Time may not exist

[lulz]

Now my crazy uncle Joe figured this out a few years ago, the first time he took a massive dose of mushrooms.

Here comes the science, but it's not really the important part. Kant taught us that the properties of space and time are the basis for rational thought. But he said that space and time aren't things we can "see", they're the building blocks upon which we see everything consciously. He said that when we try to imagine different places in space, or different points in time, we are being delusional, we are just looking at different pieces of one single thing.

So much rational thought has been put into trying to figure out what "time" is. And it is valuable work. But Joe learned more about time from psychedelic experiences than he ever did in the library.

If rational thought is your thing, read the article below. Or if, like Joe, psychedelic experiences have given you some kind of insight into "time", please share your point of view.

No one keeps track of time better than Ferenc Krausz. In his lab at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, he has clocked the shortest time intervals ever observed. Krausz uses ultraviolet laser pulses to track the absurdly brief quantum leaps of electrons within atoms. The events he probes last for about 100 attoseconds, or 100 quintillionths of a second. For a little perspective, 100 attoseconds is to one second as a second is to 300 million years.

But even Krausz works far from the frontier of time. There is a temporal realm called the Planck scale, where even attoseconds drag by like eons. It marks the edge of known physics, a region where distances and intervals are so short that the very concepts of time and space start to break down. Planck time—the smallest unit of time that has any physical meaning—is 10^-43 second, less than a trillionth of a trillionth of an attosecond. Beyond that? Tempus incognito. At least for now.

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.”

The trouble with time started a century ago, when Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity demolished the idea of time as a universal constant. One consequence is that the past, present, and future are not absolutes. Einstein’s theories also opened a rift in physics because the rules of general relativity (which describe gravity and the large-scale structure of the cosmos) seem incompatible with those of quantum physics (which govern the realm of the tiny). Some four decades ago, the renowned physicist John Wheeler, then at Princeton, and the late Bryce DeWitt, then at the University of North Carolina, developed an extraordinary equation that provides a possible framework for unifying relativity and quantum mechanics. But the Wheeler-*DeWitt equation has always been controversial, in part because it adds yet another, even more baffling twist to our understanding of time.

“One finds that time just disappears from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation,” says Carlo Rovelli, a physicist at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France. “It is an issue that many theorists have puzzled about. It may be that the best way to think about quantum reality is to give up the notion of time—that the fundamental description of the universe must be timeless.”

No one has yet succeeded in using the Wheeler-DeWitt equation to integrate quantum theory with general relativity. Nevertheless, a sizable minority of physicists, Rovelli included, believe that any successful merger of the two great masterpieces of 20th-century physics will inevitably describe a universe in which, ultimately, there is no time.

The possibility that time may not exist is known among physicists as the “problem of time.” It may be the biggest, but it is far from the only temporal conundrum. Vying for second place is this strange fact: The laws of physics don’t explain why time always points to the future. All the laws—whether Newton’s, Einstein’s, or the quirky quantum rules—would work equally well if time ran backward. As far as we can tell, though, time is a one-way process; it never reverses, even though no laws restrict it.

“It’s quite mysterious why we have such an obvious arrow of time,” says Seth Lloyd, a quantum mechanical engineer at MIT. (When I ask him what time it is, he answers, “Beats me. Are we done?”) “The usual explanation of this is that in order to specify what happens to a system, you not only have to specify the physical laws, but you have to specify some initial or final condition.”

The mother of all initial conditions, Lloyd says, was the Big Bang. Physicists believe that the universe started as a very simple, extremely compact ball of energy. Although the laws of physics themselves don’t provide for an arrow of time, the ongoing expansion of the universe does. As the universe expands, it becomes ever more complex and disorderly. The growing disorder—physicists call it an increase in entropy—is driven by the expansion of the universe, which may be the origin of what we think of as the ceaseless forward march of time.

Time, in this view, is not something that exists apart from the universe. There is no clock ticking outside the cosmos. Most of us tend to think of time the way Newton did: “Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably, without regard to anything external.” But as Einstein proved, time is part of the fabric of the universe. Contrary to what Newton believed, our ordinary clocks don’t measure something that’s independent of the universe. In fact, says Lloyd, clocks don’t really measure time at all.

“I recently went to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder,” says Lloyd. (NIST is the government lab that houses the atomic clock that standardizes time for the nation.) “I said something like, ‘Your clocks measure time very accurately.’ They told me, ‘Our clocks do not measure time.’ I thought, Wow, that’s very humble of these guys. But they said, ‘No, time is defined to be what our clocks measure.’ Which is true. They define the time standards for the globe: Time is defined by the number of clicks of their clocks.”

Rovelli, the advocate of a timeless universe, says the NIST timekeepers have it right. Moreover, their point of view is consistent with the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. “We never really see time,” he says. “We see only clocks. If you say this object moves, what you really mean is that this object is here when the hand of your clock is here, and so on. We say we measure time with clocks, but we see only the hands of the clocks, not time itself. And the hands of a clock are a physical variable like any other. So in a sense we cheat because what we really observe are physical variables as a function of other physical variables, but we represent that as if everything is evolving in time.

“What happens with the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is that we have to stop playing this game. Instead of introducing this fictitious variable—time, which itself is not observable—we should just describe how the variables are related to one another. The question is, Is time a fundamental property of reality or just the macroscopic appearance of things? I would say it’s only a macroscopic effect. It’s something that emerges only for big things.”

By “big things,” Rovelli means anything that exists much above the mysterious Planck scale. As of now there is no physical theory that completely describes what the universe is like below the Planck scale. One possibility is that if physicists ever manage to unify quantum theory and general relativity, space and time will be described by some modified version of quantum mechanics. In such a theory, space and time would no longer be smooth and continuous. Rather, they would consist of discrete fragments—quanta, in the argot of physics—just as light is composed of individual bundles of energy called photons. These would be the building blocks of space and time. It’s not easy to imagine space and time being made of something else. Where would the components of space and time exist, if not in space and time?

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.”

Rovelli has been working with one of the world’s leading mathematicians, Alain Connes of the College of France in Paris, on this notion. Together they have developed a framework to show how the thing we experience as time might emerge from a more fundamental, timeless reality. As Rovelli describes it, “Time may be an approximate concept that emerges at large scales—a bit like the concept of ‘surface of the water,’ which makes sense macroscopically but which loses a precise sense at the level of the atoms.”

Realizing that his explanation may only be deepening the mystery of time, Rovelli says that much of the knowledge that we now take for granted was once considered equally perplexing. “I realize that the picture is not intuitive. But this is what fundamental physics is about: finding new ways of thinking about the world and proposing them and seeing if they work. I think that when Galileo said that the Earth was spinning crazily around, it was utterly incomprehensible in the same manner. Space for Copernicus was not the same as space for Newton, and space for Newton was not the same as space for Einstein. We always learn a little bit more.”

Einstein, for one, found solace in his revolutionary sense of time. In March 1955, when his lifelong friend Michele Besso died, he wrote a letter consoling Besso’s family: “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

Rovelli senses another temporal breakthrough just around the corner. “Einstein’s 1905 paper came out and suddenly changed people’s thinking about space-time. We’re again in the middle of something like that,” he says. When the dust settles, time—whatever it may be—could turn out to be even stranger and more illusory than even Einstein could imagine.

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jun/in-no-time

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.
- Buddha

Reputation Comments on this post:

	fantastic post, made me think about time
	very very cool article, thanks for sharing
	Nice article. Made for a decent read.
	rad!
	Most interesting.
	Interesting article. I tend to agree with a lot of this but I don't think the writer has understood that the underlying ...

[JaWill88]

thank you for the awesome article. SWIM always thought about "time" on mushrooms for a brief moment but this allows SWIM to really sit back and think about it.

