Lee Smolin Public Lecture: Time Reborn

What is time? Is our perception of time passing an illusion which hides a deeper, timeless reality? Or is it real, indeed, the most real aspect of our experience of the world? Perimeter Institute Faculty member Lee Smolin examines these and other timely questions from his book Time Reborn during his April, 2013 Perimeter Institute Public Lecture.

[John_Longbow]

Presented by Canada Dry Ginger Ale " The soft drink so tasty, it makes you re-evaluate space-time itself "

[JorgeLetria]

This is a scientist with balls. We need a lot more of this.

[jakecarlo]

@36:30 It strikes me that Prof. Smolin‘s description of time is exactly what a certain French philosopher who shall not be named was driving at with the “critique of presence” i.e. that the future (and the past) can’t be treated as only a “modified present.” The future holds things that are genuinely new. The past is available to us, but only in traces.

[tensevo]

It's about time that theoretical physicists climbed out of their own arses, and acknowledged that the universe, and time, exist outside of their models.

[Iandefor]

Fascinating! Touched on a lot of issues I have been pondering for a while. Smolin is such an interesting thinker to me.

[KipIngram]

30:35 - This is resonating with me. There are a whole host of things that hard core scientists try to claim that just have never seemed anything but ridiculous to me. Don't get me wrong - I like science quite a lot. But *of course* time is real. *Of course* we have free will. *Of course* consciousness is not an illusion (what would be experiencing the illusion, if it were?). These are just completely obvious elements of what it's like to be in the world, as far as I'm concerned. When a framework of science gets so far afield that it loses contact with things like this, I think it's getting lost.

Now, to be clear, there are other things that someone might claim fall into this category. What about "*of course* velocities directly add" - that's an example. But that is not in the same category. Velocities *seem* to directly add, but I can recognize that my base of experience is restricted to very small velocities, and things might be different outside of that narrow realm of my experience. And I accept that they *are* different - as far as I'm concerned Einstein's thinking in this area has been completely and thoroughly validated. The things I'm talking about (like the two things I started off with) are different - they lie precisely within our experience, and there are no "outside of experience" arenas to draw on for "disproof examples." I'd go so far to say that time and free will are almost the entire basis of our conscious experience.

Science is about modeling reality. Reality is nothing if it's not the sum of our experiences. When you have to remove major components of reality in order to get your model to work, you've got a bad model. It has shock value, and there seems to be some marketing value in that - saying audacious things get attention. But it hardly strikes me as seeking the truth.

[geekcrossing]

Fabulous talk. For me, it helped to run at 1.5 speed, but freeze when they show the slides.

[Raydensheraj]

Lee Smolin - the embodiment of a highly super intelligent person that is highly unhappy with the standard model. I admit, I love his Books. Especially his Fecund Universe hypothesis has many interesting points and his work shows he really is thinking outside of the box - unfortunately those of us involved know that the Standard Model is highly successful - but it leaves many questions that will lead automatically to breakthroughs.
It's like this - so long we can't figure out Quantum Gravity nothing else really matters.
But obviously we need guys like Smolin - too many Quantum physics / String Theory followers and less classic Relativity Physicists like Smolin or Penrose... Science goes where the funding is NOT the highly speculative... Those times ended in the 60/70ies.

[DiscoGreen]

He's spot on. Even the Cosmological natural selection. Win different universes doesn't explain how the first universe was born..

[KipIngram]

It's impossible for me to imagine that anyone *truly* believes they have no free will. People say those words, but they give lie to them by the way they live their lives. No one lives as though they are a puppet.

[nozack]

'The questions are more important than the answers.'

Great, I'm much better at questions than answers.

[yendorelrae]

Smolin sounds like a true godfather!....I like his science but love his voice!

[biljanapercinkova]

This is an excellent lecture. I enjoyed and plan to listen to it 6 more times (because among many other time immutable laws one sais that you know something after repeating it 7 times :) ) I am glad to learn that Einstein pondered on the notion of NOW having realized it is not captured by science. I've delivered hundreds of lectures in mathematical and technical sciences and know that students love these kind of reasoning; surely there is a sparkle in Lee. It is true that today new kinds of models are being developed in which time is absent and the relations are in terms of A(B), B(C), C(A, B) where A, B, C are directly observable. It is interesting that Lee's opponent Carlo Rovelli brought me here (opponent, but dear friend). In his book "What if Time Does Not Exist?" he remembers Lee Smolin's honesty and integrity as a scientist when he proposed that Carlo should publish the first paper on loop quantum gravity rather than publish the first historic paper as co-authors. His honesty as a scientist is visible in this lecture as well and it is not common in the world I know from my own experience.

[fazzaz]

I read Henri Bergson maybe twenty years ago and he profoundly influenced my thinking about time as a fundamental property/aspect of our physical universe in fundamental ways (I'm a professional photographer, so "capturing time" is an ongoing interest of mine.)
[Bergson, Time and Free Will, 1889; Matter and Memory, 1896, etc.]

Smolin has expanded on Bergson's philosophical efforts and moved Henri's conjectures from the metaphysical into the mundane "scientific" and experimental/ refutable plane, as is proper, science being a subset of "metaphysics" with Smolin's expertise in "practicable/real" physics. [Karl Popper ~ "no theory (metaphysics) is completely correct, but some substantial portion must be subject to falsifiability, which is to say, subject to objective experiment by multiple observers"]

I've always objected to Platonism (laws, models, that somehow exist beyond our perception - "universal laws, objects, i/0 gates, rules & regulations out there" - in modern theories of science and mathematics (not just in religion), and Smolin has supplied me some powerful theoretical arguments to refute Plato.

As for Smolin's universe "bounce" creation theory, Sir Roger Penrose has also proposed the same argument (Sir Roger has also made the observation that our present cosmology is "not even wrong".).

[conorosirideain]

A very interesting talk but there were many things he said that nagged at me during the lecture. For instance I fail to see how logic and time are at opposition at all! In type theory we take the function to be a primitive concept, this structure fully captures the notion of change hence equivalently time. Hell even proofs have attached to them a notion of one fact following from another. Time is inescapable

[ToxisLT]

Time _is_ an illusion - if you are traveling at _c_ * ... but if you are locked to this particular configuration ** via e=hv - you get a gift of experience with a curse of time;)





--
* I know this has some weird implications - like there should be lot's and lot's of "experience" on the boundaries of black holes:)

** Yes, I mean one of many universes;)
edit:un-html5'ing ;)

[mondopinion]

Someone - can't remember who - once said "There is only one I." Big I, billions of little windows. Along those lines, why must the 'inside' of black holes each be separate when everything which separates their location is collapsed? Perhaps there is only one black hole on the 'inside.' Reproducing or . . ?

[StephenCRose]

Remarkably helpful since there IS a single REALITY -- All there is. There is no final distinction between the truths of science and those of philosophy. Triadic Philosophy is based on these premises.

[Dr.TJ]

For me, one of the key indicators that time is real is that traveling backwards in time is impossible because to do so would require traveling faster than the speed of light, which we know is impossible. Thankfully, that eliminates all the time paradox problems. And although time dilation is real, no matter how fast you travel up to the speed of light, time is still moving forward, just at different rates. That to me indicates that time is real and not an illusion.

[StephenCRose]

Finally some recognition of Peirce by science and cosmology. To read him, CP is an online PDF with much of his work -- convert it to word and enjoy.