Mathematician explains time is an illusion | Edward Frenkel and Lex Fridman

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GUEST BIO:
Edward Frenkel is a mathematician at UC Berkeley working on the interface of mathematics and quantum physics. He is the author of Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality.

PODCAST INFO:

SOCIAL:

[LexClips]

Guest bio: Edward Frenkel is a mathematician at UC Berkeley working on the interface of mathematics and quantum physics. He is the author of Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality.

[anitachu]

Love this guest. Not much he talked about, but issues he did address, very objective, precise and open-minded. Thank you, both.

[tekannon]

Professor Frenkel gives us another view of the inescapable paradox we find ourselves fighting with and marveling at all of our lives. In a sense, once we first get an inkling of what time is, from that moment on, everything becomes goalposts that we must kick the ball through to get through another minute, hour, day or month and especially, a year. We see the trace of time on our faces as photos in a drawer that were forgotten, suddenly cause us to pause and hold our breath in seeing what we looked like all those years ago. It is always unkind to us as it steals our youth, robs our beauty, dulls our minds and finally kills us off with toxins that find the weakest organ of choice and transform our bodies back to dust. Time is our master, but we master time as well...

[JeffNixonComedy]

No I’m not late boss, because you ain’t even real ok? Now, about that very real raise I asked you about…

[shaydeArtell]

I had a NDE and was told that everything is made of love and light and everything else is illusion. Apparently numbers and songs are how they communicate with us so I’ve been obsessed with numbers since 😬

[decipheredofficial]

We need to start giving the origins of Zen Buddhism some credit in these types of conversations.

[morphixnm]

The "marching forward of time" is an abstraction related to our experience of change, which is in turn the result of what is actual and physically real: things in motion.

Mathematics and geometry are essentially measurements, and just as there are no meters in a road or grams in a stone, there is no math or geometry "in" the universe, just in the minds and findings of mathematicians and geometers.

[johndrake]

They’ve done experiments involving a small digital display that flashes an arbitrary number, say 50.

This display’s flicker rate is too fast for the human eye to see the number, when a person is just standing there look at it.

Now, they have the same person climb to an elevated height, hold the display out in front of themselves and jump into a net below - as they fall they look at the display, and presto, they can read the number.

They suspect, “being in the zone” is this phenomenon of time slowing down.

[AnthonyGiallourakis]

It's all so simple. There are four coordinates for every bit of information. What we experience is the participation on three given coordinates, with the fourth being swapped for one of the three and back again to another. Think of it as X, Y, and Z, in which one of those coordinates changes to T, and then T changes back again. When the change is made, the information is what we call a wave. When the change is made again, it's what we perceive as a particle. All information is bound by an existence with three given coordinates, with T alternating with either X or Y or Z. This alternation can be thought of as a vibration.

[spacepodi]

Good of him to take the time to explain all of that. I can’t waste my time to hear it though.

[aga]

Maybe our minds are set up in that way to operate, conceptualise in this reality as we perceive it, but at the core, we are spiritual, meaning some parts of our being, without confines of brain, exist in eternity. Actually, C.G.Jung postulated it based on his personal and clinical experiences with numerous people he analized. I'm impressed by wisdom and insights coming from this conversation.

[Parkerhiggs]

If time is not real and history continues to repeat itself.. what remains constant?

Human interactions, human reactions during similar economic and political environments or cycles

[AbigBuffalo]

Time seems to me to be the byproduct of changing phases, not a force of itself, but more so like the center of a whirlpool that is not there but yet still is only because of the shape which whirls around it. We as conscious entities that record memory can see each iteration and our mind recreates the illusion of time for us. “Time” is a name for the vortex of all processes simultaneously merging.

I like the last point that you make, Lex, about consciousness forming on earth and its’ quality of keeping memory as something it seems to “love” generating.

