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Is there a crisis inside the physics of time?

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Did Carlo Rovelli, start a fashion for debunking time with The Order of Time? Here’s science writer Marcia Bartusiak, author of Dispatches from Planet 3, asking whether it is time to just get rid of time:

You might say that quantum mechanics introduced a fuzziness into physics: You can pinpoint the precise position of a particle, but at a trade-off; its velocity cannot then be measured very well. Conversely, if you know how fast a particle is going, you won’t be able to know exactly where it is. Werner Heisenberg best summarized this strange and exotic situation with his famous uncertainty principle. But all this action, uncertain as it is, occurs on a fixed stage of space and time, a steadfast arena. A reliable clock is always around—is always needed, really—to keep track of the goings-on and thus enable physicists to describe how the system is changing. At least, that’s the way the equations of quantum mechanics are now set up.

And that is the crux of the problem. How are physicists expected to merge one law of physics—namely gravity—that requires no special clock to arrive at its predictions, with the subatomic rules of quantum mechanics, which continue to work within a universal, Newtonian time frame? In a way, each theory is marching to the beat of a different drummer (or the ticking of a different clock).

That’s why things begin to go a little crazy when you attempt to blend these two areas of physics. Marcia Bartusiak, “Is It Time to Get Rid of Time?” at Nautilus

Bartusiak tells us that one physicist is working on “submicroscopic version of a Newtonian clock, a quantum timekeeper that can be used to describe the physics going on in the extraordinary realm ruled by quantum gravity, such as the innards of a black hole or the first instant of creation.”

Who knows, we might end up hearing a theory aired that “the first instant of creation” (presumably the Big Bang) did not happen in time and therefore technically did not happen. So, like Schrodinger’s cat, we are not here. Or maybe we are. Or both?

See also: Carlo Rovelli: The present is a localized rather than global phenomenon

Cosmologist Carlo Rovelli: Future time travel only a technological problem

Carlo Rovelli: Theories of everything ill-conceived but we can learn to understand quantum mechanics

and

Cosmologist: Philosophy is essential to the development of physics.

