From ScienceDaily, re UC Berkeley’s Richard Muller’s new book NOW: The Physics of Time (W. W. Norton)
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. Paper. (public access) More.
See also: Big Bang exterminator wanted, will train
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As to:
His claim that ‘now’ is constantly being created as we go into the, as of yet, uncreated future finds rather dramatic support in quantum mechanics. But first a little background:
Einstein was once asked by Rudolf Carnap (a philosopher):
Einstein’s answer was categorical, he said:
Quote was taken from the last few minutes of this following video.
And here is a bit more detail of the encounter:
The meaning of the question of ‘the Now’ can be read in full context in the following article:
Prior to his encounter with Carnap, Einstein had another encounter with another famous philosopher, Henri Bergson, over the proper definition of time. In fact, that encounter with Bergson over the proper definition of time was one of the primary reasons that Einstein failed to receive a Nobel prize for relativity:
Moreover, the statement Einstein made to Carnap on the train, ‘the now’ cannot be turned into an object of physical measurement’, was an interesting statement for Einstein to make to the philosopher since ‘the now of the mind’ has, from many recent experiments in quantum mechanics, established itself as central to quantum theory:
i.e. ‘the Now’, as philosophers term it, and contrary to what Einstein, (and Jaki), thought possible for experimental physics, and according to advances in quantum mechanics, takes precedence over past events in time. Moreover, due to advances in quantum mechanics, it would now be much more appropriate to phrase Einstein’s answer to the philosopher in this way:
Of personal note, rather than Muller saying “we are surfing the crest of that wave, what we call “now.””, and thus giving us the false impression that past time exists independent of our experience of it and that we are thus somehow ‘surfing’ on it, he should have instead emphasized that we, each one of us, as far a general relativity itself is concerned, is at the center of the expansion of space-time rather than on a wave of expanding space time.
i.e. It is not so much that we are surfing on a wave of space-time as it is being created as it is that we are watching space time as it is being miraculously created for somewhere within ourselves.
I find it extremely interesting, and strange, that quantum mechanics tells us that instantaneous quantum wave collapse to its ‘uncertain’ 3D state is centered on each individual conscious observer in the universe, whereas, 4D space-time cosmology (General Relativity) tells us each 3D point in the universe is central to the expansion of the universe. These findings of modern science are pretty much exactly what we would expect to see if this universe were indeed created, and sustained, from a higher dimension by an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, eternal Being who knows everything that is happening everywhere in the universe at the same time. These findings certainly seem to go to the very heart of the age old question asked of many parents by their children, “How can God hear everybody’s prayers at the same time?”,,, i.e. Why should the expansion of the universe, or the quantum wave collapse of the entire universe, even care that you or I, or anyone else, should exist? Only Theism, Christian Theism in particular, offers a rational explanation as to why you or I, or anyone else, should have such undeserved significance in such a vast universe.
Verse:
Here’s that public access paper….
https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.07975