A New Theory of Time - Lee Smolin

Is it possible that time is real, and that the laws of physics are not fixed? Lee Smolin, A C Grayling, Gillian Tett, and Bronwen Maddox explore the implications of such a profound re-think of the natural and social sciences, and consider how it might impact the way we think about surviving the future.

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[DormantIdeasNIQ]

I see time as a sequence of states that make it appear to our minds as time.
...and that is why rewinding of time is not possible.
If motion is frozen(all vectors of forces still in force) then 'time' also freezes.
Thus time is a perception not an entity. Time is absolute.
but he says moment to moment!?

[jamesziegenbalg]

I see a lot of folks here giving grief to Smolin for his ideas, to those of you I say this - read his books. His public speaking is a 5, but his writing is a 10. I havent yet read his latest book, but "the trouble with physics", and his postulate of cosmic natural selection through black hole formation are some of the most brilliant and original musings on theoretical physics you will find anywhere.

There is no circular reasoning in anything this man comes up with. Everything he promotes makes firm predictions, follows irrefutable logic, and most importantly, is 100% falsifiable.

He gets shunned as a charlatan by some string thoerists, as if he were insulting their religion, when all he has done is correctly assert that strong theory is unfalsifiable, messy, and hasnt produced any new breakthroughs on its own merit, for the past 25 years, despite having garnered the vast majority of grants, doctorates, and public attention during that time.

I understand that string theory is beautiful, but so was the copernican sacred geometry, and all that did was suck in great minds for a hundred years until it was finally proven to be false.

String thoery shouldnt be abandoned, nobody is saying that, but we've hit the limit of what good we can draw from it, which is essentially nothing but self assured circular math. Its time to stop ignoring other promising theories in favor of what essentially amounts to scientific dogma.

There are huge problems with our best theories right now. Quantum mechanics is brilliant, but messy, and doesnt account for time or gravity, and relativity is also brilliant, but has holes. Its predictions on the grandest scales, requiring the addition of exotic and invisible "dark" matter and energy to fit your observations with our math. Math which also breaks down into incomprehensible infinities at quantum scales.

Im not sure many will make this connection, but in his opening, Smolin noted that expanding a fixed frame model into the infinity of the universe is a methid that has been proven unreliable.

Like string theorists of today, newtons math works well on small scales, being the logical fellow he was, he rationalized that his flat geometry of space could be expanded to any frame of reference, and his predictions would hold. They didnt. Scientists observed strange patterns in the orbit of mercury, which didnt fit with newtons predictions, so they invented complicated "fixes" to force observation to match newtonian mechanics. Until Einstein came along and uprooted newtonian mechanics by showing that flat geometry only works up to a certain scale, and replaced it with a new outlandish theory, curved spacetime geometry, that worked on scales so large that newton couldnt have even imagined them, and in which his physics fell apart.

All smolin is saying is that we find ourselves on the brink of just such a transformative epoch.

The predictions of relativity are breaking down on scales much larger than einstein had access to, as well as on the tiniest of scales, and quantum mechanics is incredible but has too many working parts, and the forces involved are inexplicably arbitrary. String theory is an attempt to unify two incomplete theories, and as such it inherits the problems of both, along with the added bonus of being impossible to disprove, and of not making any predictions which cant already be made and explained using current theories. It might be true, its a really clever idea, but in its current form, its only a little more useful to science than the bible, and is proving to be defended by its propinents in a similarly dogmatic way.

[robinblankenship]

"paradigm shift in the entertwining of politics/social theory and physics strikes me as one of the most dangerous notions possible.

[anthonyalexzander]

It took me two hours to sit through this 24 minute video.

[alexsnowberg]

I once knew a physicist that was working on the idea that time is our awareness of the expansion of space. He passed away before publishing anything. I didn't understand his explanations, but I remember him saying that Einsteins space time is incomplete. That in fact it's "expanding space time". Space and time are different sides of the same thing because space is expanding and creates "quantum holes" which must be filled. The holes being filled created by space expanding is what we feel as time because these "quantum holes" allow us to go from point A to point B in space, or some such craziness that I don't understand. I also remember him saying something about if space didn't expand we could not travel through it. It would be like a solid and there could be no motion, energy or time. He claimed to have the math, but it sounds crazy to me.

[weaseldragon]

How much we want something to be true has no bearing on whether it actually is true.

[clcr]

"Laws of nature evolving" see Rupert Sheldrake, already had this idea, Nature is habitual, not law like

[ftammaro]

Its time for the rebirth of common sense.

