In the book, Meyer argues from three scientific discoveries to an inference to a personal God. If God is the creator, Keating wants to know, why was He so patient as to wait billions of years, during which not much that was very interesting happened, for the fulfillment of His purpose in initiating the universe to begin with?
Tag: time
Cells discovered in the human brain keep track of time
Jon Hamilton: The cells are called time cells, and they place a sort of time stamp on memories as they are being formed. That allows us to recall sequences of events or experiences in the right order.
Asked at Aeon: What if time doesn’t have a direction?
Can we add “Time has no direction” to the war on math stuff about how 2 + 2 does not equal 4? They seem to fit nicely together.
Rob Sheldon unpacks the new “backwards causation”quantum mechanics research
QM is all about microstates and their measurement, but not about macroscopic properties that you and I normally associate with everyday objects–smoothness, ripeness, tools like “hammer and nail” or biology like “chicken and egg”. So indeed we can entangle QM microstates, but can’t entangle chickens and eggs, and therefore using those terms creates a semantic muddle.
But then again, maybe time is all in our heads?
If time were really all in our heads, we would never miss planes. Good thing modern cosmology does not need to be serious.
Peering into the origin of time
Via a curious universal pattern of correlated pairs of objects.
Have researchers found a way to harness time?
“Even if the experiment can never be done, the study is relevant for future technologies,” Dr Costa said. The theory is, it will help quantum computers work faster. Let’s see it closer to home first.
Dark matter is older than the Big Bang?
The media release refers to “time before the Big Bang.” The idea that time did not begin, for our purposes, with the Big Bang would be contested by some. That raises arrow-of-time issues.
Is space really “the final illusion”? Rob Sheldon comments
As far as I can tell, Smolin sees this as a Darwinian solution to The Multiverse Problem. I think I’d call it “The Multiphysics Solution”. I suppose this falls under the dictum, “Fight fire with fire.” My own estimation is “garbage in, garbage out.”
Does time exist and do we experience it?
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 Read More…
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 Read More…
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” Read More…
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 Read More…