum theory and relativity’s very different idea. Broadly the former adheres to the old and outdated Newtonian idea that Absolute Time pervades the Universe: if it’s midnight now in London, it must also be the same time everywhere else in the Universe. Relativity however regards such thinking as nonsensical. Rather it regards time as an elastic and variable construct, one entirely dependent on how you slice up the overall fabric of space-time.
This difference in temporal outlook between these two great pillars of modern physics – i.e. quantum theory and relativity - is therefore the source of their stubborn refusal to come together and be unified But if such integration could ever be achieved through proper time understanding, then physicists might at last be in sight of their long-sought T.O.E. (Theory of Everything).
The ’Arrows of Time’
Elsewhere NS describes a scale of durations ranged from the shortest practical interval (10-18 secs) to the age of the Universe (14 billion years)- a scale it presents in tabloid newspeak as “a journey through time” (sic). But again in these blogs I have already dealt with such measurements in a more integrated and coherent overview. Cf Blog 4 (The Millimetre Scale) and Blog 5 (The Full Time Spectrum).
The question of “Time’s Arrow” or directionality is also discussed by NS, though mainly in terms of entropy. This ignores the fact that about some half-dozen other such direction indicators have been identified elsewhere. All of them seek to clarify how we might know whether time is “coming or going?” in conventional terms – but each of them also seems eminently arguable.
The “Time’s Arrow” article also asks the crucial question - “Why is it that humans remember only the past?” (but not the future) - a question often asked in similar terms by others like Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking.
But this common phrasing for such a crucial question is very obviously a demonstrable oxymoron (lit. foolish statement). It’s linguistically confused because ‘re’ implies ‘again or afterwards’, and so can’t possibly refer to future experience.
Instead (as I have shown elsewhere in my two books on the paranormal) this crucial question is better phrased in terms of “why can we only re-call the past, but not pre-call the future?” The problem is thereby established on a clearer basis, and the most logical answer is most surprising as I will later show.
Time Travel?
NS also affords an almost obligatory article on time travel – a question of serious discussion over the last 30 years. But in our daily lives we are already all time-travelling in a myriad miniscule ways. This is because all physical clocks (and presumably our own internal biochemical reactions) run at different rates dependent on motion and gravity.
More practical time travel into the future - i.e. over significant periods like days or weeks instead of just nanoseconds - is however still only theoretical, while time travel into the past is more problematical by far.
Those well known psychological differences between ‘filled’time (full of interesting observations) and ‘unfilled’ time (episodes of relative boredom) are also considered in a more conventional way. Whence follows the useful but confused conclusion that you can “stretch your lifetimes by trying to pack as many different and exhilarating experiences into it as possible.” Here however one must note that it’s not your lifetime you can stretch (by even one second!) through such highly advisable lifestyles. Instead it boils down to the common impression that filled years look longer in retrospect than unfilled ones...
Is Time a Cultural Construct?
But perhaps the most crucial suggestion in all these NS articles comes from Swedish language psychologist Chris Sinha. He describes chrono-cultural studies of the Brazilian Amondawa - a tribe cut off from the rest of humanity until 1986. These people lived in a relatively timeless condition: their language was largely tenseless and with few or no time referents. For example the Amondawa had no words for years, months, time - or even numbers beyond four.
Societies like this who live close to Nature have also been the norm for over 90% of human cultural history. In a remark which therefore echoes famed child psychologist J. Piaget half-a-century ago, Sinha concludes that “ our experience of time, it seems, owes as much to cultural invention as to the workings of the brain.”.....
So that to resolve the great time problem may require us to question all that we’ve ever learned or been taught about it, and thence commence to reconsider the whole experience anew.....
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2 – Scientific American – Special Edition - Spring 2012
This special issue of SA (110 pages) covers much the same time territory as NS does, though more comprehensively. Again it lends substance to my analogy of time’s current scientific status as a sort of unformed intellectual jigsaw, one with its various discernable fragments still scattered in large disarray. So SA provides 17 headings for 19 different time articles, their content ranging from history through anthropology to cosmology and time travel.
The sequence of these articles is however completely disordered or entropic: there’s no attempt to group similar topics together so as to strive for greater conceptual unity.
