Time Reborn: a new theory of time

A

Aladdin

Registered Senior Member
A short presentation by physicist Lee Smolin on time and how his personal view of it differs from the current mainstream view. Thought it may interest some of you here.

[video=youtube;6Hi4VbERDyI]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Hi4VbERDyI[/video]
 
origin said:
Not for 23 minutes of my time. How about a synopsis?
Click to expand...

[video=youtube;R-fiKAzf3Sw]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-fiKAzf3Sw[/video]

Try this, it even has subtitles
Not sure if it is the same thing though, I need more time to watch the 23mins version to compare
 
This was interesting enough. Probably the most important thing that Lee has to say here concerns the utility of viewing the natural world as a real succession of moments; a place where the flow of time is not merely an illusion or a peculiarity of human perception (what he calls timeless naturalism), but a real evolution of a natural order that is not governed by timeless immutable laws or fully and accurately mirrored in mathematical models, but is rather governed by laws that have evolved and are evolving in time along with it (what he calls temporal naturalism). Adopting this view, he says, frees us from the dehumanizing effect that timeless naturalism has on our aspirations, allowing us to truly embrace novelty, and free agency, and imagination, to make good decisions about an uncertain future and to essentially invent our way out of our problems with an enthusiasm that only comes from believing that such things are real. So it's as much about empowerment as it is about science.

That is not to say that Lee didn't get stuck into the science. Apparently he did, in his book.
 
origin said:
Not for 23 minutes of my time. How about a synopsis?
Click to expand...

The gist of it is that Smolin proposes that instead of looking at time as a consequence of the laws of our Universe, a better approach would be to see time as a „given” and see the laws that currently govern the Universe (the four forces, the elementary particles,...) as part of an evolutive process -- that is, our Universe looked a hell of a lot different in the past when the laws were different, and may as well change a lot again if the laws are going to change at some point in the future.

His recent book (he is currently on a tour promoting it, this speech being part of that tour) apparently hints to a number of tests that may be undertaken in order to prove or disprove his theory.
 
I post the following as probative rather than assertions.

Why would a universal constant necessarily have to restrict variety and probability, except forbid that which is not mathematically allowed?

Take a fractal, using a constant of self duplication we can see that as the fractal develops it is able to attain exquisite variety in expression.
CDT (causal dynamic triangulation) may well be the very structure of spacetime itself, at least to Planck scale.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rstu3nGdZLs&feature=related

As the philosopher on the panel pointed out that there are timeless truths. 1 + 1 = 2, basically all mathematics are derived from this simple constant.
Algebra allows us to apply this constant in an almost infinite variety.

I would argue that universal constants allows the evolution of the universe and allows us to plan for the future. Else we would have to try and make sense of chaos every time. We would not be able to say "If this, Then that".

Constants are essential in the orderly progression of physical events, IMO. Determinism does not forbid variety in the future. It establishes a fixed past which itself becomes a constant (in this universe). But the future is wide open to influences from converging potentials., even using rigid mathematics.

Intuitively, I would dare say that by removing constants from any equation makes that equation invalid and causality becomes moot.
Causality itself is a constant dynamic in the physical world.

Of course I always argue that Time is associated with specific events only. It takes an infinitely small amount of time for quantum to function. OTOH, it may take years to build a dam. The two time frames (timelines) are not mutually exclusive.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACS1_5jyvHE
 
Last edited:
Doesn't the flow of time to the future, create a casual universe normalized to time? If time sputtered, sped up, slowed down and reversed, without any cause and effect, this would assure randomness normalized to time.

We know time can speed up or slow relative to reference, but this is cased on a casual relationship. I tend to think a random universe perception is connected to a mind that can't normalize to time.
 
Smolin had rumblings of indigestion in regard to the conventional take well over a decade ago, in the comments section of a Paul Davies interview about time loops. Traub, Barbour and Benford chimed-in, too.

. . . I have great respect and affection for Paul Davies, and often find that I agree with his take on things. But in this case I find myself in disagreement. [...] Paul finds himself undecided on the possibility of time travel, my view is that the evidence we have from both classical general relativity and quantum theories of gravity is that time travel is not possible in any realistic theory of space and time. The evidence for this conclusion comes independently from classical general relativity, statistical physics and quantum theories of gravity.
[...]
I believe that a fair summary of the evidence is that the possibility of time travel rests on an incorrect interpretation of general relativity. According to this interpretation, which is sometimes called the "block universe", time is really no different from space and the whole universe in some sense exists "at once", so that a history is just a path in an already existing world. From this point of view, why can't a timelike path make a loop as easily as a spacelike loop?

