The first Presidential debate will be on at 6 PM PST, so I assume few will even see this diary. I’ll be watching it for sure. Tonight I’m going to talk about something light. Well not really. I’m going to talk about time, since no one actually agrees as to what it is.
In physics the past, present and future are all the same. To us time is linear. We experience things and then it gets into our memory. That’s time. We all know we experience time differently as well. Remember being a kid the week before Christmas? Time seemed to drag on forever. When we are experiencing things we love, time seems to zoom by. When we are experiencing things we don’t like, time seems to go by very slowly.
Most folks who study how we experience time believe it’s simply due to how our brains are wired.
Time gets kinda weird when physicists explain it. They think time only exists once things change from quantum physics (where everything is potential in wave form) into particle or classic physics (where particles come into being and interact). This requires an observer, of course.
Another way this is explained is that all probabilities (called superposition) of where an electron could be (quantum physics) combine when an electron collides with a larger object. In other words all probabilities instantly cease. It’s sorta like you can do anything you want because your choices are unlimited, but once you decide to do something you’ve also decided to not do any other thing. Your endless choices now cease to be. In physics, when an electron collides with a larger object it’s due to the gravity of the larger object. If the gravity is strong enough, the electron will go with the larger object. It gets caught in gravity which to physics is what creates what we experience as time. What happens if gravity isn’t strong enough to capture an electron?
Those nimble quantum particles ought to be able to keep their property of superposition before gravity grabs hold. And if, say, gravity is too weak to hold an interaction between two molecules as they decohere into something larger, then there’s no way it can force them to move in the same direction, time-wise.
Time is only experienced by an observer. Objects don’t experience time.
Time moves as it does because humans are biologically, neurologically, and philosophically hardwired to experience it that way. It’s like a macro-scale version of Schrödinger’s cat. A faraway corner of the universe might be moving future to past. But the moment humans point a telescope in that direction, time conforms to the past-future flow. In his papers on relativity, Einstein showed that time was relative to the observer. The observer actually creates it.
Of course others totally disagree with all of this. They point out that all things in the universe that we can observe are already locked up in spacetime (i.e. aren’t wave forms ruled by quantum physics). Everything we see is already locked up in gravity so therefore is also stuck in a timeline.
Physics is weird, but not as weird as Trump.
www.wired.com/…