July 31, 2007


Does Time Exist?

Efforts to understand time below the Planck scale have led to an exceedingly strange juncture in physics. The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality. If so, then what is time? And why is it so obviously and tyrannically omnipresent in our own experience? “The meaning of time has become terribly problematic in contemporary physics,” says Simon Saunders, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford. “The situation is so uncomfortable that by far the best thing to do is declare oneself an agnostic.”

link (freakonomics)

posted by Deron Bauman in science 

comments

3 Responses to “Does Time Exist?”

  1. Andrew Simone on August 1st, 2007 at 12:21 am

    Time is uncertainty.

  2. alek on August 1st, 2007 at 5:05 am

    we measure decay and call it time

  3. Daryl Scroggins on August 1st, 2007 at 10:41 am

    Thanks Deron, this is great. I love this paragraph:

    As Rovelli explains it, in quantum mechanics all particles of matter and energy can also be described as waves. And waves have an unusual property: An infinite number of them can exist in the same location. If time and space are one day shown to consist of quanta, the quanta could all exist piled together in a single dimensionless point. “Space and time in some sense melt in this picture,” says Rovelli. “There is no space anymore. There are just quanta kind of living on top of one another without being immersed in a space.”

    If you haven’t read Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “El Aleph,” please go and get it. It is built upon just such a point and is one of the finest short stories I have ever read. Italo Calvino also has a very short story that works in a similar vein–”All At One Point.”