
A somewhat rambling essay attempts to convince us that that is so:
It is true that many events in the Universe can be put into sequential order – but time is not always segmented neatly into the past, the present and the future. Some physical equations work in either direction.
A few theoretical physicists, such as the best-selling writer and physicist Carlo Rovelli take it even further, speculating that time neither flows, nor even exists. It is an illusion.
Of course, although some physicists propose that time does not exist, time perception – our sense of time – does. This is why the evidence from physics is at odds with how life feels. Our shared idea of what the concept of “future” or “past” mean may not apply to everything everywhere in the Universe, but it does reflect the reality of our lives here on Earth.
Like the Newtonian idea of absolute time, however, our belief in how time works for humans can also be misleading. And there may be a better approach.Claudia Hammond, “What we get wrong about time” at BBC
If time were really all in our heads, we would never miss planes. Good thing modern cosmology does not need to be serious.
Some fun with time:
Would backwards time travel unravel spacetime?
Economist: Can time go backwards?
Astrobiologist: Why time travel can’t really work
Carlo Rovelli: Future time travel only a technological problem, not a scientific one. Rovelli: A starship could wait [near a black hole ] for half an hour and then move away from the black hole, and find itself millennia in the future.
Rob Sheldon’s thoughts on physicists’ “warped” view of time An attempt to force complete symmetry on a universe that does ot want to be completely symmetrical
At the BBC: Still working on that ol’ time machine… BBC: “But using wormholes for time travel won’t be straightforward.” Indeed not. Unless everything is absolutely determined, some wise person from the future has already gone back through a wormhole and altered the present so that we can’t go anywhere.
Is time travel a science-based idea? (2017)
Apparently, a wormhole is our best bet for a time machine (2013)
and
Does a Time Travel Simulation Resolve the “Grandfather Paradox”?
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Here is a comment that I made last month on a post that was entitled “Peering into the Origin of Time”
Towards the end of the article they concede that the ’emergence’ of time is still a unresolved mystery:
As well, Entropy was not mentioned in the article. Which, given entropy’s rather tight correlation with time, is a strange omission for a paper to make that is claiming to have made significant progress on our understanding of how time could have possibly ’emerged’ in the Big Bang.
As the following article states, “Entropy explains time; it explains every possible action in the universe;,,”,, “Even gravity,,,, can be expressed as a consequence of the law of entropy.,,,”
On top of the fact that “(Entropy) explains time; it explains every possible action in the universe”, Entropy is also, by a VERY wide margin, the most finely tuned of the initial conditions of the Big Bang. Finely tuned to an almost incomprehensible degree of precision, 1 part in 10 to the 10 to the 123rd power. As Roger Penrose himself stated that, “This now tells us how precise the Creator’s aim must have been: namely to an accuracy of one part in 10^10^123.”
In the following video, Dr, Bruce Gordon touches upon just how enormous that number truly is. Dr. Gordon states, “you would need a hundred million, trillion, trillion, trillion, universes our size, with a zero on every proton and neutron in all of those universes just to write out this number. That is how fine tuned the initial entropy of our universe is.”
In order to provide evidence that the Mind of God is behind the initial entropy of the universe, i.e. behind the ’emergence’ of time, I will appeal to the Quantum Zeno Effect and also to Quantum information theory.
An old entry in wikipedia described the Quantum Zeno effect as such “an unstable particle, if observed continuously, will never decay.”
Likewise, the present day entry on wikipedia about the Quantum Zeno effect also provocatively states that “a system can’t change while you are watching it”
And here is a fairly recent experiment which verified the ‘Quantum Zeno Effect’:
Atheistic materialists have tried to get around the Quantum Zeno effect by postulating that interactions with the environment are sufficient to explain the Quantum Zeno effect.
Yet, the following interaction-free measurement of the Quantum Zeno effect demonstrated that the presence of the Quantum Zeno effect can be detected without interacting with a single atom.
In short, the quantum zeno effect, regardless of how atheistic materialists may feel about it, is experimentally shown to be a real effect that is not reducible to any possible materialistic explanation. And thus the original wikipedia statement of, “an unstable particle, if observed continuously, will never decay”, stands as being a true statement.
On top of the Quantum Zeno effect, in quantum information theory we find that “one should bear in mind that an object does not have a certain amount of entropy per se, instead an object’s entropy is always dependent on the observer.”
And as the following article states, “Fifteen years ago, “we thought of entropy as a property of a thermodynamic system,” he said. “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,,
Why in blue blazes should the finely tuned entropic actions of the universe, entropic actions which happen to explain time itself, even care if I am consciously observing them unless consciousness really is more foundational to reality than the finely tuned 1 in 10^10^123 entropy of the universe is? To state the obvious, this finding of entropy being “a property of an observer who describes a system.” is very friendly to a Mind First, and/or to a Theistic view of reality.
For instance Romans chapter 8: verses 20 and 21 itself stated, thousands of years before the 1 in 10^10^123 initial entropy of the universe, and the quantum Zeno effect, was discovered, “For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.”
Thus, whilst the ’emergence’ of time is, as they themselves admitted towards the end of the paper, unresolved as far as their mathematics is concerned, if one is willing to follow the evidence from the quantum zeno effect and from quantum information theory to where it leads, then one is led inexorably to the obvious conclusion of “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
Further notes on how consciousness and quantum mechanics are extremely tightly correlated are in the following video description: