Why does time advance?: Richard Muller's new theory

A simple question from his wife – Does physics really allow people to travel back in time? – propelled physicist Richard Muller on a quest to resolve a fundamental problem that had puzzled him throughout his 45-year career: Why does the arrow of time flow inexorably toward the future, constantly creating new "nows"?

That quest resulted in a book to be published Sept. 20, NOW: The Physics of Time (W. W. Norton), that delves into the history of philosophers' and scientists' concepts of time, uncovers a tendency physicists have to be vague about time's passage, demolishes the popular explanation for the arrow of time and proposes a totally new theory."Time has been a stumbling block to our understanding of the universe," said Muller, a UC Berkeley professor emeritus who for many years taught a popular introductory course, "Physics for Future Presidents," which he turned into a 2008 book of the same name. "Over my career, I've seen a lot of nonsense published about time, and I started thinking about it and realized I had a lot to say from having taught the subject over many decades, having thought about it, having been annoyed by it, having some really interesting ways of presenting it, and some whole new ideas that have never appeared in the literature."

In commenting on the theory and Muller's new book, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, host of the 2014 TV miniseries “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey,” wrote, "Maybe it's right. Maybe it's wrong. But along the way he's given you a master class in what time is and how and why we perceive it the way we do."

Muller’s new idea: Time is expanding because space is expanding.

"The new physics principle is that space and time are linked; when you create new space, you will create new time," Muller said.

Time kicked off by Big Bang

Ever since the Big Bang explosively set off the expansion of the universe 13.8 billion years ago, the cosmos has been growing, something physicists can measure as the Hubble expansion. They don't think of it as stars flying away from one another, however, but as stars embedded in space and space continually expanding.
Muller takes his lead from Albert Einstein, who built his theory of general relativity – the theory that explains everything from black holes to cosmic evolution – on the idea of a four-dimensional spacetime. Space is not the only thing expanding, Muller says; spacetime is expanding. And we are surfing the crest of that wave, what we call “now.”

"Every moment, the universe gets a little bigger, and there is a little more time, and it is this leading edge of time that we refer to as now," he writes. "The future does not yet exist ... it is being created. Now is at the boundary, the shock front, the new time that is coming from nothing, the leading edge of time."

Because the future doesn't yet exist, we can't travel into the future, he asserts. He argues, too, that going back in time is equally improbable, since to reverse time you would have to decrease, at least locally, the amount of space in the universe. That does happen, such as when a star explodes or a black hole evaporates. But these reduce time so infinitesimally that the effect would be hidden in the quantum uncertainty of measurement – an instance of what physicists call cosmic censorship.

"The only example I could come up with is black hole evaporation, and in that case it turns out to be censored. So I couldn't come up with any way to reverse time, and my basic conclusion is that time travel is not possible," he said.
Muller's theory explaining the flow of time led to a collaboration with Caltech theoretician Shaun Maguire and a paper posted online June 25 that explains the theory in more detail – using mathematics – and proposes a way to test it using LIGO, an experiment that detects gravitational waves created by merging black holes.
If Muller and Maguire are right, then when two black holes merge and create new space, they should also create new time, which would delay the gravitational wave signal LIGO observes from Earth.

Video by Stephen McNally

Additional video provided by:

LIGO-SXS-R. Hurt-T. Pyle
LIGO
NASA
LIGO-T. Pyle
SXS

Music:

"Oxygen Garden" and "Out of the Skies Under the Earth" by Chris Zabriskie

[ChristopherHartbooks]

I am currently finishing Mr. Muller's book, "The Physics of Time." What is so interesting about his perspective is that he's an experimentilist rather than an abstract theorist. To be sure, he covers all of the theories, but he appears not to be sanguine if a theory is promising only on paper but has no way of being tested. And this outlook leads him to say, in this video, that he is perfectly willing for his theory to be wrong, as it needs to be tested. An impressive degree of humility coming from an expert. I wholeheartedly recommend his book.

[joebazooks]

i love his modesty and adherence to actually testing his theory :D

[wird]

I know nothing, but I had a similar thought watching someone interview Tyson.
Seems to me, time and the expanding universe are basically the same thing.
As the universe expands, time progresses.
To go back in time, we would have to find a way to reverse this expanding, but whats the point :)
Perhaps black holes are some kind of time implosion, time falling in on itself, which eventually turns into new time in a new dimension/universe that we are not connected to, time wise at least.

[torresinfesta]

Honestly? One of the best videos I've ever watched on YT.

[FirstLast-cnyf]

Stephen Hawkings (once contradict the idea) said. If time travel is real we can experienced tourist from the future visiting us right now.

Time travel is isn't about our "now's" capability or when or someone already cracked time travel.
Because time travel suggest that future is already in existence. so meaning. people from the future, or in the deep future already crack out time travelling and is visiting us way before.

[bklock]

01:23 "... when this happens, you are locally creating millions of square miles of new space."

