Sunday, June 9, 2013

A Matter Of Time: The Science & Philosophy Of Time


The World Science Festival recently wrapped up here in New York. They gather world renowned scientists and philosophers where they are sometimes pitted against one another to hammer out scientific concepts and theories.

Here is a program about the nature of time, one of my deepest areas of interest:

8 comments:

  1. I have started listening to this. I find the topic interesting, and am curious how it is that B-Theorists explain our experience of time with the physicists understanding of what time is. Specifically, given the definition of time offered by modern theism, how is it that we experience change, or time passing, or whatever it is that we experience? What is going on that propels the "I think" if not time passing?

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  2. "modern theism" should read "modern physics". Scary typo, that.

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  3. We do experience time as if the A-theory were true even though the evidence points to the B-theory. It is similar to how we experience objects as being solid even though they are 99.99% empty space. All the matter in your body could be squeezed down to a size much smaller than a grain of sand, and the rest of you is literally empty space. It seems inconceivable, but it's true. It just means that physics tells us that what we perceive is not always what is.

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  4. Yeah, I can get behind rejecting the A-Theory based on Special Relativity's indicating that there is no privileged space time, but I think that leaves unanswered the question about how/why we experience the present as we do. And that for me is the question -- knowing that we're evolved creatures, why do we have the experience of time that we have?

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    1. One aspect of time is that it essentially follows the second law of thermodynamics, that entropy increases overtime. So the universe starts out as an extremely low entropy state, the "singularity", and over time (in the block universe) it evolves into an extremely high entropy state, sometimes called thermal equilibrium, where all matter is as spread out and disordered as it can be.

      That's why it's easy to mix coffee and cream but really hard to unmix it. Likewise, we remember the past because it is different from the future and at a macroscopic scale - contains less entropy. There are many more ways the future can be from the past. When you see an omelette, you know it was an egg, but when you see an egg, you don't know if it will end up as an omelette, or scrambled eggs or dropped and thrown out. That's why we remember the past and don't remember the future.

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  5. Yes, I understand that time has a direction (toward entropy). I think I was hoping that B-theory had an explanation for the feeling of "the present" -- in the A-Theory, it seems that we experience the present because, well, that is "when" we are. With the B-theory, it seems that the present that we experience is no more privileged than the past or the future, and yet we experience only one (the present). The A-theory has that attraction -- an "explanation" for our experience of present. The problem with the B-Theory is that I don't see how it explains our experience of the present -- in other words, if the past, present, and future all exist, then what is it that we are experiencing?

    I don't doubt the correctness of the B-Theory, mind you, I was just wondering if you could suggest a link, book, etc. that addressed this question.

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    1. This is a nice link written by physicist Paul Davies (who appears in the link above) about time. It doesn't have all the answers, but it's an interesting read.

      http://www.ipod.org.uk/reality/reality_mysterious_flow.asp

      Here's another one:

      http://www.ipod.org.uk/reality/reality_arrow_of_time.asp

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