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Time Does Not Exist

Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist The credit goes to theconversation.com

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36 views3 pages

Time Does Not Exist

Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist Time does not exist The credit goes to theconversation.com

Uploaded by

yashneelchauhan69
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Time does not exist

Without a sense of time, leading us from cradle to grave, our lives would make
little sense. But on the most fundamental level, physicists aren’t sure whether the
sort of time we experience exists at all.

This is the topic of the first episode of our new podcast series, Great Mysteries of
Physics. Hosted by me, Miriam Frankel, science editor at The Conversation, and
supported by FQxI, the Foundational Questions Institute, we talk to three
researchers about the nature of time.

Scientists long assumed that time is absolute and universal – the same for
everyone, everywhere, and existing independently of us. It is still treated in this
way in quantum mechanics, which rules the microcosmos of atoms and particles.
But Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity, which apply to nature on large scales,
showed that time is relative rather than absolute – it can speed up or slow down
depending on how fast you are travelling, for example. Time is also interwoven
with space into “space time”.

Einstein’s theories enabled scientists to picture the universe in a new way: as a


static, four dimensional block, with three spatial dimensions (height, width and
depth) and time as a fourth. This block contains all of space and time
simultaneously – and time doesn’t flow. There’s no special now in the block –
what appears to be the present to one observer, is simply the past to another.

But if that’s true, then why is our experience of time moving from past to future so
strong? One answer is that entropy, a measure of disorder, is always increasing in
the universe. When you run the numbers, explains Sean Carroll, a physicist at
Johns Hopkins University in the US, it turns out that the early universe had very
low entropy. “[The universe] was very, very organised and non-random and it’s
been sort of relaxing and getting more random and more disorganised ever since.”
This is likely to create an arrow of time for human observers.

We don’t know why the universe started out with such low entropy, however.
Carroll suggests it it may be because we are part of a multiverse containing many
different universes. In such a world, some universes would, statistically speaking,
have to start out with low entropy.

Emily Adlam, a philosopher of physics at the Rotman Institute of philosophy at the


University of Western Ontario in Canada, on the other hand, believes the mystery
of why our universe started with low entropy is a problem that ultimately stems
from the fact that physics is riddled with assumptions about the time.

“I personally am very much on the side that says time does not flow,” she explains.
“This is kind of an illusion that comes from the way in which we happen to be
embedded in the world”. Her hunch is that, on the most fundamental level,
everything happens all at once – even if it doesn’t appear that way to us.
Adlam argues the best way to understand time would be to remove it entirely from
our theories of nature – to strip it out of the equations. Interestingly, when
physicists try to unite general relativity with quantum mechanics into a “quantum
gravity” theory of everything, time often disappears from the equations.

Experiments could also help shed light on the nature of time, helping to test
various combinations of quantum mechanics and general relativity. Natalia Ares,
an engineer at the University of Oxford, believes that studying the thermodynamics
(the science of heat and work) of clocks may help. “By understanding clocks as
machines, there are things that we can understand better about what the limits of
timekeeping are,” she argues.

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