Time at Sea | Episode 1101 | Closer To Truth

Is time the ultimate stage on which all events play? Some physicists and philosophers say No -- time is an Illusion; time is not real. How can that be? Is time real? Featuring interviews with Max Tegmark, Huw Price, Dean Rickles, Fotini Markopoulou, Andreas Albrecht, Antony Garrett Lisi, Raphael Bousso, Scott Aaronson, Sean Carroll, David Eagleman, David Albert, and Julian Barbour.

Season 11, Episode 1 - #CloserToTruth

Closer To Truth host Robert Lawrence Kuhn takes viewers on an intriguing global journey into cutting-edge labs, magnificent libraries, hidden gardens, and revered sanctuaries in order to discover state-of-the-art ideas and make them real and relevant.

Closer to Truth 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.

#Time #Reality

[jmzorko]

When I first read Edwin Abbott's "Flatland" years ago, it struck me how in a 2D space, time was the 3rd dimension. In our 3D world, any interaction by a 4D object would appear to us as moving through time as well. It's interesting to consider the premise that in any world of n phenomenologically spatial dimensions, time is the dimension represented by n + 1 i.e. what appears as time to inhabitants of the nD world appears as a spatial vs. temporal dimension to inhabitants of an (n + 1)D world. When these world overlap, the dimension ordinally represented as n + 1 is both temporal (to nD inhabitants) and spatial (to (n + 1)D inhabitants).

Anyway, Edwin Abbott's "Flatland" is an _amazingly_ cool book - part math, part sci-fi, part philosophy - that really asks some _very_ interesting questions :-)

[timmarshall]

It’s a fascinating subject. Honestly, I am none the wiser even though I enjoyed the program greatly.

[wingflanagan]

Excellent. This episode is a perfect example of why I subscribe to this channel. Keep 'em coming!

[uzzivalencia]

Hey folks, there is a typo in your title for this video. Someone accidentally wrote "Closer to Turth"!

[jimsleestak]

It was quite fun watching you clamber about the Nordic hills and defy the waves in the inflatable boat. I bet you slept like a rock that night. I’d totally watch a series where you live in a rustic cabin in the woods for a year. Chopping wood, the aforementioned clambering, bathing in icy streams. You’d finish the show looking like Hugh Jackman. And singing like him if you bathe in the icy streams.

[JorgePerez-cywq]

I like to think of time with this metaphor:

Imagine you are walking down a straight path in a dark cavern or cave. You have a lantern that lights up a small radius around you. As you move forward along this path in the cavern you are only able to see the point of the path that is lit up by your lantern. You are walking continuously so that point along the path is always changing and at any given point, all you can see is the present point of the path that your lantern is currently allowing you to see. It seems as if the path you have already walked across disappears (into the past) and you cannot see what lies ahead (in the future). I believe that in this same way, we perceive time in the present. We can no longer see the points in time that we have already traversed (the past), nor can we see the points in time that lie ahead (the future). But as with the thought experiment in the cavern, we know that the entire cavern exists (even the parts of the cavern that we already crossed or have yet to walk along), we just can’t see it. In the same way I believe it is totally possible that the past and present in time may exist continuously and fundamentally, we just didn’t evolve with the ability to see them. We can only “see” the present. Only the present is “lit up” for us to see, but the past and future may very well always be there.

[garybala]

Thank you for another challenging video, this one on the mysterious issue of time.

My 2 cents on your final questions.

1. Is time real? (Or an illusion?)
My view is that time is “real” enough on a practical everyday basis for us homo sapiens who are embedded in our space-time matrix with its arrow of time. Entropy and the Second Law explain it well enough.

I see time however as a “mental convention” to help us make sense of our world and interpret it as “reality.”

2. Is time fundamental?
My view is no. Based on Einstein’s special relativity, we know that time itself can slow for a hypothetical observer traveling at the speed of light in our macro universe. While general relativity shows that time is part of the “space-time” fabric which conceptually bends to explain how gravity works.

This to me means time is malleable and limited in concept, thus not eternal or fundamental.

Further if our Big Bang literally brought the space-time matrix into existence, then time could not conceivably be fundamental but “created.”

As for the direction of time, we know that nothing in the laws of physics mandates that it flows as “past-present-future.”

Indeed, a recent model put forward by physicists suggests a Reverse Mirror Universe on the other side of the Big Bang where time runs backwards and anti-matter dominates.


