Australian Time Scientist Says that Time "Passing" is an Illusion

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rocket_troy said:
... and to all those who offhandedly disputed any productive qualities to the consumption of LSD.

TP
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Lots of good art and music has come from it. Also a promising 'one shot' treatment for anhedonia and some forms of depression. I have an open mind about the controlled clinical usage of it.
 
Cape Byron said:
Lots of good art and music has come from it. Also a promising 'one shot' treatment for anhedonia and some forms of depression. I have an open mind about the controlled clinical usage of it.
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Like a lot of rambunctious youths of the 60's, I tried LSD once. On a commando-style fishing trip deep into the Pasayten Wilderness, the two of us stealthily crossed the border into Canada. There, at remote alpine lakes, we caught dozens of brown, speckled and cuthroat trout on un-baited double-treble hooks, cooking them on a cast iron skillet we had lugged in along with the beer. "Windowpane", the LSD was. It was a wonderful, unforgettable, sublime experience.

Unfortunately, maybe since I don't suffer from depression, I've never done that again. (One of my favorite quips: "I never suffer from colds, headaches or depression. But I do give those things to others.")
 
Dotini said:
Unfortunately, maybe since I don't suffer from depression, I've never done that again. (One of my favorite quips: "I never suffer from colds, headaches or depression. But I do give those things to others.")
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A one-off trip on hallucinogenics in a controlled environment is a serious treatment for depression. Ketamine and other dissociative drugs are also strong contenders. Lots of research being done. Some treatments available even in places such as Australia.
 
Cape Byron said:
A one-off trip on hallucinogenics in a controlled environment is a serious treatment for depression. Ketamine and other dissociative drugs are also strong contenders. Lots of research being done. Some treatments available even in places such as Australia.
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I'm sorry for my joke about depression. I recognize it is a serious matter.
 
So time is space/spatial? 🤔

TLDR: Your life is a recorded movie. Fate is real.

However, I disagree with "we know it's possible to travel into the future just by travelling very fast."

From what I understood of that time dilation effect, it's more that you're slowing down things for yourself, so you're not traveling into the future as much as time is continuing as usual, but faster than you see it. It's like saying you time travel by being in suspended animation (which stops you vs. slowing you) and then revived. It may appear to you that you've jumped to the future, but to others not really.

raiders lawyer GIF
 
brockrwood said:
Professor Kristie Miller, at the University of Sydney, says that the universe exists in spacetime "blocks" and the passage of time is an illusion based simply on which block you inhabit.

For @Cape Byron

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science...medium=content_shared&utm_source=abc_news_web
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Does the Professor have anything to say about other universes? Are there an infinity of universes? Is there only one universe? Is it all random, or is there any meaning or purpose to any of it?

KenECoyote said:
TLDR: Your life is a recorded movie. Fate is real.
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That's an interesting idea. I've done some reading, off and on, regarding the recording not just of our lives, but our thoughts and consciousness.

The idea that fate - or destiny - is real is repeatedly encountered in Bernard Cornwell's bestselling Saxon Tales beginning with The Last Kingdom.
 
Cape Byron said:
A one-off trip on hallucinogenics in a controlled environment is a serious treatment for depression. Ketamine and other dissociative drugs are also strong contenders. Lots of research being done. Some treatments available even in places such as Australia.
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I can't get my doctors to do the treatment of LSD. The Sheeple/trained pharmaceutical dispensers are sometimes ignorant. They are not the ones suffering.
 
Science journalism at its best....

What I want to know, is whether this is an actual theory, or just a hypothesis? If it is a theory, what experiment has been done and repeated to validate it? If it is a hypothesis, how do we try to falsify or validate this via experiment?

I'm not seeing much reason to take this seriously as this article gives me the impression that this is just one person's supposition and there is likely no way to prove or disprove it.
 
I don’t feel like this article explained the idea very well. Why do we experience time as flowing if it all exists in a single, unchanging block? If the universe is an unchanging block of space and time dimensions, how is the time dimension different from the space dimensions? The time travel thing made no sense at all to me. It seemed like a lot of circular reasoning.
 
