Visualizing Emergent Time

At the 2015 World Science Festival program "Time is of the Essence ... or Is It?" a panel of physicists weighed the question of whether time is an absolutely fundamental building block of the universe like space or some emergent property generated by reality. In this clip, physicist Vijay Balasubramanian talks about what it would mean if we found out that time really was emergent and not fundamental.

Original Program Date: May 29, 2014

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[mariouribe]

So could the excess gravity in our universe that we call “dark matter” actually just be a 3 dimensional shadow of mass that is not actually intersecting with us in the 4th dimension? Maybe it’s gravity emanating from matter that doesn’t exist now but exists in the universes future or past.

[citizenschallengeYT]

Great example of getting lost within one's Mindscape and losing sight of physical reality. Our answers are limited by the questions we ask. And, ... all this jazz is just so incredible anthropocentric and self-indulgent. Profoundly removed from what we need to know to deal with our here and now, macroscopic reality as products of evolution and Earth's biosphere, in 2021.

[christopherayers]

What if time were emergent, and being created through Quantum Entanglement?
That would mean that Quantum Entanglement would occur outside of the influence of time, thereby explaining the 'Spooky Action at a Distance".

[winstonchang]

We are so limited by our sense of things we do has to be "visualized" visualizing the soul....going into the brains and
the brain act like transistors....If dreamed a strange visualized the dreams "I" dream?

[Ungtartog]

What do you guys think about the idea that space/time is one thing, as Einstein postulated, and it is our *perception* of time which changes as we evolve. In it's most rudimentary form, all existence appears as events, thus there is no space, only time, as the awareness begins to pick *patterns* out of existence, the awareness perceives the abstraction of *objects* out of the ever flowing continuum of existence... *Space* is an experience which *appears* to condense out of *time* as perception evolves.

[yellowburger]

I think something that a lot of people miss is that a two dimensional universe is just a mathematical analogy. Everything that exists exists in three dimensions. Two dimensions are just an abstract mental exercise.

[danielsteel]

That's not what "emergence" is. Emergence has little (if any) conceptual connection to the 'projections of objects onto, e.g., boundary-subobjects' concept. This explanation was surprisingly off-the-mark.

Either that, or there's some alternative sense of the term "emergence" that physicists use, and of which I'm unaware. (This in fact happens from time to time: mathematicians, scientists and philosophers will transport and effectively redefine jargon from areas not their own. And eventually the others' usage becomes unintelligible.) That alternative sense, in this case, is apparently something to do with translating the Holographic Principle into something with an explicit focus on spatial dimensions. Or something.

[rai]

huh? How did I get here from dolphin videos

[Dyslexic-Artist-Theory-on-Time]

Could the wave particle duality of light and matter (in the form of electrons) be forming a blank canvas that we can interact with forming the possible into the actual? We have an emergent future unfolding relative to our own actions!  At the smallest scale this is represented by the Planck's Constant ħ=h/2π being a constant of action in the geometrical process that we see and feel as the passage of time ∆E ∆t ≥ h/2π with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle ∆×∆pᵪ≥h/4π representing a potential sphere 4π of future uncertainty. We observer this sphere as the visible Universe as the stars above us and the objects around us and can choose what to observer and what objects to interact with.

[ericjane]

Abbott's Flatland taken seriously.

[peepalfarm]

So what's the implication for our daily lives?

[charlesmccarthy]

in terms of causation, say with a pendulum, Is it possible to describe emergent time as being a delay in the energy transfer from one ball to the other? I think this form of time diallation is probably more aligned with Einstein, and possibly "anti-time" for the uncertainty principle in say a double slit.

[charlesbrightman]

If energy is everywhere and in everything and energy cannot be created nor destroyed, then the same amount of energy in the 2D world would have to be in the emerged 3D world.

[justinnehls]

That was a long description of absolutely nothing

[michaelzimmermann]

Imaging a two dimensional human, he or she would just fall into 2 pieces scine we have a digestion system which necessarily must include 2 holes :D

[jimmyb]

This guy needs to work on his delivery.

[DonJivine]

Is it just me or does anyone else find this guy incredibly annoying as a speaker? Seems really self impressed and somewhat condescending to me...