The answer, I think, is that this view is derived from the study of vastly over-simplified models, rather than the real theory. When one gets to a detailed, realistic description, rather than a model, the complexity of the world (and here I am thinking of the spacetime geometry and not life....) makes it impossible for any reasonable sized part of the universe to ever return to the same state.
[...]
My own view is that when we are done making the quantum theory of gravity the block universe idea will be as dead as Ptolemy and we will have a view of time in which the future has a very different status than the past and the notion of time travel will be logically impossible. This is described in the papers I mentioned and in a forthcoming book. But one does not need to agree with my view to come to the conclusion that time travel is very unlikely; there is sufficient evidence for this already in what we know about general relativity and quantum theory, so long as one considers their application to the real universe, rather than vastly oversimplified models.
[...]
Now, having said this, why is time travel such a popular subject, among both experts and laypeople? One possibility is that it represents another in a genre of ideas that may be called the technological transcendent fantasies. [...] Perhaps in a thousand years priests from the Church of Time Travel and the Church of AI will meet in the Vatican with their Jesuit brothers to discuss the present status of their still unfulfilled hopes. Meanwhile the rest of us will still be transcending time and perpetuating and improving the human race the old fashion way. ​
 
wellwisher said:
Doesn't the flow of time to the future, create a casual universe normalized to time? If time sputtered, sped up, slowed down and reversed, without any cause and effect, this would assure randomness normalized to time.

We know time can speed up or slow relative to reference, but this is cased on a casual relationship. I tend to think a random universe perception is connected to a mind that can't normalize to time.
Click to expand...

That was my point. While there is a Universal Time (the dynamic continuation from BB to the present), Time itself is dependent on the occurrence of an event and in a specific frame of reference. Time itself has no dynamic function. It is a result of the duration of all functions in space. We do not live in Time, we create (use, take, make) our individual timeline as we live.

This where I disagree with Loll's statement that time existed before the BB, unless there was action before the BB.
IMHO, before the BB there was no time and the BB was an instantaneous mega quantum event, which an instant later created time as an essential by-product of movement. As Loll said, time keeps things from happening all at once, but the BB was an event where everything did happen all at once and in the same place (singularity). It seems to me this is why the BB was totally chaotic and only after the inflationary epoch did time become measurable (theoretically) with the ordering of chaos into an evolutionary process which produced spacetime and everything in it.
 
C C said:
Smolin had rumblings of indigestion in regard to the conventional take well over a decade ago, in the comments section of a Paul Davies interview about time loops. Traub, Barbour and Benford chimed-in, too.

. . . I have great respect and affection for Paul Davies, and often find that I agree with his take on things. But in this case I find myself in disagreement. [...] Paul finds himself undecided on the possibility of time travel, my view is that the evidence we have from both classical general relativity and quantum theories of gravity is that time travel is not possible in any realistic theory of space and time. The evidence for this conclusion comes independently from classical general relativity, statistical physics and quantum theories of gravity.
[...]
I believe that a fair summary of the evidence is that the possibility of time travel rests on an incorrect interpretation of general relativity. According to this interpretation, which is sometimes called the "block universe", time is really no different from space and the whole universe in some sense exists "at once", so that a history is just a path in an already existing world. From this point of view, why can't a timelike path make a loop as easily as a spacelike loop?

The answer, I think, is that this view is derived from the study of vastly over-simplified models, rather than the real theory. When one gets to a detailed, realistic description, rather than a model, the complexity of the world (and here I am thinking of the spacetime geometry and not life....) makes it impossible for any reasonable sized part of the universe to ever return to the same state.
[...]
My own view is that when we are done making the quantum theory of gravity the block universe idea will be as dead as Ptolemy and we will have a view of time in which the future has a very different status than the past and the notion of time travel will be logically impossible. This is described in the papers I mentioned and in a forthcoming book. But one does not need to agree with my view to come to the conclusion that time travel is very unlikely; there is sufficient evidence for this already in what we know about general relativity and quantum theory, so long as one considers their application to the real universe, rather than vastly oversimplified models.
[...]
Now, having said this, why is time travel such a popular subject, among both experts and laypeople? One possibility is that it represents another in a genre of ideas that may be called the technological transcendent fantasies. [...] Perhaps in a thousand years priests from the Church of Time Travel and the Church of AI will meet in the Vatican with their Jesuit brothers to discuss the present status of their still unfulfilled hopes. Meanwhile the rest of us will still be transcending time and perpetuating and improving the human race the old fashion way. ​
Click to expand...

Perhaps a simple answer might be that Time does not exist in the past. The past is fixed and not dynamic. When we talk about time travel we are really talking about space travel back to an earlier time (looping or tunneling through space). But the travel itself creates time and it is always additive, never subtractive which IMO prohibits from going back to an earlier time. Taking a shortcut from the grocery store to home does not allow me to arrive back home to the time I left, no matter if the shortcut is a result of folding space. Time is a result of movement and once created can never be undone, without undoing the events which created time in the first place, including my existence in spacetime.

But I will stipulate to my limited knowledge and the speculative nature of my intuition. But then, the greatest minds are also still searching for answers to the phenomena of time, so I am just putting in my two cents worth.
 