Thus, I conclude that neither time nor its direction are fundamental.

Rather, I am persuaded that time is ultimately emergent from something more fundamental or primordial, as mentioned as a possibility in your video.

What is that? To know that will require more discovery, more exploration, more knowledge.

Many thanks again for your video.

[sinebar]

Time is the rate at which everything in the universe changes. And the universe is and always will be in a state of change.

[mediocrates]

Causality is NOT violated: what matters is responsibility and, we still have it.

[xaviervelascosuarez]

We use time to measure change. The question would be: is time just a mental category or is it the context that makes change possible, in other words, is time inherent to change? Obviously, without time change is not possible. Since change is undeniable, ergo, time is also an undeniable objective reality. If space is the neighborhood where matter abides, time is the street along which inexorably proceeds the change from matter to energy—and back—and all the changes that go with it. In a way, space and time are sides of one coin: look at it as the "container" of matter, and you see space; look at the constant mutation of matter, and you see time.

[CoreyChambersLA]

Time is an excellent example of human subjectivity that obstructs objective science. Our minds are stuck on a timeline that is not fundamental to the multiverse.

[IAMD]

My thoughts is “ time exists as an relationship to matter. Though time exists different for all different materials that exist as matter.

[FalkFlak]

imho, it's way easier to imagine a space where objects move in relation to each other with no time happening at all than a space where objects sit there and then a metaphysical time flow effect just happens.
I wonder, is there a physical "proof" of time?

[laurisolups]

Premieres in 25 hours? I guess that settles the question then.

[RogerBays]

'Time is comparison of motion, the minute hand of my watch rotates as my eggs boil.'

[alexthompson]

@8:36 "everything is relative". Is One of My Personal Favorite Terms for Clarity.🤔🤔 🙃🤡🙃

[wayneasiam]

Time is different when I'm having fun compared to boring events

[tomkwake]

If the Singularity is supersymmetrically real and exists prior to the breaking of symmetry, why can't both exist in this moment of "now" time? While space-time initiated ~13.8 billion years ago from a earth-time perspective, all the forces, waves. and matter are still dynamically existing in this moment of "now", so that two types of time appear to co-exist, supersymmetric time and broken symmetric time. Both have mathematical foundations, but only one has space-time. So if the view is from a brokent symmetric space-time, then at the Planck length and time, this broken symmetric time is where the space-time mathematics breaks down, which in human coonsciousness terms can appear as an illusion. My vote is that there is a duality in time, one is fundamental and real, at the same time can be viewed as a mathematical illusion or hologram, relative to a mathematical perspective.

[firstnamesurname]

What about 'Space'?

For example, if there is Pure Space without any sort of entity in it ... Then, that space should be dimensionless ( not 1D, not 2D, not 3D, not 4D, etc etc etc ) but at the same time undistinguishable of having infinite dimensions at once ... without size but at the same time the potential container for all the multidimensional vectors ...

It seems that the intuitions about space tend to be way more abstract than the intuitions about time ... while 'time' requires 'change' of 'things in space' to exist ... space seems to be flexible to exist without time and within time ...

Plus, The human brain seems to be working in space for deploying an inertial space-time narrative, and next that narrative excludes its spatial nature for abstracting temporal narratives ... but those temporal narratives about the past and the future never become manifested in space ... then, Space collapse in a block universe where past, present, and future happens at the same 'Space' ...

Plus, the current observations seem to appoint for an overall Flat Space but challenging because other observations about 'The Past' seem to appoint to a 'Curved space' ...

Maybe, it is not C what tells matter/energy what to do ... instead, matter/energy behaves in different spatial forms bellow and abode that parameter ...

For example, if something can be stopped from all the inertial forces in a universe, that something will become the space from another universe ... if a something can move faster than C, then that something becomes the radiant AdS Space envelope from its universe, therefore, disappearing from all the entities of that universe traveling bellow C ...

Both entities, The unmoved and the fast-moving disappear from the universe but the faster preserves a relationship with its universe ... Meanwhile, the unmoved breaks all those relationships transitioning between discrete continuum spaces ...

Of course, to write about this is worst than Democritus talking about atoms in ancient Greece. Just Philosophical Speculations ...

[jamiesaunders]

One thing that strikes me is is the amount of times time crops up in everyday language.