Comments
TL;DRSeversky
September 22, 2018
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as to this statement from the article:
His (Einstein's) law of gravity looks the same no matter what timepiece you happen to be using as your gauge.,,, “The actual physical predictions that come out of general relativity don’t depend on your choice of a clock.”
No, not exactly,, the 'choice of clock' matters very much if you want to clear up the whole time travel mess within General Relativity that was pointed out by Gödel to Einstein:
The God of the Mathematicians - The religious beliefs that guided Kurt Gödel’s revolutionary Ideas - by David P. Goldman - August 2010 Excerpt: In a Festschrift for Einstein’s seventieth birthday in 1949, Gödel demonstrated the possibility of a special case in which, as Palle Yourgrau described the result, “the large-scale geometry of the world is so warped that there exist space-time curves that bend back on themselves so far that they close; that is, they return to their starting point.” This means that “a highly accelerated spaceship journey along such a closed path, or world line, could only be described as time travel.” In fact, “Gödel worked out the length and time for the journey, as well as the exact speed and fuel requirements.” Gödel, of course, did not actually believe in time travel, but he understood his paper to undermine the Einsteinian worldview from within. http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/08/the-god-of-the-mathematicians
The solution to that particular conundrum within general relativity was to use 'photon clocks' rather than the 'matter clocks' that he referenced in his article.
Physicists continue work to abolish time as fourth dimension of space - April 2012 Excerpt: “The rate of photon clocks in faster inertial systems will not slow down with regard to the photon clocks in a rest inertial system because the speed of light is constant in all inertial systems,” he said. “The rate of atom clocks will slow down because the 'relativity' of physical phenomena starts at the scale of pi mesons.” He also explained that, without length contraction, time dilation exists but in a different way than usually thought. “Time dilatation exists not in the sense that time as a fourth dimension of space dilates and as a result the clock rate is slower,” he explained. “Time dilatation simply means that, in a faster inertial system, the velocity of change slows down and this is valid for all observers.,, Our research confirms Gödel's vision: time is not a physical dimension of space through which one could travel into the past or future.” http://phys.org/news/2012-04-physicists-abolish-fourth-dimension-space.html
And here is the part of the article in the OP where the author referenced the current work that is being done with "matter clocks" in order to try to reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity.
The most common candidates for this special type of clock are simply “matter clocks.” “This, of course, is the type of clock we’ve been used to since time immemorial.,,, Unfortunately, each type of (matter) clock that Kucha has investigated so far leads to a different quantum description, different predictions of the system’s behavior. “You can formulate your quantum mechanics with respect to one clock that you place in spacetime and get one answer,” explains Kucha. “But if you choose another type of clock, perhaps one based on an electric field, you get a completely different result. It is difficult to say which of these descriptions, if any, is correct.”
Besides the fact that his assumption concerning Relativity and the 'choice of clock' was wrong, it is also completely misguided for him to think that one can possibly 'tame' the predictions of Quantum Mechanics in regards to space-time simply by building a better clock. A minor detail left out of the article in the OP is that the predictions and experimental results of Quantum Mechanics have a notorious history for blatantly ignoring the constraints of space-time. As Vlatko Vedral states, "For instance, space and time are two of the most fundamental classical concepts, but according to quantum mechanics they are secondary. The entanglements are primary. They interconnect quantum systems without reference to space and time. If there were a dividing line between the quantum and the classical worlds, we could use the space and time of the classical world to provide a framework for describing quantum processes. But without such a dividing line—and, indeed, with­out a truly classical world—we lose this framework. We must explain space and time (4D space-time) as somehow emerging from fundamentally spaceless and timeless physics."
LIVING IN A QUANTUM WORLD - Vlatko Vedral - 2011 Excerpt: For instance, Columbia University physicist Brian Greene writes on the first page of his hugely successful (and otherwise excellent) book The Elegant Universe that quantum mechanics “provides a theoretical framework for understanding the universe on the smallest of scales.” Classical physics, which comprises any theory that is not quantum, including Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity, handles the largest of scales. Yet this convenient partitioning of the world is a myth.,,, Until the past decade, experimentalists had not confirmed that quantum behavior persists on a macroscopic scale. Today, however, they routinely do. These effects are more pervasive than anyone ever suspected.,,, Thus, the fact that quantum mechanics applies on all scales forces us to confront the theory’s deepest mysteries. We cannot simply write them off as mere details that matter only on the very smallest scales. For instance, space and time are two of the most fundamental classical concepts, but according to quantum mechanics they are secondary. The entanglements are primary. They interconnect quantum systems without reference to space and time. If there were a dividing line between the quantum and the classical worlds, we could use the space and time of the classical world to provide a framework for describing quantum processes. But without such a dividing line—and, indeed, with­out a truly classical world—we lose this framework. We must explain space and time (4D space-time) as somehow emerging from fundamentally spaceless and timeless physics. http://phy.ntnu.edu.tw/~chchang/Notes10b/0611038.pdf
It is simply impossible for anyone to 'tame' the instantaneous actions of Quantum Mechanics in regards to space-time. Quantum Mechanics, contrary to what these researchers may believe, can never be based on any sort of clock based time. In fact, the proper frame of reference for 'time' within quantum mechanics is found to be the 'outside of time' frame of reference that is referred to as 'the now of the mind' instead of the space-time of general relativity. In fact, this outside of time 'now of the mind' frame of reference is one of the primary reasons that Einstein never received a Nobel prize for Relativity, but only received a Nobel prize for some of his 'lesser work' (if I may dare to call the photoelectric effect lesser than relativity).
Albert Einstein vs. Quantum Mechanics and His Own Mind - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxFFtZ301j4
A bit deeper look at the different ways General Relativity, Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics relate to time is gone over in the first part of the following video:
Quantum Mechanics, Special Relativity, General Relativity and Christianity - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4QDy1Soolo
Of further note to the 'now of the mind', the main problem with trying to unify General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics into a purely ‘mathematical’ theory of everything is that theorists have tossed agent causality, and more specifically, have tossed the Agent Causality of God by the wayside. Yet with the recent closing of the ‘free will loop-hole’ within quantum mechanics, quantum mechanics itself now demands that the agent causality of people, and more specifically the Agent Causality of God, be let "back" into the picture of modern physics.
Quantum mechanics: Pushing the “free-will loophole” back to 7.8 billion years ago – September 14, 2018 https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/pushing-the-free-will-loophole-back-to-7-8-billion-years-ago/
Thus in conclusion, if we rightly let the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into the picture of modern physics, as the Christian founders of modern science had originally envisioned, (Sir Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, Michael Faraday, and Max Planck, to name a few), then an empirically backed reconciliation, (via the Shroud of Turin), between Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity, i.e. the ‘Theory of Everything’, readily pops out for us in Christ’s resurrection from the dead.
Shroud of Turin: From discovery of Photographic Negative, to 3D Information, to Hologram https://youtu.be/F-TL4QOCiis Particle Radiation from the Body - July 2012 - M. Antonacci, A. C. Lind Excerpt: The Shroud’s frontal and dorsal body images are encoded with the same amount of intensity, independent of any pressure or weight from the body. The bottom part of the cloth (containing the dorsal image) would have born all the weight of the man’s supine body, yet the dorsal image is not encoded with a greater amount of intensity than the frontal image. Radiation coming from the body would not only explain this feature, but also the left/right and light/dark reversals found on the cloth’s frontal and dorsal body images. http://www.academicjournals.org/sre/PDF/pdf2012/30JulSpeIss/Antonacci.pdf etc.. etc.. etc..
Verses:
Matthew 28:18 And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Colossians 1:15-20 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.
bornagain77
September 21, 2018
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