Summary
Three books published
within the past year reveal how the question of “time’s real nature” is now
coming to the fore with increasing urgency, while further showing how its
essential mystery eludes physics still.
Of these 3 recent books the most comprehensive is “A QUESTION OF TIME – THE ULTIMATE PARADOX”. This
is a new ebook from the editors of Scientific
American, one which collects together recent time
writings from the same source.
It expands on Scientific
American’s special issue on “A MATTER
OF TIME” (Spring 2012) – a compendium I’ve already reviewed in a recent
blog. There I noted a great lack of
overall order - or connectivity between the various topics it considered. Though still with a fairly comprehensive treatment overall.
And it’s fair to say that the same holds true for this new ebook
likewise. ...
“A QUESTION OF TIME” then
republishes 17 time-related articles,
from recent issues of the parent magazine and its several subdivisions, over the last five years. Of these articles some two-thirds consider
the role of time as apparent from physics, while one-sixth (3 articles) deal
with “The human side” .
Which also leaves one-sixth of the total (3 articles) concerned with
philosophy, the “most original and general of all the sciences”. Philosophy has been trying to bridge the great rift between the inner
and outer realities of time ever since it first took hold in Ancient Greece
around 600 BC.
Nowadays this rift is expressed more formally as the great temporal
gulf which separates psychology and
physics, two disciplines with very
different views on time.
So that “the gap between the scientific
understanding of time and our everyday understanding of time has troubled
thinkers throughout history” as contributor Craig Callender states in his
article. He considers the very common
question of whether time might be just be an illusion, despite what our all common experience seems to say.
Elsehwere George
Musser describes our current lack of temporal understand-ing as “a hole
at the start of physics”. While physicist Paul Davies argues from
relativity that “the most straightforward
conclusion is that both past and future are fixed”. This expressed a viewpoint first expressed by
Zeno and Parmenides ca. 450Bc, and long known to later philosophers as The
Block Universe or block time.
Such implications
from physics are of course in direct conflict with what we seem to encounter in
everyday experience. But on this Gary
Stix further notes that “Science has barely begun to consider how we
perceive passage.” Presumably the
science he’s talking about here is psychology which deals with perception. Though one may reasonably question whether
psychology is as yet fit to tackle such
questions at its present early stage of development.....
In sum therefore the
ultimate time paradox seems to be the total confliction, between the implications of physics and our everyday
experience. But the sophisticated laws
of physics – and in particular relativity – have been tested to exhaustion and
never found to fail. Whereas those
tests on our time experience seem rudimentary in comparison.
It therefore seems
likely that common experience is somehow misinterpreting, or missing something crucial, about the “real nature” of time. This is a very important question which
deserves more critical consideration, and to which I’ll be returning in my next
few blogs....
FROM ETERNITY TO HERE
...is another recent
time book (2010) written by cosmologist Sean Carroll, well known for his popularisation of science as derived from his
theoretical cosmology.
In this ‘new history
of time’ Carroll ventures far beyond Stephen Hawking’s original BRIEF HISTORY
OF TIME. Fot the latter only dealt with time from the Big Bang event, which most people think started off our
current Universe some 14 billion years ago.
But Carroll now
theorises that reality may be much older than this. In fact it may be infinitely old – i.e. eternal - with the Big
Bang just the latest in an ongoing and never-ending series of creation
events. Of these the last one has meant
that we’re now living in a “time forward” phase, one which entails increasing
entropy as the source of our past-to-future arrow of time.
But Carroll theorises
that there may have been a previous or ‘pre-Big Bang’ Universe (i.e. before 14 billion years ago) in which time’s arrow
may have been reversed. And with others before that again in an infinite series
stretching back through all eternity.
So that the real
history of this supposed greater and eternal Universe goes far beyond our
current episode of just 14 billion years, being also “statistically
time-symmetrical”. Or with an equal
number of “time backward” and “time forward” episodes, the latter being the
kind we live in now.
Of all those many
far-flung speculations in cosmology, this surely must be the most cosmic idea
of them all. And it must seem near
impossible for non-specialists to follow through on whatever mathematical reasoning
lies behind. Though the prime factor
may have been the desire to preserve time symmetry for things overall....
TIME REBORN
...is another recent
time book (2013), written by cosmologist and former advocate of string theory
Lee Smolin. And as compared with Sean
Carroll’s book, it seems almost
cosmologically restrained. For Smolin’s
time-span just deals with the history and future of our current Universe.
He holds that the
current crisis in physics just comes down to our lack of understanding about
the real nature of time – a problem at the root of ‘all of the mysteries which
physicists and cosmologists face’.
In contrast to others
who claim time is unreal in the natural world, Smolin contends it’s a basic
factor in all those physics laws we apply to our own particular Universe. But thence he proceeds to a more arguable
contention: if these laws are to be explained they must have evolved in time.
And furthermore if
so, they should be subject to the same principles as Darwin’s Natural Selection
in biology. So that Smolin’s proposed
principle of cosmological natural
selection may have sorted things out in aeons past, to leave us with those
physical laws and constants we now have!
Elsewhere Smolin
refers to the current battle between Relativity and Quantum Theory ,with their
two very different conceptions of time.
He believes that Relativity needs to be rethought away from its
implications of a block universe - in which all events both past and future lie
‘timeless and already written’, as numerous authorities have believed.
Here his position is
in contrast to most commentators who suspect that there’s something amiss with
quantum ontology, i.e. the picture it seems to afford us for reality.
Though if one follows Smolin, a new
understanding of reality can result. It
affords a new world-view in which ‘time
is reborn’ and again becomes a dominant factor for the Universe. As it was in the era of Newton or before
Einstein.
Overall however the
more grounded and down-to-earth among us may feel that such heady speculations
of cosmology come dangerously close to
metaphysics – a traditional preoccupation of philosophy which was always
lacking in much evidence. Likewise
there seems little or no factual evidence of any sort to back up such far-flung
cosmological ideas. This too was the
argument in John Barrow’s FAREWELL TO REALITY which I reviewed in my previous
Blog 13.
It may therefore be
wiser to adopt a more practical approach to the question of ‘time’s real
nature’ – going back to the very basis of what makes us think of it all in the
way we do. And that will be the subject
of my next blog, wherein I will reconsider a far more grounded and so basic
starting-point for time.
