On the Non-Existence of Time by James E Tyson

Due to my French origin, I share your conclusion that Time has nothing to do with physical reality and thus must not be included in Physics as it is in 'Quanta Physics' and in Einstein's Theories that are obvioulsly non-sense.

But is what we state understandable in an Anglo-Saxon or Asian culture? I do not think so. The difference between me and you is that it is the cut from what our senses perceive that has driven to this 'Time ideology' in my opinion -a 'Time ideology' which is first of all a 'Musical ideology'.

I believe it was Einstein who said that something is more real when it appears the same regardless of which perspective it is viewed from.

I don't know why a person from another culture would have more or less difficulty understanding this. Are you saying that some languages suggest concepts of time differently than others? I don't know much about Asian languages, but certainly French & English both have past and future tenses in addition to present, which, I would think, convey a similar concept of time.

Dear Ing. James Tyson,

I agree with you that the phenomena of light, color, sound, language etc. are not fundamental, being "emerged" from the fundamental phenomena by our perceptions and minds. In a sense, time as we perceive it is also a projection of our minds. You sustain well a presentist view (I admit this, although my personal opinion is different), and you correctly acknowledge the usefulness of time in physics. On the other hand, if we consider time as being rather an illusion, this may apply as well to the space. Not necessarily because of the Theory of Relativity, which relates in an interesting manner the space and time, and which rejects an absolute direction of time in the spacetime by rejecting the simultaneity. You said well that time will be absent in the absence of motion (I would say that it would be useless, or redundant, but from operational viewpoint this means absence). But if the state of a system is invariant to translations along a given direction in space, then we can also factor out that direction from our representation of the Universe, so in this sense even space may be an illusion. I like your idea of "urge", and your warning that we should not regard the word "desire" from an anthropomorphic viewpoint. My humble suggestion would be to use the word "tendency" instead of "desire", as being less anthropomorphic. Especially because I understand that you attempt by this proposal to distillate the real, physical quantity underlying the time, from our anthropomorphic view of time. In this respect, maybe the essay of Hrvoje Nikolic can be connected with yours, as a complementary approach (he seems to defend the block time view). In fact, in my humble opinion, the "urge" may be independent from the presentist view (which I understand to be the two main proposals of your essay).

Congratulations for your essay, which is both interesting and well written.

Cristi Stoica

Flowing with a Frozen River

Hello Mr. Tyson,

i experienced your paper as thought provoking.

re:

"It may be initially difficult to think of motion in terms of an instantaneous velocity that exists only in the present. To aid our thinking, I would suggest a new quantity which I call "urge" (u). It can be thought of as a property of a particle that describes its ..desire,, to be somewhere else at the present instant. (I'm not intending to be anthropomorphic here-it is just the easiest way to describe this.) It is a property like mass and charge, except that it is a vector property, having direction as well as quantity. It has both an lower limit and an upper limit. The lower limit is zeroo since negative urge, like negative velocity, is simply positive velocity in a different direction. Its upper limit is the "utgency of light" (i.e. the speed of light). This is a constant which Einstein found to be fundamental, and itself suggests that motion or urge is fundamental rather than time."

but that 'urge' of light would appear to exist only in our perception. form a photon's perspective, traversing from a star some 5.4 billion light years away to the point where it intersects with the retina of your eye while out stargazing one evening occurs instantaneously - there is no velocity in the instantaneous - from the perspective of the photon, there cannot be said to be any velocity, and thus no length here. your perception of space and velocity appear to be a figment of consciousnes.

this appears to leave only consciousness and events therein, occurring in the present, in the set of that which can be said to exist.

i like it. :-)

btw... what is 'present'? my understanding of the term is that it is a short space of time between the past and future, but you've apparently done away with past and future, so 'present' remains undefined - is this a temporal location? can't be a temporal location, since time is just in the imagination. where is it from 'now'? where does it exist? is it fundamental? 'present' compared to what? what evidence do you offer for the existence of 'present'? did Newton have a 'present'? if so, is it still present? if no, where is it? what happened to it? what is 'velocity' in 'present' - if that is an instant, there can be no velocity (as seen with the photon) - anything at a given instant has s specific location and cannot be said to be moving (see Zeno's arrow paradox). what is 'velocity' (urge) in 'present'? how do you quantify 'urge'? noticing that the only place i seem to be aware of any 'present' is in my consciousness...

anyway, it's great to know that time doesn't really exist. i'll remember that if i ever happen to be terribly late for work some day in a future the only existence of which is in my imagination (so, when i get there, it can't be real).

i believe it was your expressed intent to be thought provoking.

a fun read.

thanks

:-)

matt kolasinski

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ..."

-Isaac Asimov

The arrow of time doesn't even exist.

I proved this once verbally. How can there be a directionality to time, if big bang happened everywhere? To draw a linearity or directionality in time, you need a specific point in which you can draw a line and calculate the distance from. In all honesty, spactime does not hold such a quality.

The linearity of time is IN FACT purely part of our percption of a past and a future. Even though the past and future do not actually exist, the perception of it allows us to destinguish the psychological arrow of time. The only true kind of arrow which explains the linearity in terms of our experience of the world around us.