Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time : Cosmic Variance

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Cosmic Variance
Time Is Out of Joint How Probability Works

Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time

By Sean Carroll | September 1, 2011 10:58 am

Time is the most used noun in the English language, yet it remains a mystery. Weve just completed an amazingly intense and rewarding multidisciplinary conference on the nature of time, and my brain is swimming with ideas and new questions. Rather than trying a summary (the talks will be online soon), heres my stab at a top ten list partly inspired by our discussions: the things everyone should know about time. [Update: all of these are things I think are true, after quite a bit of deliberation. Not everyone agrees, although of course they should.] 1. Time exists. Might as well get this common question out of the way. Of course time exists otherwise how would we set our alarm clocks? Time organizes the universe into an ordered series of moments, and thank goodness; what a mess it would be if reality were complete different from moment to moment. The real question is whether or not time is fundamental, or perhaps emergent. We used to think that temperature was a basic category of nature, but now we know it emerges from the motion of atoms. When it comes to whether time is fundamental, the answer is: nobody knows. My bet is yes, but well need to understand quantum gravity much better before we can say for sure. 2. The past and future are equally real. This isnt completely accepted, but it should be. Intuitively we think that the now is real, while the past is fixed and in the books, and the future hasnt yet occurred. But physics teaches us something remarkable: every event in the past and future is implicit in the current moment. This is hard to see in our everyday lives, since were nowhere close to knowing everything about the universe at any moment, nor will we ever be but the equations dont lie. As Einstein put it, It appears therefore more natural to think of physical reality as a four dimensional existence, instead of, as hitherto, the evolution of a three dimensional existence. 3. Everyone experiences time differently. This is true at the level of both physics and biology. Within physics, we used to have Sir Isaac Newtons view of time, which was universal and shared by everyone. But then Einstein came along and explained that how much time elapses for a person depends on how they travel through space (especially near the speed of light) as well as the gravitational field (especially if its near a black hole). From a biological or psychological perspective, the time measured by atomic clocks isnt as important as the time measured by our internal rhythms and the accumulation of memories. That happens differently depending on who we are and what we are experiencing; theres a real sense in which time moves more quickly when were older. 4. You live in the past. About 80 milliseconds in the past, to be precise. Use one hand to touch your nose, and the other to touch one of your feet, at exactly the same time. You will experience them as simultaneous acts. But thats mysterious clearly it takes more time for the signal to travel up your nerves from your feet to your brain than from your nose. The reconciliation is simple: our conscious experience takes time to assemble, and your brain waits for all the relevant input before it experiences the now. Experiments have shown that the lag between things happening and us experiencing them is about 80 milliseconds. (Via conference participant David Eagleman.)

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Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time : Cosmic Variance

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5. Your memory isnt as good as you think. When you remember an event in the past, your brain uses a very similar technique to imagining the future. The process is less like replaying a video than putting on a play from a script. If the script is wrong for whatever reason, you can have a false memory that is just as vivid as a true one. Eyewitness testimony, it turns out, is one of the least reliable forms of evidence allowed into courtrooms. (Via conference participants Kathleen McDermott and Henry Roediger.) 6. Consciousness depends on manipulating time. Many cognitive abilities are important for consciousness, and we dont yet have a complete picture. But its clear that the ability to manipulate time and possibility is a crucial feature. In contrast to aquatic life, land-based animals, whose vision-based sensory field extends for hundreds of meters, have time to contemplate a variety of actions and pick the best one. The origin of grammar allowed us to talk about such hypothetical futures with each other. Consciousness wouldnt be possible without the ability to imagine other times. (Via conference participant Malcolm MacIver.) 7. Disorder increases as time passes. At the heart of every difference between the past and future memory, aging, causality, free will is the fact that the universe is evolving from order to disorder. Entropy is increasing, as we physicists say. There are more ways to be disorderly (high entropy) than orderly (low entropy), so the increase of entropy seems natural. But to explain the lower entropy of past times we need to go all the way back to the Big Bang. We still havent answered the hard questions: why was entropy low near the Big Bang, and how does increasing entropy account for memory and causality and all the rest? (We heard great talks by David Albert and David Wallace, among others.) 8. Complexity comes and goes. Other than creationists, most people have no trouble appreciating the difference between orderly (low entropy) and complex. Entropy increases, but complexity is ephemeral; it increases and decreases in complex ways, unsurprisingly enough. Part of the job of complex structures is to increase entropy, e.g. in the origin of life. But were far from having a complete understanding of this crucial phenomenon. (Talks by Mike Russell, Richard Lenski, Raissa DSouza.) 9. Aging can be reversed. We all grow old, part of the general trend toward growing disorder. But its only the universe as a whole that must increase in entropy, not every individual piece of it. (Otherwise it would be impossible to build a refrigerator.) Reversing the arrow of time for living organisms is a technological challenge, not a physical impossibility. And were making progress on a few fronts: stem cells, yeast, and even (with caveats) mice and human muscle tissue. As one biologist told me: You and I wont live forever. But as for our grandkids, Im not placing any bets. 10. A lifespan is a billion heartbeats. Complex organisms die. Sad though it is in individual cases, its a necessary part of the bigger picture; life pushes out the old to make way for the new. Remarkably, there exist simple scaling laws relating animal metabolism to body mass. Larger animals live longer; but they also metabolize slower, as manifested in slower heart rates. These effects cancel out, so that animals from shrews to blue whales have lifespans with just about equal number of heartbeats about one and a half billion, if you simply must be precise. In that very real sense, all animal species experience the same amount of time. At least, until we master #9 and become immortal. (Amazing talk by Geoffrey West.)
CATEGORIZED UNDER: SCIENCE, TIME, TOP POSTS

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Community Funs Way

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Hi Monica,

Our perception is not limited to our thinking/being in the conscious mind. Intuition is an inherent awareness and we can "know" something without consciously thinking it.

Actually, how else could one explain that over 5,000 years ago the great Masters understood polarity and many other aspects of Energy without the use of the technology scientists currently use. They sat very still, honed and heightened their awareness.

Many of us have lost this ability by becoming slaves to our "busy" minds. In doing so, our minds are in the past or future. Can we be fully present? I think with practice, we can have the experience some of the time.
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Monica Garliceanu

Ever since I read about the 80 ms lag between things happening and us experiencing them, I&#39ve had a question in my mind: where does this leave the "quantum mind-body problem"? How can our consciousness cause the collapse of the wave function when by the time we are aware of an event, that event is already in the past? It seems to me that, by the time we open the box, the fate of the cat have been already sealed. Does anyone have a theory about this?

Funs Way

and yeppers, it would seem "change is fundamental, and time is a perceptual overlay". (# 232)

There is Form and there is Flow. Form creates and limits Flow, Flow creates and limits Form. Time
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Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time : Cosmic Variance

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