Imaging a world without time.
Now Einstein says time is an illusion but we still assume it has some basis is reality? In the movie, "Doctor Strange" he goes to a universe where time doesn't exist and creates a time loop. Now fiction aside, can we imagine a place without time? Would any events occur? Can memories form? Or do all possible events occur simultaneously? What is the lay of the land?
Comments (55)
Becoming one with light (or in a capable ship) and traveling and its speed through the vaccum of space at 186,000 miles per second. Not quite the same thing but probably as close as we'd be able to get.
Without time as in never existed/outside of the laws of time or just say "frozen" in time, etc? It's a curious question that probably has a simple enough answer. I don't know it, though.
If it has intelligent or even any form of life or has beings capable of consciousness obviously they'd have to move or at least think. Wouldn't they?
He said absolute time is an illusion, caused by the fact that everyday speeds are negligible compared with the speed of light. Time itself isn't an illusion, rather it depends on one's frame of reference. Time has equal footing with space in Einstein's theory.
We would have to assume that I am real so is my experience in flowing continuous time. But I am not so sure about other people whose experience is obviously different from mine and from one another therefore cannot be absolute or even just objective.
I found a link that gives an example of the culture/time problem that in effect does make time stand still.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1046/j.1038-5282.2003.02009.x
In India some may think it is rude to set a specific time for a meeting because that sets ourselves above all else, making gods of ourselves instead of seeing ourselves in the flow of something much greater than ourselves. We could agree to meet at 3:00 p.m. but we better add to that "God willing".
Time as we have created it with our 12 hour clocks is an abstract concept that we treat as tangible reality. It is now 7:50 a.m. where I sit but this moment in time may be different for you.
It depends on which side of the bathroom door are you? Inside or outside. :lol:
No problem for me at least. Just imagine no recording or measuring of change.
I don't see any conceptual problems with a timeless world. We routinely construct such worlds in our minds. One of the subfields of mechanics is actually called Statics, and there are plenty of other theories and models in which time does not figure. Frankly, I am surprised that anyone with any exposure to science and abstract thought in general would have a difficulty with this concept.
Sure. Time is often conceived as a series of moments in a 1-dimensional line so a world without such a time is simply a 0-dimensional version of that, which would be a single moment. I wouldn't say that events "occur" given that that seems to suggest that they come into being or come to pass which implies time, but they do exist within this solitary moment. There are no other versions of the world and in that sense everything is "simultaneous". Such views about time are often called temporal solipsism for obvious reasons.
One can do the same thing with space just by reducing the amount of spatial dimensions to a single point. In that case, there is no "there", only "here" and our sense of direction ceases to be. Like time this is a solipsistic view with respect to space.
I guess a more interesting question would be what multiple time dimensions would be like if it were possible. We often understand space as being multi-dimensional, but in most theories (even in string theory with it's dozen dimensions), there is only one time dimension.
Quoting TiredThinker
Never watched that movie but frankly that just sounds like a load of sci-fi mumbo jumbo.
Just a thought. :roll: My attempts at philosophy are shallow.
For example you could have a one dimensional universe plus time. The x dimension have be a series of field values from 0 to A, and can consist of discrete positions form 0-X. All along the time axis the sum of the field values in each point is constant.
The illusion of motion is observing new values for each position along the t axis.
Now let’s introduce another space axis y and remove time. Now, You can have any pattern of values everywhere or you may set some rule but scanning along x or y the total energy is not conserved otherwise it would be a time axis
What if we remove space and add two time axes?
The energy would conserve on both axes and there will be some symmetrical patterns possible like a line at a 45 deg but this restricts the possibilities substantially
Einstein's shunting aside of time is now increasingly recognized as an attempt to abstract out of physics what may in fact be the key to its understanding (See Prigogine, Smolen ,etc).
Time of course is not an illusion since as Einstein knew if I travel away from you at an extreme acceleration and velocity and then travel back... well I'll still have experienced 60 seconds per minute... just as you have, but when I arrive back more of those minutes will have passed for you than I. That's not possible in a universe of illusory time.... only in a universe of illusory static or solid state time.
Either way we have moved on just a little bit from Einstein. I'm sure he was onto a lot of things and all, but Einstein is not the worlds Oracle of Delphi and we know that in many cases, including with quantum mechanics he was just plain wrong.
Many current theories and in fact lots of cosmology and physics ignores time since its irrelevant. Time is also not a property, or a requirement for many known processes in the universe such as quasi-particles. In the quantum world the primary mover is probability, not time.
Aristotle defines time as the measure of motion. I think this is a perfect definition. It is something we imagine to help us understand motion.
Now to mix in my own opinion: We cannot have any awareness of time without memory, because memory gives us awareness of motion, which allows us to describe that motion with the construct we call "time".
There was a movie some time back in which the central character had no short-term memory, but solved some sort of mystery, taking copious notes continuously. Anyone recall?
From a philosophical view, in one attempts to consider the literal existence of time, as could be imagined in manifest experience, it would be impossible to describe. One could wildly speculate that, absent time, nothing happens, and something like totally "flat surface" in space would exist, lacking any characteristics, including spatial characteristics, so we would be imagining an "flat-extension", with nothing to differentiate anything from anything else. And something like that would be all there is. But this would be an exercise in transcendent metaphysics, because any notion we have of "flat surface" could not be imagined by our cognitive faculties. It is only when you bring forth space-time, that you could even talk about a flat surface as we understand the term.
But in short no, a world without time is inconceivable to us.