[Alicia]

Time is just a thing that happens to people while there alive, in some altered states it can slow down or moments of timelessness can happen they have with swia.

When your dead as well "APPARENTLY" as being liberated from the earth , there is also the idea that loved ones etc will already be there already since there is no time, there's no waiting for them to die as well everyone is already there.

Time becomes meaningless, like when just before people die there have been mentions of timelessness or the lack of time. Swia wonders if this the brain chems finalizing before it ends, (body physically anyway)

[Digemlo]

SWIM twice has "blacked out" so to speak, from strong NMDA receptor antagonist + serotonergic drug action. In his everyday life, he otherwise has never "blacked out"--and the two times from drugs that this has happened, it hasn't been entirely a "traditional" black out.

All of a sudden, SWIM begins to sense extreme heat, but mostly around his head (brain), because he can tell that the rest of his body is at a decent temperature. Text on screens/paper appears to be slanted left- or right-ward, almost dyslexic in nature, and his heartbeat massively slows, to the point that it skips a beat every-now-and-then. He then becomes scared that he is dying, has poisoned himself, and that soon he'll forget to keep breathing--so he forces himself to focus on breathing.
Everything begins to feel "static"-y, in a way; he can hear a sort of static and "feel" it throughout his body, a sort of tingling sensation. In his field of vision, black or white dots fizzle in from everything, "as if stardust trailing off the back of a star", but the star is moving straight ahead and the stars are coming toward SWIM.
Then, it hits SWIM: he suddenly can't remember anything that has happened up to this point.
The next time he's aware he's entirely alive, SWIM is not where he thought he was. He can decently well recall the thoughts he'd had in the last _____ (amount of time passed while "passed out"), but knows that he had to be physically there in the meantime, implying that, in a sense--
"SWIM's body, his brain, really, stopped processing time rationally; therefore, time only exists so long as our bodies perceive it"
SWIM does not want that to sound as if he's saying that we are not our bodies--he simply means to take a more objective look at the matter.

Sorry that that gets a tad off-topic... but hopefully it will serve to exemplify SWIM's belief in "timelessness", or, "timeful timelessness". Time exists so long as we believe in it, but it can also be viewed as an object.

[TMM]

If one is to put large amounts of chemicals into their brain, it's true that time can lose its meaning. Your brain works a lot faster than you are consciously aware of. We instinctively translate all thought into language, and run it through the forefronts of our minds at a conversational pace. If you stop and think about it, you know exactly what you are going to say long before you say it to yourself, but you still have to. This is just the tip of the iceberg. It's possible to reach down deeper than this, especially on large doses of certain chemicals, and of course 'time' is going to drastically slow down. I think there is still a physical limit to how fast the processes in our brains can occur, though, but I lack the scientific knowledge to say what this is. Were one to experience true 'timelessness' and come back from it, one would paradoxically still be there. I believe that it's impossible to escape that every occurrence in a drug experience is down to brain chemistry, impossible to escape the system by which we have consciousness. As such, we are always slaves to 'time'. Whatever that may be.

[Digemlo]

Originally Posted by TMM

As such, we are always slaves to 'time'. Whatever that may be.

Yeah, another way of looking at it is that time is a sort of "4th-level" process, whereas one could attribute physical existence to a "3rd-level", etc. (each "level" comparable to what is also perceived as a "dimension")... an atom/a "point" (so to speak) is 0-dimensional, chemical bonds are 2-dimensional (depending on one's view of it)... if this doesn't make sense, don't worry... just some of SWIM's ramblings he supposes ;-)

[acetylene]

Time only exists if you have memory. Think about it, the ticking hand on a clock shows the time because you can compare this instant to the instant ( second, min, hour, day…) before. Time is the comparison of this moment to the previous moment. So, therefore, if you have no short term memory, or memory at all, you cannot remember the moment before this instant moment, this way, you have nothing to measure or compare this moment to. In this state of being, there is only infinite existence or the feeling that time has stopped aka eternity. This isn't some mushroom insight, but it's insight gained from one puff of weed away from passing out.

