Sabine Hossenfelder also has a blog at which she provides transcripts:
First things first, what is time? “Time is what keeps everything from happening at once,” as Ray Cummings put it. Funny, but not very useful. If you ask Wikipedia, time is what clocks measure. Which brings up the question, what is a clock. According to Wikipedia, a clock is what measures time. Huh. That seems a little circular.
Luckily, Albert Einstein gets us out of this conundrum. Yes, this guy again. According to Einstein, time is a dimension. This idea goes back originally to Minkowski, but it was Einstein who used it in his theories of special and general relativity to arrive at testable predictions that have since been confirmed countless times.
Time is a dimension, similar to the three dimensions of space, but with a very important difference that I’m sure you have noticed. We can stand still in space, but we cannot stand still in time. So time is not the same as space. But that time is a dimension means you can rotate into the time-direction, like you can rotate into a direction of space. In space, if you are moving in, say, the forward direction, you can turn forty-five degrees and then you’ll instead move into a direction that’s a mixture of forward and sideways.
You can do the same with a time and a space direction. And it’s not even all that difficult. The only thing you need to do is change your velocity. If you are standing still and then begin to walk, that does not only change your position in space, it also changes which direction you are going in space-time. You are now moving into a direction that is a combination of both time and space.
Sabine Hossenfelder, “Is Time Real?” at BackRe(Action) (January 2, 2021)
We think time is real but that it has never been convenient.
Seems to be a bit confused. Turning 45 degrees is a move in both space and time. Changing your acceleration is a move in both space and time. Every change of position, or change of speed, or change of direction, involves both space and time.
The Cummings definition is actually more useful in judging valid measurement vs invalid measurement. Statistics are often deceptive and invalid because they leave out the time axis and falsely represent things as “all happening at the same time.”
http://polistrasmill.blogspot......ation.html
http://polistrasmill.blogspot......stats.html
Yes.
Your consciousness is experiencing a sequence of state changes.
Isn’t yours?
Mine is.
As to:
Well, actually, Einstein view that ‘time is a dimension’, as was shown by Godel, (i.e. via time travel), has some fairly profound difficulties with it.
But before we get into that, first it is important to note that Einstein himself got is a heated debate with leading philosophers of his day about what the proper definition of time should be.
Specifically Einstein had a heated disagreement with the famous philosopher Henri Bergson over what the proper definition of time should be (Bergson was very well versed in the specific mental attribute of the ‘experience of the now’, and/or the ‘persistence of self-identity’ through time).
In fact, that heated disagreement with Henri Bergson over what the proper definition of time should be was one of the primary reasons that Einstein failed to ever receive a Nobel prize for his work on relativity: (Thus, obviously, it was not a minor disagreement)
Here is another article that goes into a bit more detail about the particular confrontation between Einstein and Henri Bergson over what the proper definition of time should be.:
And then, around 1935, Einstein was directly asked by Rudolf Carnap (who was also a fairly well respected philosopher of his day):
Einstein’s answer was ‘categorical’, he said:
The specific statement that Einstein made to Carnap on the train, “The experience of ‘the now’ cannot be turned into an object of physical measurement, it can never be a part of physics.” was a very interesting statement for Einstein to make to the philosopher since “The experience of ‘the now’ has, from many recent experiments in quantum mechanics, established itself as very much being a defining part of our physical measurements in quantum mechanics.
For instance, the following delayed choice experiment with atoms demonstrated that, “It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,”
Likewise, the following violation of Leggett’s inequality stressed the quantum-mechanical assertion that reality does not exist when we’re not observing it.
Moreover, in recent experiments in quantum mechanics, it is now found that “quantum mechanics can even mimic an influence of future actions on past events”
As the following 2017 article states, “a decision made in the present can influence something in the past.”
Moreover, besides our decisions in the present influencing something in the past, in quantum mechanics, our decisions in the present also influence what we will see in the future.
As leading experimentalist Anton Zeilinger states in the following video, “what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.”
Thus, (directly contrary to what Einstein himself thought was possible for experimental physics), experiments in quantum physics have now shown, in overwhelming fashion, that ‘the experience of the now’ is very much a part of experimental physics. In fact, due to these recent advances in quantum mechanics, it would now be much more appropriate to rephrase Einstein’s answer to the philosopher Rudolph Carnap in this way:
It is also interesting to note that Godel himself, Einstein’s close friend and confidant at Princeton, directly opposed Einstein’s view that ‘time was a dimension’.
Also of note, the following study, (in a fairly ingenious thought experiment that looked at the differences between ‘photon clocks’ and ‘atomic clocks’), challenged the assumption of length contraction as being valid for ‘photon clocks’. In doing so, they cleared up some loose ends in relativity concerning time’s relation to space. Loose ends that had been ample fodder for much of the speculation that time travel is possible in relativity:
Thus, Hossenfelder’s reliance, (solely), on Einstein to “get us out of this conundrum’, in regards to ascertaining the proper definition of time, has a pretty big defect within it. Namely, it is fairly obvious that Einstein did not get himself out of his own conundrum with time, thus it is also fairly obvious that Hossenfelder cannot rely solely on Einstein to resolve the issue.
From the quantum evidence, it is clear time is not a “dimension,” something we are “moving through” as we move through space. However, what this also reveals is that there is no such thing as space. Our concept that we are beings moving among other spatially moving objects through spatial co-ordinates through universal linear time requires that time is a 4th-dimensional environment that provides for the capacity for physical things in space to change states. “Changing states” is proposed as the time equivalent of changing physical location in 3D space. Without time as a dimension, you cannot (so the old idea goes) even change location. You’re “frozen in time.”
But, just as we know this concept of time is false, we also know our concept of 3D space has long been proven false by quantum physics. This was shown when we discovered entanglement and the capacity of consciousness to instantaneously determine/change states/characteristics regardless of “distance” in space.
All of this has very clear ramifications: space and time are experiences, not things in and of themselves. This is why consciousness affects those experiences the way it does, not limited by supposed “external” distances in space or time or by lack of causal, local physical connections. Physicists keep trying to “materialize” what is clearly mental phenomena into something else by using materialist and physicalist language and concepts to express what is clearly not those kinds of things.
Folks, time has a major thermodynamic aspect which is linked to the causal flow in say cosmology. It is a reasonable analytical step to treat it as a dimension, recognising relativistic effects. KF
Thank you, Kairosfocus @6,
It’s stupid to deal with unsupported assertions that time and space don’t exist without at least some explanation or references. Hawking used imaginary time for his calculations, but such assertions without some references leave us with nothing sane to discuss, and the thread degrades into a bizarre list of unfounded statements . . .
I can hardly wait to read what else “doesn’t exist” without a modicum of explanation.
-Q
Well, time is money. And _money_ is real. So follow the logic…
Does anybody really know what time it is?
Does anyone really care?
If so I can’t imagine why.
We’ve all got time enough to cry.
EDTA,
Time is money.
Nothing is better than money.
Therefore surely nothing is better than time.