I believe the relevant quote - or, at least, the one I am familiar with - is this:
Quoting Einstein
The above link gives the source as "Letter to Besso's family (March 1955) following the death of Michele Besso, as quoted in Disturbing the Universe (1979) by Freeman Dyson Ch. 17 "A Distant Mirror", p. 193".
Thanks for the source. Within that context, I doubt he meant it literally as if it time were an actual illusion. I may be wrong, but using that as an argument that he thought time didn't exist can be misleading.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention current dissenting views in physics, like Lee Smolen, who argues that the presuppositions that have dominated the field concerning the understanding of time are holding it back.
He says the currently accepted physical description of reality is hampered by its reliance on a static model that sees time as a superfluous construct.
Making time central to physics and reenvisioming it as a science of evolutionary process unites it with living processes and points the way to an eventual conciliation with the new mind models. Such models also dissolve the divide between the strictly physical and the mental by seeing self-organizing informational processes as fundamental.
Ilya Prigogine is another who would argue that a revolution of philosophical worldview within physics is necessary to keep pace with where philosophy has already gone after Darwin . with respect to temporality. This shift in thinking would not necessitate the invalidation of any of the prior empirical results , but rather a re-envisioning of the significance of those results within a metatheoretical framework that would open up new horizons of discovery.
I'm assuming, of course, that for time to exist, there has to be change. No change, no time
You have five minutes to get it done.
Thinking is time.
Therefore imagining is time. If you wish to do without time, do without thinking.
sounds very like meditation?
It can be meditation. It can also be death.
death is ceasing, meditation is being
What is being? What is ceasing?
ceasing is when life is no longer “animate”
being is nothing but you “are” on this plane of existence
Isn't ceasing only relative to your exact Universal (coordinate) position? And doesn't that suggest that no thing can actually cease?
Who is? And where is this plane?
The simplest answer would be God. He simply Is.
what do you mean by this?
Quoting synthesis
i don’t think any person truly “is” but the concept of God definitely qualifies for it, the plane is what we would define as reality through our human lens, no?
It is if it is for you. Everybody has their own reality, no? And how would God play into this?
How can the present be a point, when time is always passing?
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”
Omar Khayyam (ca 1100AD) - As a mathematician he worked on continued fractions, a subject I studied fifty years ago. :cool:
I find this to be a common misunderstanding of dimensions that consolidates ‘space’ within an aspect ‘time’. What we commonly refer to as ‘time’ presupposes the existence of what we commonly refer to as ‘space’. This presupposes the existence of direction (shape), which in turn presupposes the existence of (potential) energy.
Quoting TiredThinker
I think Einstein was referring to the relativity of time in relation to knowledge. Memories can only form as such in an atemporal structure, where all possible events may be accessible at any time. Such a system would be structured according to a perception of value, significance or potential, rather than an observation of change.
It's a form of change, going by. We measure the going by of time, which is called passing. Since time is always passing (changing), a "zero point" cannot be determined, and it is simply assumed. An assumed point is lacking in truth. Therefore if a zero point is needed for measuring time, but the one employed is just assumed, the measurements are inaccurate.
People who believe in physics, know time to be an illusion. The difference between past, present and future does not exist. Everything in the universe, always has been and always will be, here and now.
By physics do you mean alchemy? Science might really be alchemy, idn. There may be no way to test how our thoughts affect reality. We surely can wonder what our thoughts happen in, though. Intellectuals around Newton argued that his physics (unlike Descartes's vortex) required theism. They thought they "knew" how their physical laws led to philosophical "truths". Who is to say what will come after the post modern age, what new ideas will arise
If you were on the surface of the Sun, the light which left there 8 minutes ago would be considered to be in he past, however, that same light would be just arriving at Earth and be considered to be in the present. If you were standing on the surface of another planet 10 light years away, that same light would reach you 10 years into the future from Earth’s perspective. Electromagnetic radiation, which travels in all directions in an unbroken stream, exists indefinitely. The light which left the earth during the period of the dinosaurs is still out there, traveling through space. In this sense, there is no difference between past, present and future. It all depends on where you are located in space.
I understand your argument and it is backed up by the claim in physics that light exists in eternity (and it alone as some would add)
Photons don't have mass and therefore time doesn't apply to them. Gravity can bend it though that's what I'm a little fuzzy about. The distinction between time and eternity is discrete
What event, in-time or in-timelessness, provoked your question? Was that event in the past? How do you know?
Einstein's theory of Block Time was a hypothetical notion intended to make sense of his abstract mathematical theory of Relativity. The theory's relevance to Reality though, was proven in Time Dilation experiments. The passage of time is a subjective concept, even though in objective clocks it is recorded (remembered) differently. So I doubt that, in real life, he acted as-if time was frozen into a block of ice.
As Albert himself said, " People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion". The "illusion" is persistent because, as humans, we can't forget the past, and hope for the future. :smile:
Block Time : “Again, though, it might seem that dynamic change and temporal passage have been banished from nature by Einstein . . .” For example, his theory of Relativity required a patternless back-ground of Block Time, sometimes referred to as “Eternalism”, which freezes our perception of dynamic space & time into a static universe where all things & events exist simultaneously. Nevertheless, that timeless-spaceless “ice-cube” universe may be true mathematically (i.e. abstractly), but not true physically (concretely), because Eternity & Infinity are excluded from our Reality — yet remain like ghosts in human in imagination, in metaphysical mathematics, in Ideality.
http://bothandblog6.enformationism.info/page73.html
Time Dilation : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation