Greg,
"I believe that time can be eliminated from the laws of physics because the
equations are deterministic. If the future is entirely determined by its past, then the flow of time makes little sense: all of the information necessary to predict the future already exists today. In the words of Pierre Simon Laplace, given a sufficiently intelligent being who knew every detail of the present state of the universe, "nothing would be uncertain and the future, like the past, would be present before its eyes."7 The intelligent being would have no need of a time variable and could simply remove it, as we have done.
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A clue where to look comes from one of the arguments for timelessness:
determinism. In a completely cause-and-effect universe, the flow of time is extraneous; however, our universe is not governed completely by cause and effect. Atoms undergo transitions, or "quantum jumps," spontaneously."
Besides that it makes a number of important points about the relationship between Quantum Mechanics and time, your essay describes quantum jumps in a manner that dovetails with a point that I have been making.
I have been arguing that time and temperature are both descriptions of motion and energy. Temperature being a non-linear scalar average and time as a series of linear units. Consider the example you are using, of a strontium ion being "excited" by a laser. It is safe to say that its temperature, the level of non-linear energy, is being raised until it "pops," like a kernel of corn (and pops back, as the energy is removed). This transition then counts as intervals of time. What if the same principle applies to the macro scale? Say an earthquake, where the levels of non-linear energy build up until a quake happens and the process repeats itself, so that a predicable series occurs. It isn't deterministic because the energy build up is non-linear. There is no perfectly closed, cause and effect relationship between the system and the energy being introduced into it, since that would entail a larger closed system, of which there might always be unrecorded elements coming and going. The very problem with determinism is that it is inherently linear and reductionistic, in assuming closed systems and objective perspectives from which to view them, but this is a contradiction, since the very concept of "perspective" explicitly requires subjectivity. This reductionistic winnowing of information and input to what can be predicted necessarily eliminates many potential factors, thus linear systems exist as limited sets of larger non-linear situations. So time itself is an emergent property of activity, just like temperature. The point of my own essay is that since activity creates time, as each event is replaced by the next, than the "flow" of time is actually future potential becoming past circumstance. Neither of which physically exist, as these are only phases through which the activity transitions. As opposed to explaining the perception of time as a dimension along which we travel from the past into the future. Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth turns, as opposed to reality traveling along a dimension from yesterday to tomorrow.
This goes to the very nature of logic and its self re-enforcing feedback loops which mitigate against natural corrections until the energy build up causes those transitions known as revolutions, but that is beyond the scope of this contest.