What Lee is proposing is that in time knowledge changes

So instead of being STUCK in the Einstein of timelessness of Universalities that we allow for new information
 
river said:
What Lee is proposing is that in time knowledge changes

So instead of being STUCK in the Einstein of timelessness of Universalities that we allow for new information
Click to expand...

Sure, perhaps we might discover that time is created as a result of events, all of which "require" time to become explicate in reality...:)
 
C C said:
Smolin had rumblings of indigestion in regard to the conventional take well over a decade ago, in the comments section of a Paul Davies interview about time loops. Traub, Barbour and Benford chimed-in, too.

. . . I have great respect and affection for Paul Davies, and often find that I agree with his take on things. But in this case I find myself in disagreement. [...] Paul finds himself undecided on the possibility of time travel, my view is that the evidence we have from both classical general relativity and quantum theories of gravity is that time travel is not possible in any realistic theory of space and time. The evidence for this conclusion comes independently from classical general relativity, statistical physics and quantum theories of gravity.
[...]
I believe that a fair summary of the evidence is that the possibility of time travel rests on an incorrect interpretation of general relativity. According to this interpretation, which is sometimes called the "block universe", time is really no different from space and the whole universe in some sense exists "at once", so that a history is just a path in an already existing world. From this point of view, why can't a timelike path make a loop as easily as a spacelike loop?

The answer, I think, is that this view is derived from the study of vastly over-simplified models, rather than the real theory. When one gets to a detailed, realistic description, rather than a model, the complexity of the world (and here I am thinking of the spacetime geometry and not life....) makes it impossible for any reasonable sized part of the universe to ever return to the same state.
[...]
My own view is that when we are done making the quantum theory of gravity the block universe idea will be as dead as Ptolemy and we will have a view of time in which the future has a very different status than the past and the notion of time travel will be logically impossible. This is described in the papers I mentioned and in a forthcoming book. But one does not need to agree with my view to come to the conclusion that time travel is very unlikely; there is sufficient evidence for this already in what we know about general relativity and quantum theory, so long as one considers their application to the real universe, rather than vastly oversimplified models.
[...]
Now, having said this, why is time travel such a popular subject, among both experts and laypeople? One possibility is that it represents another in a genre of ideas that may be called the technological transcendent fantasies. [...] Perhaps in a thousand years priests from the Church of Time Travel and the Church of AI will meet in the Vatican with their Jesuit brothers to discuss the present status of their still unfulfilled hopes. Meanwhile the rest of us will still be transcending time and perpetuating and improving the human race the old fashion way. ​
Click to expand...

I'd say he's a poor source for determining what could possibly be wrong with modern physics. I think he's gone over to the 'Crankside'.
 
river said:
Explain "require " time

As to imply that time is the cause of events , how ?
Click to expand...

It requires time so all the events don't happen at once. Now you explain just what this means "... STUCK in the Einstein of timelessness of Universalities ..."
 
river said:
Explain "require " time

As to imply that time is the cause of events , how ?
Click to expand...

First, I am implying that events are causal to the creation of time, not the other way around.

All events require time to become explicate in reality. Before then they are (timeless) potentials, the Implicate. But to express these potentials as physical reality requires time to become manifest as a physical object, with it's own time line as a result, i.e. an event in space which is already in the past and may no longer require time to become explicate, because it no longer exists at all (supernova).

Fortunately all functions of causal natural laws and constants require time and everything we see and experience is always associated with time. Space itself creates time. Universal expansion is not "inside time", the expansion of space creates time from nothing as it did during the BB. The creation of a space coordinate also results in creation of a time coordinate, which was not there before the space coordinate was explicated in reality.

I await the onslaught.....:D
 
brucep said:
It requires time so all the events don't happen at once. Now you explain just what this means "... STUCK in the Einstein of timelessness of Universalities ..."
Click to expand...

Perhaps it is more accurate to say that all events cannot happen all at once, except when you start with a physical singularity such as the BB?
 
So, he is essentially theorizing that the laws of physics aren't fixed? (But, rather evolving) Wow. Interesting.

I found more info online about this and some are struggling to make sense of it because Lee isn't offering equations to explain his arguments. (If laws are outside of time as Lee suggests, then no one can "check" them using science.) Things that make you go hmmm. Lol

I need to get this book because I'd like to see not only how his mind works, but how he plans to "test" this theory.

He is definitely challenging the status quo. :eek:
 
Write4U said:
Perhaps it is more accurate to say that all events cannot happen all at once, except when you start with a physical singularity such as the BB?
Click to expand...

It always amazes me how little modern cosmology is discussed in this forum. Probably since most still seem to think there is a singularity at the beginning of our universe. Eternal Inflation theory changed everything. Cosmology became a testable science. Over the last 40 years the advances in theoretical and experimental cosmology have been very revealing about the origin of this universe. Maybe even some physical evidence for the Eternal Inflation multiverse.
 
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