Antares JS said:
Science journalism at its best....

What I want to know, is whether this is an actual theory, or just a hypothesis? If it is a theory, what experiment has been done and repeated to validate it? If it is a hypothesis, how do we try to falsify or validate this via experiment?

I'm not seeing much reason to take this seriously as this article gives me the impression that this is just one person's supposition and there is likely no way to prove or disprove it.
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Nailed it right there sir.
 
This is really one of the standard interpretations of Relativity, i.e., that all events are already mapped out in both space and time. It is really an interpretation or hypothesis. There are other theories with regard to time. One theory is that space-time is constantly laying down new cells and thus the future is continually unfolding. The fact is that the matter is not settled. There are many things in contemporary physics that are not settled. For example, does an electron have a finite diameter or is it a singularity? Of course, there is the explanation from Relativity that someone's future may be someone else's past. I find this explanation very confusing, but it is strongly advocated by Relativists. Einstein strongly believed this himself convincing himself that a deceased friend still existed in another reference frame. Paradoxes in Relativity are abounding. Remember an inertial reference frame is a non-acceleration reference frame or moving at constant velocity. Observers in two moving reference frames relative to each other can always point to the other and say that time is moving slower for the other one and they are both right! It is only when one of them slows down (changing velocity in a non-inertial manner) that it is found that time has slowed for that person.
 
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ThirstyBarbarian said:
I don’t feel like this article explained the idea very well. Why do we experience time as flowing if it all exists in a single, unchanging block? If the universe is an unchanging block of space and time dimensions, how is the time dimension different from the space dimensions? The time travel thing made no sense at all to me. It seemed like a lot of circular reasoning.
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What Relativists argue is that the passage of time is an illusion of the mind. I agree that time is unfolding, but I can tell you that the matter is not settled with physicists. Time is definitely different than the other 3 spatial dimensions. Even relativity shows that the time dimension is multiplied by "i", the square root of "-1" .
 
ThirstyBarbarian said:
I don’t feel like this article explained the idea very well. Why do we experience time as flowing if it all exists in a single, unchanging block? If the universe is an unchanging block of space and time dimensions, how is the time dimension different from the space dimensions?
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KenECoyote said:
TLDR: Your life is a recorded movie. ...
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Basically I took the idea to be saying that your life is already all there as a time strand like it's recorded to a videotape and you're currently experiencing it like when you play the tape to watch a movie in Play mode, but you can go to any point past or present and it's still there and the same.

"Videotape" may be an outdated example, but I feel it fits better with the idea presented... like a long strip of pre-recorded media.

I'm with you on the time travel part.
 
aerostadt said:
What Relativists argue is that the passage of time is an illusion of the mind. I agree that time is unfolding, but I can tell you that the matter is not settled with physicists. Time is definitely different than the other 3 spatial dimensions. Even relativity shows that the time dimension is multiplied by "i", the square root of "-1" .
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I’ve heard these kinds of theories before — that the universe is an unchanging shape of some kind, but the mind can only experience one segment of the shape in the time dimension at a “time”. This article didn’t seem to explain the idea very well.

And the time travel part did not make sense. In this kind of model wouldn’t time travel be represented as a gap or discontinuity of the shape in the time dimension? The idea of traveling through time by moving very fast didn’t make sense to me.
 
KenECoyote said:
Basically I took the idea to be saying that your life is already all there as a time strand like it's recorded to a videotape and you're currently experiencing it like when you play the tape to watch a movie in Play mode, but you can go to any point past or present and it's still there and the same.

"Videotape" may be an outdated example, but I feel it fits better with the idea presented... like a long strip of pre-recorded media.

I'm with you on the time travel part.
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Another way to think about it would be if you recorded your life or some event on traditional film, and then you cut up the film into all the individual cells and stacked them on top of each other. That stack of all the individual moments of would form a shape. Say the film was a simple animation of a ball bouncing up and down. The shape inside the block of stacked film cells would be a kind of zig-zag, but you wouldn’t be able to see the whole zig-zag, you would only perceive one cell of the stack at a time.
 