[nagilumx]

I recently viewed Brian Greene's B-Theory of Time. In it, he claims that time does not flow moment by moment from the future through the present and into the past, but that each moment eternally exists in the universe around us as does space. For instance, a particular one occurring on the night of December 31, 1999. Now my question is this: If this is true, doesn't the audience think we could use an observatory computer to calculate the exact coordinates in the Milky Way of the Earth on a given moment on that date, and venture there, and thereafter revisit it? Of course. But in reality, when we get there, it's not there. Why not? We arrived at the planet's correct spatial coordinates--but not its right TEMPORAL coordinates! To do so, we need to GO BACK IN TIME to that desired moment. That proves the moment we desire to relive resides in the PAST. In conclusion, what we must do from this time forward is no longer philosophize that the flow of time is an illusion, but search with devices like the LHC at CERN for a particle whose function constitutes the physical basis for time.

[LocoGeorge]

I really respect Lee Smolin, he's one of the most unique and insightful minds in theoretical and philosophical physics.

[osyfuture]

I lol'ed at this. There is no hope for modern physics. :(

[JoeRobinsonOn]

The idea is that time is a construct of our consciousness should not be avoided because of fear. The idea has great implications yes but none that would affect us in our experience of our physical world because it exists for us in this existence and has great implications for us regardless of if time is just a limitation/ability of our consciousness. Our world and universe is ours regardless of if it has any implications for anyone else.

[eXtremeDR]

Uncertain future - nature solved this problem very elegant. Nature maintains highest possible diversity at any given time. This ensures, regardless what the future holds, that existence continues. Unless we adapt this highest principle for our civilization - it's only a matter of time when we'll extinct.

[Sam_Utah]

Dr. Smolin, like a symphony conductor, disciplines his orchestra of ideas to a cresendo but he forgot his conductor baton and he should have one to occupy his left hand. Regardless, his revelation is music to my ears. The symphony remains unfinished but with agency and novelty we face the danger and opportunity of today's red flag world with a modicum of encouragement. The future is not fixed, we have agency, creativity and force. We find courage in Dr. Smolin's resolve that we have agency over the emergent future, we can impact experience, one person makes a difference. Timeless truth mutates and reverses into the truth of evolution in time. It may be an evolving pattern set of fractal developments expanding previous patterns and rolling out constant variation in an expanding and changing reality. My intuition is that even our precious self is a process, a changing, moving fountain of waves, continually transcending past structure. Thank you Dr. Smolin!

[glyphiest]

So he says he'll explain what the new theory is plainly.. and basically just says he has a new theory of time.. But after 10 mins of plainly talking, I had to stop watching because there wasn't anything I could actually hear explains what this new version of time is. He's not the greatest communicator. He could've just explained how his version is different in three dot points.

[Astroboy]

Mr. Smolin, with respect your notion of time is conventional and limited in scope. Here is the proper definition of time which has extra-terrestrial origins. The closest translation available is: "Time is nothing more than an arbitrary and relative measure of the change in the physical state or set of coordinates of a given object to another physical state or another set of coordinates in three dimensional space". Basically every object that exists in the physical universe has its own relative time. This means that there is no such thing as the "present" and that an event which may have occurred at one set of coordinates in the past relative to one observer may have not yet occurred relative to another observer at another set of coordinates. In essence this is relativistic time. It also means that there is no such thing as a single homogeneous time in the universe where all events follow a single arrow of time. This is nothing but illusion.

[edwardjohnfreedman]

Might the "now" moment be how decoherence is expressed in the time dimension of space-time? So, in space we experience solid matter (as opposed to the wave it emerged from) and in time we experience the "now". The implication would be that time is emergent from mass, not fundamental. Also, the arrow of time would therefore be the result of our continuously expanding universe, which in turn "stretches" all matter, which in turn generates a continuous flow of new "now" moments. Another implication of this way of thinking is that entropy is the result of our expanding universe.

[naimulhaq]

Time is not 'real' may mean/imply it is complex, as Einstein realized.
Perhaps its complex nature gives it a fractal nature.

[bobaldo]

Concepts can, at best, create an imperfect mirror of experience.
The comforting concepts of entity and agency have been traditionally used to create man's conceptual universe. Since the symbol is not "that for which it stands", it is the usefulness of the pattern created by the concepts that matters more than the so-called objective truth of a concept. The relative merits of these patterns can be assessed by science. The Buddhists are right in that the only way to apprehend reality directly is "without thought-coverings" (without concepts).

[LudvigIndestrucable]

His argument seems to be "I don't like the implications of physics", scientists should go away and remake reality till I'm happy with it. To paraphrase a great physicist "the universe doesn't require that you like it"