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Complex Numbers #1045934 added March 4, 2023 at 12:12pm
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Ticking
A timely article. Well, not really, but it's about time. That is to say, the subject of the article is time.
In his book Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, Max Tegmark writes that “time is not an illusion, but the flow of time is.”
Finally! Someone agrees with me.
The article is from back in 2019, but it's not like time's gone anywhere since then. And it's largely a transcript of an interview from 2014; thus, there's more to it than I can cherry-pick.
But this question, I felt was important:
Is it part of the scientist’s job to explain why things feel the way they do?
Part of his reply:
As physicists, that’s ultimately what we need to explain: Why does everything feel the way it does? We shouldn’t be so naive as to think that things will always feel the way they actually are, because the history of physics is a long sequence of examples of where we realize that the ultimate nature of things is very different from how they feel.
I have some issue with the phrase "ultimate nature," but this is an ad-hoc interview response, so I'm not going to quibble. Take temperature, for example. Temperature is a bulk effect of particle motion/vibration within an object or volume of fluid (air in this sense is a fluid). At the smallest scales we can contemplate, there's only vibration—not temperature. People don't say that temperature is an illusion, but I keep hearing "time is an illusion" even though it, too, is a bulk property of matter.
Anyway. The interview goes on to talk about some other interesting aspects of time, space, the universe, etc., with a bonus Monty Python quote, which I'm always a sucker for. But I won't bore you any further, not today. |
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