Thank you for starting this thread! I find this subject fascinating, and the questions and answers above are really good. "Before" the internet, I used to catch a PBS special here and there on black holes or relativity, and they always left me very unsatisfied. During Covid, I started looking on Youtube for some better explanations and found lots of fantastic content from PBS Spacetime, Brian Greene, Sabine Hossenfelder, Science Asylum and more. Here is a link to one good 16 minute video relevant to this discussion:

I like how you guys have been cognizant of which concepts are well supported and which are still speculation. The block universe is still speculation, but it fits so perfectly with the parts of relativity that are solidly supported by math and experiments, that I personally feel it is the best model out there. As was mentioned above, it was believed (but not proven) by Einstein.
 
Antares JS said:
Science journalism at its best....

What I want to know, is whether this is an actual theory, or just a hypothesis? If it is a theory, what experiment has been done and repeated to validate it? If it is a hypothesis, how do we try to falsify or validate this via experiment?

I'm not seeing much reason to take this seriously as this article gives me the impression that this is just one person's supposition and there is likely no way to prove or disprove it.
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Sounds to me like a "typical scenario", which occurs all too often, in Science.

Develop a "theory / hypothesis" of something that could, potentially, be "life-changing / earth-shattering", but is 100% un-proveable, and, then, apply for large research grants.

Ultimately, the Scientist "lines his pockets", while doing virtually nothing and, from time to time, releases "updates" of his "findings" which, of course, requires more "grant money" to explore . . . On and on and on . . . Nice SCAM !

Dave F.
 
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Another way to look at it, is not that theories are right/wrong, or true/untrue, but just if they are useful or not. The "block universe" is useful in helping to visualize difficult aspects of relativity, especially when setting up quantitative word problems in relativity. If someone offers a tool that suites my needs better, I'll drop that corded drill and pick up a rechargeable Makita. Newton's law of gravity is flat out wrong, but for most applications it is plenty accurate and way easier than General relativity, so it is still taught and still used. The fact that it doesn't represent reality doesn't matter in the practical sense, it simply has known limitations. I think anyone thinking about this stuff wants to know more about what reality actually is, but that doesn't mean we have to throw away our favorite tools if they are still useful.
 
Thundercloud said:
Another way to look at it, is not that theories are right/wrong, or true/untrue, but just if they are useful or not. The "block universe" is useful in helping to visualize difficult aspects of relativity, especially when setting up quantitative word problems in relativity. If someone offers a tool that suites my needs better, I'll drop that corded drill and pick up a rechargeable Makita. Newton's law of gravity is flat out wrong, but for most applications it is plenty accurate and way easier than General relativity, so it is still taught and still used. The fact that it doesn't represent reality doesn't matter in the practical sense, it simply has known limitations. I think anyone thinking about this stuff wants to know more about what reality actually is, but that doesn't mean we have to throw away our favorite tools if they are still useful.
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Sure. Some physicists will say that Quantum Field Theory( which includes Quantum Electrodynamics) replaces Quantum Mechanics. The former states states that the electron is an excitation of the electric field and the later represents the electron as a particle. However, the Quantum Mechanics solution (of the Schrodinger Equation employing spherical harmonics) for the hydrogen atom with the proton and the electron postulated as particles gives all the standard orbitals (1s, 2s, 2p, etc.) that are taught in chemistry. Throwing out Quantum Mechanics is a bad idea.
 
I was not aware that some physicists say that Quantum Field Theory replaces Quantum Mechanics. I just assumed that QFT was built on QM, like a second floor is built on the first, and if you get rid of the first, you can't have a second. I don't know a lot about QM or QFT, but I am at least familiar as I ran across it multiple times while reading about Einstein. On a related note, I recently watched this video which really helped me visualize how standing waves relate to electron orbitals. It's probably just a crude analogy for a professional physicist, but it was just my speed!
 

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