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Mind June 2010 183 Email Print
Is Time an Illusion?
The concepts of time and change may emerge from a universe that, at root, is utt
erly static
By Craig Callender
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le.
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As you read this sentence, you probably think that this moment right now is what is
happening. The present moment feels special. It is real. However much you may re
member the past or anticipate the future, you live in the present. Of course, th
e moment during which you read that sentence is no longer happening. This one is
. In other words, it feels as though time flows, in the sense that the present i
s constantly updating itself. We have a deep intuition that the future is open u
ntil it becomes present and that the past is fixed. As time flows, this structur
e of fixed past, immediate present and open future gets carried forward in time.
This structure is built into our language, thought and behavior. How we live ou
r lives hangs on it.
Yet as natural as this way of thinking is, you will not find it reflected in sci
ence. The equations of physics do not tell us which events are occurring right n
ow they are like a map without the you are here symbol. The present moment does not
exist in them, and therefore neither does the flow of time. Additionally, Albert
Einstein s theories of relativity suggest not only that there is no single specia
l present but also that all moments are equally real [see That Mysterious Flow, by
Paul Davies; Scientific American, September 2002]. Fundamentally, the future is
no more open than the past.
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Comments
scots engineer May 19, 2010, 3:44 PM
I have a vivid memory from my youth of a steam locomotive producing a perfect sm
oke ring. This doughnut shaped cloud of revolving warm air and smoke , rose stea

dily in the air and kept it's shape till it became invisible as the smoke was gr
adually diluted. A feature of this phenomena is that although it had no net angu
lar momentum, it had a lot of angular energy. This might be a metaphor for the a
rticle's proposition that whilst the whole may be timeless, individual parts wou
ld exhibit time like properties. However just because equations can appear to ba
lance and are applicable in some cases, this does not guarantee fundamental trut
h or universality. The late Werner Heisenberg ( Physics Nobel prize 1932 ) whils
t working in Germany during WW 2 derived an elegant formula to predict the amoun
t of fissile material required for an explosive chain reaction. Because he had n
ot considered the effects of using neutron reflecting materials, he concluded th
at a working A bomb would be heavier than the payload of any existing aircraft,
and as a consequence german research efforts in that direction were curtailed. S
imilarly in the late 1940's the then astronomer royal declared rocket flight to
the moon to be impossible, citing the rocket equation as proof that no rocket co
uld lift the weight of fuel it would require. The equation was not wrong, but di
d not consider the case of staged rockets. Maths are like models and extrapolati
ons have to be done with care.It's a chicken and egg situation where the theorie
s put forward are a product of the mathematics the authors have at their disposa
l. The analogy to money is a bit weak because for much of human history what was
used as currency had intrinsic value, such as precious metal.Rather than being
a convenient figment of our imagination, some temporal influences exist in our u
niverse and could have more than one dimension. They may be subject to something
like Heisenbergs uncertainty principle where the more accurately you measure on
e attribute the more indeterminate the other(s) become. Multi dimensional time m
ight reconcile some of the quantum wierdness, but I have no idea how we might ve
rify it, or what mathematics would be required for a successful description.
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scots engineer May 21, 2010, 2:19 AM
Musing further about torii, imagine if you will a flexible coil spring and someo
ne has bent the two ends round and joined them together to make a torus. If youz
oom in you find that the spring was not made of a single filament but a coil and
that the coil was made from a smaller coil and so on as far down as resolution
permitted. I know almost nothing about string theory, but the above seems a rath
er neat way of nesting a lot of dimensions An interesting property of such an ar
rangement is that as the fundamental filament ( or string ) tends towards becomi
ng infinitly thin, like fractal coastlines, tends towards infinite length. Could
this be the fundamental "stuff" of the universe accounting for all types of mas
s, energy, space and time by the many modes of vibration available to it?
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vasoo May 21, 2010, 6:15 AM
Time is actually an interesting topic. I always used to wonder if the concept of
time that we feel as human is the same for other animals. They, at least most o
f them, dont think. So for them, they dont worry about future and probably learn
nothing from past. The only thing they may carry forward is adaptations carried
over generations, which are probably genetic in nature than "learnings". But fo
r human, it is an entirely different story. We remember and plan our lives. So d
oes that mean that notion of time differs among living beings? Is that then a re
al thing? Or is it just a measure of the period between the natural clock of mfg
date and expiry date? Another aspect is the scale of time that we talk about in
this small planet. There are creatures that live only a few minutes or even sec
onds. Some them live for centuries. Compare this with the Universal scale. Time
in billions of years... distance in billions of light years...we aer nothing, ar
e we?
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scots engineer vasoo May 21, 2010, 7:55 AM
Hi vasoo - sheep do not get a reputation for intellectual excellence yet as anyo
ne who works with them can testify they seem capable of learning things that wil
l reward them (usually food ) and things to avoid ( things that have hurt ). The
y also seem capable of distinguishing between familiar humans and strangers, whe
reas some humans can not tell one sheep from another. Our own temporal experienc

