Video Source: Big Think
Physicists' ideas about the nature and existence of time may seem incongruent with our experience of it, but author James Gleick makes a case for why we need to keep an open mind. Gleick is the author of
“Time Travel: A History”
Partial Transcript:
There is a sort of funny thing that you hear people say that time doesn't actually exist. And it's something that physicists argue about, I mean physicists actually have symposia on the subject of is there such a thing as time, and it's also something that has a tradition in philosophy going a back about a century. But I think it's fair to say that in one sense it's a ridiculous idea.
How can you say time doesn't exist when we have such a profound experience of it, first of all? And second of all, we're talking about it constantly. I mean we couldn't get – I can't get through this sentence without referring to time. I was going to say we couldn't get through the day without discussing time. So obviously when a physicist questions the existence of time they are trying to say something's specialized, something technical. Einstein offers, Einstein or maybe I should say more properly Minkowski, his teacher and contemporary, offers a vision of space-time as a single thing, as a four-dimensional block in which the past and the future are just like spatial dimensions, they're just like north and south in the equations of physics.
And so you can construct a view of the world in which the future is already there and you can say, and physicists do say something very much like this that in the fundamental laws of physics there is no distinction between the past and the future. And so if you are playing that game you're essentially saying time as an independent thing doesn't exist.
Time is just another dimension like space. Again, that is in obvious conflict with our intuitions about the world. We go through the day acting as though the past is over and the future has not yet happened and might happen this way or it might happen that way. We could flip a coin and see.
