Craig Callender - Is Time Real?

What does it mean for time to be real? Is time the ultimate stage on which all events play? Some physicists and philosophers would say no, time is an illusion; time is not real. How can that be? Is our sense of time all wrong?



Craig Callender is a philosopher of science and professor of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego.


Closer to Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

[Bassotronics]

Time is relative to each person who is currently alive.
What makes us so special that we who are alive right now are experiencing “present time”? Would time even make sense for those who have problems or absence of memory?

[Dworld]

I think that our struggle with the concept of time comes from our inability to understand space. We think we know what space is, but we are likely off the mark.

[bearnadloh]

In the morning when you woke up from your bedroom you walk to the wash room, that space covered takes time.Simple and direct explanation, bombastic answers and theories only distort the TIME.

[johnnisshansen]

The room is the old library at the university in the center of Copenhagen the capital of Denmark

[kalapitrivedi]

The language is the barrier in seeing reality

[Johannes_Brahms]

Past and future are only in our mind. They are thoughts. Our experience of time, as a result from past versus future, is based on concepts and is therefore not based on reality as such. Since we are only able to really experience this very moment, we can not experience time as a real phenomenon. We can only conclude that there is time because of our experience of movement in space. We need space to have time, so time is kind of a 4th dimension.
But actually I think this is all mental games and has nothing to do with reality. It's entertainment that we hang on to, to escape this very moment that feels so threatening to us.

But this is also entertainment etc.

At about 40 I remember looking into the mirror and seeing an awful lot of wrinkels on my face for the very first time. This was very confusing because I was the same person as ever, "me". This makes me draw the conclusion that spacetime is a playground for consciousnes, which stays beyond time and space. That means that consciousnes is either nowhere or all over the place, or both, which means it's inseparable. So you and I are the same person: God.
I think it's nice to know and it certainly gives the "seeker" piece. But for the rest everything stays the same.

[jamiemccartney]

Our memories are creating times but time is what we use as life forms to measure our movement in space but everything in the universe has its own way of moving in space so time only exists in our reality because we are able to recognise it and use it as a way to keep things in order. Time is real to anyone or anything that has an impact on our planet, even if we never evolved here, earth would still age and one day die.

[jimhowaniec]

Been waiting in these interviews.... Not there yet. But this may be the best yet.

[wolfeyes]

Time is a tricky thing to grasp.

We measure it because of the motion of something, be that cogs in an old clock, vibrations in a crystal, or even the movement/ energy state of an atom.

Gravity affects time, it slows it down the closer you are to it.
Having said that though, if you put a clock on the earth and one in a plane flying up high, time for the plane slows down.
I feel that's also because of motion as the plane is moving while the one on the ground is still.

Gravity bends space and so that's why time gets affected as both space and time are connected.
If you meet a friend at a coffee shop, you do so in space ( a coordinate ) and at a particular time.
If you change that space, time changes with it.
Is that because the space is shorter or longer and hence, takes more or less time to travel across?

It also changes depending on your perspective.
If you are falling into say, a black hole, time for you continues.
If you are an observer on the outside watching that person falling in, the closer they get to the event horizon, the slower time for them seems to become.
To the point that they seem to slow down and then simply fade from existence as the light from them gets red-shifted.

It seems to me so far though that time is a tricky thing because in all of these examples, the thing doing the measuring, say an atomic clock, gets affected by things such as gravity, motion etc.
So is it really time that changes or is the thing doing the measuring being changed by such things as gravity, motion, speed etc?

If gravity changes how fast or slow an atom moves, is it just that atom being slowed down or time itself, whatever that may be?

Just to add, there is another idea of time and that's Entropy.
A thermodynamic quantity represents the unavailability of a system's thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work.
In other words, things going from order to chaos in a system.

[larsfaye]

From what I've learned personally/intuitively through

Chronology is "real". Time is "measurement". Simultaneity is "truth".

[ailblentyn]

I don’t see the point of all of Smolin’s ideas, but I do like his basic idea that physicists think time is an illusion just because mathematical structure can’t capture it. I guess that was Goedel’s attitude too.

[DOW-E]

Holy smokes me head can’t catch any of this, plus the comment section. This is so bloody fascinating, love it! You are a smart audience.

[audiodead]

As others have pointed out, space and time are intimately connected. I suspect we won't properly understand time until we understand even more fundamental things.

[evanjameson]

even a memory is in the moment--think that through

[mikessoupcan]

People get old and deteriorate over time, time is real.

[exitolaboral]

I don't think that equations are real. They are just models that might be practical or not, but fundamentally all models are wrong, they are just models of reality. The map (the equations) is not the territory (reality). So I feel that the four dimensional model, is just that, a model. Reality is something else. And physicists continually improve models, they improve their equations, but you know, they are always aproximations in that sense they are not "real".

[havenbastion]

Change is the substrate of material reality and all physical processes can be understood in relation to it. Time is experienced or measured change.

[saturdaysequalsyouth]

I forget who said it but I heard someone say once "Time isn't real but we're trapped in it"

[B.S...]

Relativity says time is not absolute but it still flows. Schrodinger's equation says time flows. The future no matter if it is determined or not, exists... moment by moment you head in the direction of your inevitable and inescapable fate.

[malna-malna]

coincidentally, near death experiencers have been telling us this forever: there is no time