Has it occurred to you, that the cosmos has no supernatural characteristics whatsoever, and all such concepts are fictional such as time travel, other spatial dimensions, parallel universes, the multiverse, wormholes, teleportation, singularities, and the bending of space? All that's necessary is a way to describe gravity and cosmology through purely Newtonian physics, exclusively with natural mechanisms that rely only on basic kinetic theory.

Here it is! Gravity is caused by background permeative particle fields. That's why gravity propagates at the speed of light, and why gravity is proportional to mass - because permeative particle fields act continuously on an object's entire volumetric mass. There's only one key necessary to understand why immersion in background permeative particle fields causes gravity:

When an object absorbs particle momentum from the background permeative particle fields, it is by definition only reducing its own upward permeative particle fields.

The new Law Of Physics is this: Continuous immersion in approximately isometric permeative particle fields automatically causes a gravitational effect. [12-13-2020]

[maff]

Space is time its motion you can't go back to something that has already happened its gone, you can't go forward into something that hasn't happened yet there is only now forever

[CarloMarchiori]

Fascinating concept, I look forward to the experimental support suggested in the interview.

[vaishalipatil]

This makes very much sense and explains the arrow of time. The time is expanding with the space. But it doesn't feel like expansion as time has 1 dimension and is expanding in 1 dimension. Just like how the space is expanding in its 3 dimensions.

[thatguy]

1:27
why? why is new space created when this happens? i have found no explanation for this.

[kshitizsharma]

According to your theory, if creating more space simultaneously leads to creating more time, then does that mean that destroying space (don't know if it's possible) can lead to a similar reduction in time and hence, possibly lead to time flowing backwards?

[nadeembajwa]

That’s very interesting - expanding here creating expanding now. But does the expansion have to be faster than the speed of light?

[NearIbris]

Ok so let’s think here. 2 massive blacks holes have a lot of matter sucked in. It’s essentially space bent on itself with matter, very very dense. When the 2 black holes merge.... they lose mass, something Lawrence Kraus spoke about In his lectures. So in one instance 2 large black holes lost 3 solar masses during a merge, those solar masses were disbursed into gravity waves. So gravity waves aren’t creating new space, they are releasing space/mass of the black holes merge. Essentially a piece of now larger black holes is this extra space/time you are suggesting. But it’s not created, it’s released by the black hole thus proving your theory wrong? Just a thought

[sparkstarter]

I got the book NOW... its a great story of how we got to where we are in our knowledge of time but did NOT give the details of Richards theory in the book. Why do merging black holes create new space? How do you calculate how much new space is created? Why would the creation of new space create new time? Is the expansion of the universe what creates time? Why can we measure time progression but more difficult to measure space creation? If somebody can make a tutorial video on these questions i would love that...

[freeenergy]

in my opinion there are fundamental questions to ask to understand time:
1- does time have any physical affect on matter ? answer is no chemical reactions and any other change anywhere in the cosmos happen accordingly with available matter and laws available at their locations regardless what time is or how they appear to be to another reference or observer
2- we know with Einstein that time is a perception element ; things look smaller and and events seem to happen at slower rate when speeding in respect to a slower or static reference ; but in fact those events in their landmark or at their location happen accordingly with the physical laws governing them at that location ( with law such such as gravity )

[Dyslexic-Artist-Theory-on-Time]

Time t², ψ², c², e² and velocity Eₖ=½mv² geometrical similarity formed out of spherical symmetry

[pawcket]

How we perceive time has to do with the indeterminism of Quantum Mechanics, fundamentally on where one observes a particle through light. Causality has a speed limit(c) with every point in space, where one observes it from the closest to their present moment. Example, when one looks out into the universe they see the past which is made of particles(GR). When one tries to measure the position of a particle, they are observing smaller distances and getting closer to the present moment(QM). The wave property of particles appears when we start trying to predict the future of that particle. A particle that has not had an interaction exists in a future state. It is a probability wave because the future is probabilistic. Wave function collapse is what we perceive as the present moment, its what divides the past from the future. GR is making measurements in the observed past and therefore, predictable. It can predict the future but only from information collected from the past. QM is attempting to make measurements of the unobserved future and therefore, unpredictable. Only once a particle interacts with the present moment does it become predictable. This is an observational interpretation of the mathematics we currently use based on the limited perspective we have with the experiments we choose to observe the universe with. We cannot travel backwards, only travel faster, towards a particle that has already reflected light.

[DoleoSeorsum]

I still say that if the many worlds theory ends up being true, then dark energy is linked to the uncertainty principle / path integral theory. As time expands to account for all possible futures, space also expands.

[revolution]

I am an average Joe, but still get curious from time to time.
I have a question regarding the expansion of space.
If space is constantly expanding between galaxies as the vid states, shouldn't
space also be expanding between stars, planets, my house and my shop, or where ever space exists.?
Is it at such a slow rate that even in a life time not enough expansion is created to measure a noticeable increase between my house and shop.?

[razorback]

If the universe is expanding then isn't that creating new space/time ?