[eltimmy]

Thanks lulz, great article. Will post some thoughts/experiences/readings in a bit maybe

edit: I also agree with your transmetropolitan avatar

[Earlocybin]

Nice article. Hmm from SWIM's perspective time doesn't exist, the way some people think it does anyway. Time is just a metric but the thing it measures is just conceptual. In SWIM's opinion the past and future don't exist. Since matter and energy are just recycled and not created or destroyed then each moment is the same as the last except subatomic particles are arranged differently. Maybe it's just SWIM's intoxication but when he thinks about time, and one moment of reality changing into the next one he just sees the entire span of time as one fluid moment... There are records of the past and predictions of the future but they don't actually exist, now is forever... that was weird

[LookingForHer]

Those researchers weren't very clever.

They confused time with causality.

Time is not linear, but causality is...

Causality is always "one directional", becuase that's the only way it could be, or else it wouldn't be causality!

Time is more about choice, than anything. Without time, there is no choice. We can choose, therefor, there is time. Time is a measure of choice.

This is why time-lines can often be warped, looped, or fractured or even stopped. Because choice isn't linear.

[lulz]

Originally Posted by LookingForHer

Causality is always "one directional", becuase that's the only way it could be, or else it wouldn't be causality!

There seem to be two ways you're looking at this, but I see where you're coming from.

One: you're treating it like the anthropic principle. This is entirely unrelated to that perspective on the nature of the universe though, because that treats the issue of a creator entitity who set the physical parameters of the universe.

Two: this is related, but belongs to a different area of philosophy. You're quite right that causality can only move in one direction. The problem philosophers have been having for a long time, and recently physicists (as illustrated in the article above), is twofold. One - why does the temporal direction of causality point "forward". The second is - if the past doesn't exist any more, and the future doesn't exist yet, how does the "present" actually move from past to future, if neither of those two states exist during the "present".

Time is possibly the most confusing concept I've come across in philosophy.

[acetylene]

We predict the future, remember the past, and experience the present.

Time is made up of memory (past), cognition (present), and imagination (future).

Reputation Comments on this post:

Interesting take.

[dr ACE]

the past is history,the present is happening, the future is unpredictable

[Euthanatos93420]

Originally Posted by acetylene

We predict the future, remember the past, and experience the present.

Time is made up of memory (past), cognition (present), and imagination (future).

That's a fairly narrow perspective. One tends to think that cognition is universal and time irrelivant. For that matter, one thinks that all three are likewise.

[KBLSD]

there is one thing for certain even if time doesn't exist. humans need time because if we didn't have time nothing would get done ever. Time as we know it is what separates us from animals, animals dont use time they do stuff when they need to do it they don't have a schedule. Time is essential for the survival of the human race

Reputation Comments on this post:

dude ur posts are classic. how the heck did u get that red dot?

[Cakes]

if we didn't have time nothing would get done ever.

One tends to think that cognition is universal and time irrelivant.

my god i think i might be old.

[booyah007]

Originally Posted by KBLSD

there is one thing for certain even if time doesn't exist. humans need time because if we didn't have time nothing would get done ever. Time as we know it is what separates us from animals, animals dont use time they do stuff when they need to do it they don't have a schedule. Time is essential for the survival of the human race

I don't think so. Yes, time is useful for our civilization as of now, but I think you contradicted yourself by saying that animals don't use time (even though they still exist) and if we didn't use time we wouldn't exist. Two things about this: First, your view on 'time' refers to 'scheduling' (which I don't think is what the article is about), as opposed to a physical magnitude. Secondly, if 'scheduling' didn't exist and we did stuff when we needed to do it, we would still exist, just not in the same way of existence as we do now. On the first couple of paragraphs of wikipedia's article on time they talk about this sort of distinction.