es are not fully explained as the apparent passage of time is affected , by what
we are doing , age, and familiarity, or otherwise, with our surroundings. Becau
se we require to synchronise with clocks and calendars, it is assumed that this
is faulty observation on our part, though it could be that we all inhabit our ow
n time frame and, as naturally as breathing, synchronise with our immediate envi
ronment, but set the clock rate according to circumstance. Many report time appe
aring to slow when in extreme circumstances, such as battle or dangerous sport.
I would think that birds such as swallows would see us as lethargic when they ar
e flitting about catching insects. If you have ever driven down an unfamiliar ro
ad, it almost always seems shorter on the return journey, or if you repeat the j
ourney. What if time is a quantum thing and each bit of mass comes with it's own
quanta of spacetime?. Pure speculaton of course,but that's how a lot of theorie
s get started.
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brodix May 22, 2010, 11:47 AM
I think trying to incorporate time as a fundamental linear projection, or dimens
ion has confused the issue. The earth doesn't travel the fourth dimension from y
esterday to tomorrow. Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth rotates. So t
ime is an emergent effect of motion, similar to temperature, rather than the bas
is for it. During the time we exist, we are part of this changing configuration
and so we go from past events to future ones, but as units of time, our lives st
art in the future and eventually recede into the past. Neither past or future ar
e physically real, because the energy to manifest them is the same energy manife
sting the present.
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pdav221 May 22, 2010, 6:14 PM
After reading the article and learning that some physicists think time may not e
xist, I was confused. How can theoretical physicists ignore local examples of ev
idence of time? Using biology and what has been demonstrated about the evolution
of species on this planet, we can pretty solidly determine that, over time, spe
cies have evolved from prior versions. This kind of example seems to remove the
concept of our personal "experience of time" from the equation and still points
to "rock solid" ;-) evidence of time as a basic component of understanding our w
orld and therefore of the universe. Don't fossils and "evolved" genes require th
at time exists, whether one dimensional or 3 dimensional?
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docdirt May 22, 2010, 8:46 PM
It struck me that this may be the wrong question, that it is just possible that
physics is the illusion.
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scots engineer May 23, 2010, 8:46 AM
Hi David - musing a little on what is or isn't subjective or objective here are
a few questions. When I see something coloured blue, the colour my mind conjours
up may be different from what yours invokes. As they are both occasioned by the
same particular light frequencies we will both consistently have the same respo
nses in our minds but not be aware that what our minds created was not the same.
Only people who have suffered some brain damage and reported a change would be
able to tell that the "blue response was individualistic" . If time was subjecti
ve then this type of evidence might be all that we have, and would we then belie
ve it? Why should it be any more true that a four dimensional universe is the ul
timate reality? The very words dimension and reality set us along trains of thou
ght that may just reinforce our perceptions rather than reveal a deeper truth. D
imension implies measurement and that involves a yardstick ( such as a familiar
length ) and numbers. But the heirarchy of comparison may well be something like
topology, where other properties of shape are ranked.
We are neither sub atomic particles, nor galaxy clusters, so seem to be well con
fined to the laws of physics we have so far discovered. We would need to find a
pretty large anomoly to exploit to change our temporal progression in any way, a
nd with no prior knowledge of where such an adventure might lead or what consequ
encies might be whether in what we thought was the past, the fleeting present, o

r in which of an infinity of futures.

Abolishing time to make the maths "fit" does not mean the maths is true, especia
lly if it ignores discoveries yet to be made.
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luisa rodal May 23, 2010, 12:32 PM
Since old times, when Aristotle thought time, it was connected with the idea of
kinesis or movement. Then there is no moveent at all at the universe!?... Luisa
Rodal
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pdav221 May 23, 2010, 2:21 PM
Those of you who are commenting from the standpoint of how humans experience tim
e apparently do not understand my comment above. Ignore human "perception" of ti
me. Fossils and genetics don't have human time perception, yet they seem to requ
ire "time" as a progressive sequence in order to paint a picture of evolution, d
o they not?
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