[chinnpatel]

3:51 Within Hinduism, it is believed that there is no such concept of time as we know it. Existence is eternity, and we only delve into the realm of time or timekeeping when we become a part of a universe (i.e. we are born and living). Another related concept is that everything is cyclical, meaning that we are born with this body and with our relationships, but once we die, we shed this body and those relationships. Then once again, we embody a new body. Same cyclical nature is applied to a universe. There are infinite universes that are created and destroyed at different points in time. Outside of a universe, however, there's just existence. But once a universe is pushed into motion/creation, until its death, we keep time to make sense of different aspects of life within that universe. And a point of clarification regarding the illusion of existence, etc., is that everything is real, but it's all temporary apart from our conscious selves (along with God, choicest devotee, governors of each universe, and base material from which universes are made, if you believe in such things).

[thegrey]

Mathematics is a language that communicate relationships, but you need time, intuition and inspiration to discover those relationship.

It is like saying all the people in the future will all be English speakers. Mathematics just expresses ideas more precisley and accurately than English. You can take the proof of infinite primes as an example. I can explain in it in English but only the mathematical statement is self-evident and verifiable.

[_VICK_]

I can listen to this guy talk all day long

[nickduplaga]

Velocity of light doesn’t change instead more light is seen in more time. Time is an observation. Gravitational time dilation (measured) makes the external observer see an object experience less time progression. The universe can look at an object not progressing in time, but the time dilated object always sees information from the universe such as light arrive at the same velocity where events seen are elongated in time, and since there is no 0 limit from the internal perspective the gravitational time dilation allows an illusion of information incoming from a temporary predicted future, and when time dilation ends internal perspective sees the information from the present retaining future information since the universe couldn’t progress into the same future yet, causality was an illusion of time, and one perspective seen information from the future, so events become changeable. If you froze, you would also freeze the gravity interaction needed to keep you frozen, so you don’t freeze, instead a temporary future is seen while the inverse perspective has a limit of seeing you frozen as it’s not interacting with the gravity. Same with velocity time dilation. Universe not experiencing gravity has a limit of seeing velocity of an object make it progress in time less into a 0 limit, and this velocity is the speed of light/gravity. Extra dimensions can see future information while being in a quantum superposition that sometimes is quantum entangled with the expanding universe time present, and then that temporary future is already a bridge while being in future locations of future space, where you can become intangible from the universe perspective, as the universe has a limit of seeing 0, while the objects true location is ahead in time, and therefore within a future location of space that the universe can’t measure from it’s perspective.

[TerryBollinger]

I can't resist doing this, knowing very well no one will take it seriously (that's part of the fun):

Yes, time _is_ an illusion, and so is space. But that is only because both are created _locally_ (“frame perspective”) by condensed matter and local fields slicing up a more fundamental distance-squared (actually, length-duration to us) metric. Go below the local spacetime resolution, and you get quantum mechanics. Expand beyond the point where all clocks are in synch — that is, to the point where the combination of motion and internal binding creates multiple observer frames — and you get special relativity.

Within such finite-extent regions, the very fact they have boundaries also means they have finite resolutions. Anything too detailed becomes math noise — bugs, really — created by overgeneralizing the effectiveness of the pre-quantum, pre-relativity maths of the 1700s and 1800s. These maths generalized classical xyzt physics in the belief it was "deeper" than dumb-old ordinary matter.

The sad truth is that neither dimensions nor orthogonalities are free, including the ones in math. That's because these "simple" concepts don't even exist at large scales without the availability of clumpier, mostly-bound forms of condensed matter, in particular atoms, to help create them. Any maths that ignore the local nature of space and time inevitably generate dreadful levels of information-is-free noise that has nothing to do with experimental physics.

The observable universe is the only formal model we have that both works and manages to avoid paradoxes— and _that_ system is profoundly averse to infinities.

[Xxcyclonexx]

Time is truly an illusion, it is a measure of change, how would I know time has passed if my hair never grew, the sun never set, I never got hungry,

[someguynamedvictor]

Has anyone created an idea around time absoluteness. That the experience of time is localized in a sense. Where time has already technically ended at any given point but we view it from the inside out. Like a needle dropping onto a record, our experience of time begins. Since we only see and hear what is hitting the needle for that time it would appear there was no past or future, just that moment, however the beginning middle and ends were already decided, it was simply us observing it in what we only think is real-time.