[KBLSD]

Originally Posted by booyah007

I don't think so. Yes, time is useful for our civilization as of now, but I think you contradicted yourself by saying that animals don't use time (even though they still exist) and if we didn't use time we wouldn't exist. Two things about this: First, your view on 'time' refers to 'scheduling' (which I don't think is what the article is about), as opposed to a physical magnitude. Secondly, if 'scheduling' didn't exist and we did stuff when we needed to do it, we would still exist, just not in the same way of existence as we do now. On the first couple of paragraphs of wikipedia's article on time they talk about this sort of distinction.

you are right, but if we didnt use "scheduling" i dont think are minds would of ever evolved enough to the point where me and you could argue if time exist or doesnt exist.

[Cakes]

if not our minds, then at least maybe the means to do it over the net? but that might have had to do more with cooperation, because without cooperation we couldn't have done it no matter how much TIME we had on our hands.

ha ha.

time to go.

[KBLSD]

Originally Posted by Cakes

if not our minds, then at least maybe the means to do it over the net? but that might have had to do more with cooperation, because without cooperation we couldn't have done it no matter how much TIME we had on our hands.

ha ha.

time to go.

yeah but if we didnt use what we call "time" than we would never know when to cooperate with each other, because we could never arrange a "time" to get together and cooperate with each other

[Cakes]

sounds good. lets do lunch.

[KBLSD]

Originally Posted by Cakes

sounds good. lets do lunch.

ok how about friday at 8:00 P.M

[antizero]

Today I was watching an hour long documentary on supermassive black holes. It was relatively recent and they showed some new computer simulations of what the universe looked like just after the big bang, when the universe was entirely made up of hot gasses which began to swirl and clump together, forming the first stars, which were so large and massive that they quickly collapsed into the first black holes. These black holes in a way "seeded" the universe to create the galaxies and inject the required motion into the matter of the universe which caused the various bodies of matter to form into what they are now. The black holes began to orbit eachother and smash these galaxies together, cannibalising eachother and turning into bigger galaxies. After a while, it began to look like coffee swirling in a coffee pot. At that moment I really began to appreciate the scope of the universe. We're so used to thinking in terms of scale that we are a certain size, and below this size is smaller, and above is bigger, but it can only get so big until it turns into a black hole. But I ask you, what if in actuality, the universe really is just a pin prick in a piece of something even bigger, something we couldn't possibly imagine because our concepts of scale do not have the ability to understand that we can only so far measure up to a limit. Its as if we're a really just individual atoms, inside a cell. Inside a body. Inside a house. Inside a neighborhood. Inside a city. Inside a state. Inside a country. Inside a continent. Inside a planet. You get the picture. How are we to be sure that WE ourselves are not made up of galaxies and stars? In the face of the universe, is death really so horrible? We're part of something incredibly magnificent. It takes a lot of effort to really appreciate the magnitude of your own existance. Its a wonder anything even exists at all. As you stare at the cold factuality of science, you can't help but start to become a believer in something "bigger", because that nature we find ourselves in is so incredibly perfect in its operation, even when all we can see is chaos.

[lulz]

^

You may be interested in this documentary, "What We Still Don't Know: Are We Real?"

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8018371269760059556

It's part of a BBC series hosted by Gilbert Ryle, the most senior astronomer in the United Kingdom.

There is a computer simulation in it about 1/5 through the documentary called "Life", if you watch it you'll see what I'm talking about.

[antizero]

Originally Posted by lulz

^

You may be interested in this documentary, "What We Still Don't Know: Are We Real?"

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8018371269760059556

It's part of a BBC series hosted by Gilbert Ryle, the most senior astronomer in the United Kingdom.

There is a computer simulation in it about 1/5 through the documentary called "Life", if you watch it you'll see what I'm talking about.

Thanks . Link didn't work, but I found it. Looks interesting so far.

Reputation Comments on this post:

good courtesy. and nice eloquent previous post.