For example the various scattered features on ‘relativity’, ‘twin paradox’, ‘time travel’, ‘astrophysics’, ‘entropy’ ‘cosmology’ (twice),’ could obviously be presented more fruitfully in closer relation under the single heading of ‘PHYSICS’. Likewise other scattered features on ‘biology’, ‘neurology’, ‘chronology’ might usefully be summated under ‘PSYCHOLOGY’ – an absolutely crucial aspect for time understanding which is not awarded any heading at all!
And finally ‘PHILOSOPHY’ – which can be defined as ‘the most general science’ – might best have been presented at the very end - in an effort to round up, summarise and integrate those various other disciplines. Or, again in terms of a metaphorical jigsaw, philosophy might provide those straight-edged pieces and corners which would bound it all.
SA can also be faulted for largely ignoring the well-known intimate connection between our temporal language and the consequent time attitudes it must both induce and convey. But such is a matter of prime importance because of the uniquely tensive content of the original Indo-European language system through which science has evolved.
Does Time Really ‘Pass’ or Flow?
Such criticisms aside however, SA provides excellent summaries of current time thinking by physicists, and also the latest advances of relativity into everyday affairs.
For example renowned physics writer Paul Davies comes down firmly on the side of those many philosophers who maintain that our common impression that “time is passing” is probably an illusion: there’s nothing in physics to substantiate this universal everyday idea. The time of the physicist does not pass or flow - because it’s simplest to conclude that both Past and Future are fixed more or less equally.
And in any case both Past and Future are just our little personal labels for that sector of space-time we humans encounter as we wend our daily lives through a frozen Block Universe. In this version of reality, time is another version of space assumed to be a continuum, though perhaps quantised into chronons (time atoms) like the successive frames of a movie film.
Such a physical version of reality however very strongly contradicts our everyday observations, wherein our impression of passing time is probably the most basic experiential fact of all. But yet it’s probably all an “illusion which cries out for explanation” – on which Davies wonders whether there may be a key quality to time not yet identified. (A matter I will return to in a later blog....)
On the same topic contributor Craig Callender again notes that the notion of passing time is built into our language, culture, thought. And yet this contradicts the fundamental laws of physics. So a huge gap now exists between psychology and physics which requires to be bridged: likely it needs a new psycho-physical isomorph - a concept with the same shape for both disciplines - as JT Fraser suggested half-a-century ago. (Again a matter I will revisit in due course)
Or is Time a Total Illusion?
Such physical concepts of time as revealed by Relativity are in total conflict with time as regarded in Quantum Theory, where older and more commonplace ideas hold. However time seems to disappear totally when the Wheeler/deWitt equations unite electro-magnetism to relativity. All of which is now forcing some physicists to conclude that the very idea of time is no more than a personally useful illusion.
So perhaps it’s a bit like money - a useful personal contrivance which is still completely absent from the natural world?
Relativity Now Demonstrable on the Human Scale
SA also affords a very useful article on the history of timekeeping, and the ever-growing accuracy of clocks in recent years. Essentially the latest aluminium-ion device should be able to measure the entire lifespan of the Universe to within an accuracy of 4 seconds, or 1 part in 1017 in more general terms.
Though whether time really began with the Big Bang is now an issue of some uncertainty due to string theory – again a matter I’ve only accepted with due reservations in Blog 5.
More importantly in any case, other ion clocks have now grown so accurate that they can easily measure those very slight time distortions predicted by relativity for our everyday affairs. For example they can show how time runs faster for any individual who is just one step higher than another due to his lesser gravity. Likewise they can demonstrate time variation between two cars with a speed difference of just 20 miles an hour. And of course there are those all those SATNAV devices which must use relativity mathematics to locate accurately wherever you may happen to be.
All of which means that Einstein’s Relativity Theory – formerly relevant to more exotic matters like atomic energy or distant starlight – can now be shown to apply equally in our everyday affairs. We can therefore reasonably expect that its other implications - of past-future similarity and frozen spacetime – may well be equally demonstrable in some new type of experiment on everyday reality.
And if so there must follow a new scientific revolution in all our time thinking and attitudes, a revolution which will be truly Copernican in scope......
