That’s a perhaps surprisingly contentious topic among theoretical physicists: You see, whether time flows forward, or doesn’t flow at all, or moves back and forth, our resulting subjective experience would be identical in all cases: we would always find ourselves in an experiential snapshot extending smoothly backwards in memory and forwards in expectation, just like […]
Tag: time
Is there a crisis inside the physics of time?
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 […]
Carlo Rovelli: The present is a localized rather than global phenomenon
Carlo Rovelli, author of The Order of Time, that there is neither space nor time: A present that is common throughout the whole universe does not exist. Events are not ordered in pasts, presents, and futures; they are only “partially” ordered. There is a present that is near to us, but nothing that is “present” […]
Rob Sheldon’s thoughts on physicists’ “warped” view of time
Further to Carlo Rovelli’s views on time travel (only a technological problem, not a scientific one) and the order of time in general, views, as set out in The Order of Time, our color commentator Rob Sheldon offers, — If I can speculate about what goes on in physicist’s heads, this issue about time is an attempt […]