It’s About Time with Bernard Carr and Jonathan Allday

It’s About Time: A Conversation on the Subject of Time
with Bernard Carr and Jonathan Allday

Time is one of the central mysteries of existence. It is also a profound puzzle in physics.
We understand how the passage of time ‘expands’ or ‘contracts’ depending on how fast you are travelling compared to an observer. There is also conclusive evidence that time distorts in the presence of mass, leading to the effects we used to ascribe to a force of gravity. Some even believe that they understand how time morphs into existence, along with the universe, out of some quantum pre-stuff. This, however, is all ‘physical time’; the relationship between the physics and the experience of ‘psychological time’ is far from clear.

Is there a “block universe”, where all of time is laid out to God’s eye-view, with humans only perceiving a small slice as they advance along their world-lines? Or is the future not yet written, but exists in some quantum level of possibility and probability?

In this conversation we will touch upon the physical aspects of time, attempting to make the physics clear to non-scientists. Undoubtedly, this will lead us to psychological, and perhaps spiritual time. Who knows where the thoughts will take us, but it seems very likely that the specious present and the multiverse will also come up…

Recorded April 24, 2024.

[cuddywifter]

Thank you Olga for bringing in Bohm's implicate order from the point of view of time. Bohms notion of temporal view is rarely talked about. To add there are inequivalent vacuum states by which photons can be made to unfold out of the vacuum similar to the way you say aboyt memory

[collegephysicsforeveryone]

Time only changes relative to each other. Absolute time is a thing when time doesn't have to exist in our space. A program is stored in a file. The whole program is written and sitting there and sometimes it takes time to run the program but the absolute time is nothing because the program is sitting in a folder waiting to be used. If we are a part of that folder we constantly experience pieces of the folder but that doesn't mean they make sense until the program is run. The only thing this points to is that we are laying in a cold fluid under someone elses control. Wether that someone else is truly us is still up for debate.

[francescoangeli]

Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, 1896:

"Questions relating to subject and object, to their distinction and their union, should be put in terms of time rather than space”.

"In reality there is no one rhythm of duration; it is possible to imagine many different rhythms which, slower or faster, measure the degree of tension or relaxation of different kinds of consciousness, and thereby fix their respective places in the scale of being".

[cuddywifter]

In quantum theory, one could view the complex conjugate of the wave function as if it were coming from the future. Were the past and future wave functions meet an event emerges or becomes actualized.

The problem is under relativity no one can agree on when this actualized event took place? Contrary to popular, there is nothing in quantum theory nor phenomena that is there evidence of collapse.

[collegephysicsforeveryone]

Physics uses abstraction to explain literally everything... so what is their problem? I guess the fact that conciousness and time are both non physical