The rediscovery of time through its disappearance by Alexis de Saint-Ours

General Relativity is a Theory coming from music, not light (and Einstein makes comparisons with organ pipes). Sound wave gives the illusion that Time is not only conventional.

In my opinion, fight of Bergson against Descartes Empiricism is unfinished, not so far away from Descartes that Bergson himself does believe he is.

(May be you will notice than in today Anglo-Saxon culture -and Asian culture- Time cannot be really questioned, that even those who want to forget it, aware that Superstring theory for instance is pure ideology, keep the Time as a convention although.)

Alexis,

Excellent essay. However, I do take issue with a key conclusion--you write: "The disappearance of time at the Planck scale has to be understood as the absence of a time-frame but more radically as the absence of a time-order. How then is one supposed to understand evolution at the Planck level ? Obviously, things evolve but they don't evolve in time : there is change without time, i.e pure change."

Time doesn't disappear at the Planck scale, no more than measure disappears at measure zero. There is, moreover, physical meaning in evolution punctuated by discontinuous jumps. In biological evolution (Gould-Eldredge) punctuated equilibrium informs us that "stasis is data." In the evolution of particle life, a change in energy level is differentiated from stasis as a subset of the evolutionary process and not in opposition to it.

Tom

Dear Alexis,

Interesting evolution of thoughts and becoming, are not both these a part of human 'awareness'. When does any human become aware of oneself, right from conception in the womb or before formal birth or after sometime later! before a child starts speaking he is definitely aware of things around. If we tie 'awareness' with 'consciousness' and say that the latter has got several levels/degrees, then sensual awareness comes to our body sensors. Birds and animals have different levels of sensors, some of these are much more sensitive than the human ones! o me, this whole game of physical universe and human existence is basically tied to 'consciousness'. If i say that pure consciousness is vibration/motion free and it takes a physical shape only when it gets modulated with some frequency. The science is confined to the physicalness and so science can't investigate pure consciousness from where everything physical may be originating.

In my essay, i speculate that before the birth of the Universe, say by Big Bang, there was this intensely powerful Unified Potential field. It had the logistics for the physical creation. It is quite possible that the four force/fields known to us today, emerged in a sequence after the primordial matter got created along with initial energy of the Universe. The first to emerge was gravitational, followed by strong nuclear, electromagnetic and weak nuclear. All these came as per demand of the evolution of universe. It was not a random creation , by pure chance.It is as per a design that has now unfolded before us in 13.7 billion years of existence.

Where does the Time fit into this picture? The first awareness is the birth of the concept of time and space is the expansion from a point of origin. The question howver remains whether the scales for both time and space have been linear from the very beginning. It is quite possible that the distortion in space and time are the manifestation of mass and energy. Now in the pastb 1000 yrs of our science development we see the steady state and our entire development of Physics is basically based on it. The physics closer to the birth of the Universe may well be different. The laws of Physics and the so-called Physical constants may not be what we claim to be so today. We need to explain the nature as it exists and we are unable to question how it got evolved as it did! We are explaining things as we observe or perceive them today. The gravity itself may have had a intense repulsive component as demanded by the early inflation and later it became attractive to explain the evolutionary expansion. It is true for the strong nuclear force that it is strongly repulsive at the nucleon distances and becomes attractive around the nuclear dimensions. All this are the requirements of what we observe by way of finite size of the nucleus and how nucleons need to be glued in to form the same. That may well be indicating how one finds gravitational field to defy unification attempts while the other three could get recoinciled!

Hello Alexis,

i very much enjoyed reading your essay. it helped to clarify issues i'd been looking at regarding the perception of time in physics. i particularly appreciated the observations from Whitehead. i've read a little of his work, but hadn't yet encountered what you presented here.

your paper helped deepen my understanding of Relativity. thank you.

your paper also helped me to better understand Carlo Rovelli's paper here. thank you for that also.

i have a slight disagreement with the physics in spite of how lovely it is, but that doesn't appear to actually be so much an argument with your work and will save those comments for Carlo.

a continuing conceptual evolutionary process...

thanks again,

matt kolasinski

Dear François-Xavier, Tom, Narendra and Matthew,

Thank you for your comments. In writing this essay one of my goal was the following. I have tried to show that the fact that the time-coordinate in GR has no physical significance and the relational understanding of evolution in GR that follows, both clarify in physics the relations between change and time. Moreover, I believe that Carlo Rovelli's ideas on time are not, as it has been very often claimed, the one of a Parmenidean. To the contrary.

The main dynamical equation of Canonical Quantum Gravity is an equation that does not factor evolution in time. This characteristic has led Julian Barbour to claim that at a fundamental level, reality is of a Parmenidean nature. Julian Barbour argues that the Wheeler-DeWitt equation pictures a timeless and changeless world "and simply gives relative probabilities for all the different possible three-dimensional configurations the universe could have".

Physicists like Karel Kuchaø have vigorously denied such theories and argued in favour of the Heraclitean nature of reality: "I do not want to see things evolving. I see things evolving, and I want to explain why I see them evolving."

Karel Kuchaø's claim is Heraclitean only on the surface since there is nothing Bergsonian or Heraclitean in trying to understand evolution by referring it to a variable t.

The fact that the time-coordinate in GR has no physical significance, the relational understanding of evolution in GR that follows, and the emergence of time in Loop Quantum Gravity from a timeless level are truly Bergsonian since for the French philosopher, time or duration's main attribute is change.

All the very best,

Alexis

- You are true to say that Rovelli is the opposite of Parmenide and I demonstrate in my own essay that Einstein is 1/Zeno of Elea.

- As I am stating on Dr Rovelli's forum, criticizing a post he wrote himself on December 12, C.R. is not understanding Aristotle's Physics at all.

- Coming back to Bergson, the problem is that he wants to give consistancy with his duration to something -Time- that has no. Fighting against Descartes, Bergson is himself catched in Algebraic web.

- Max Planck himself, due to his rather concrete approach, was not 'happy' to use Boltzmann's Algebra that splits Matter artificially. So it is more logic to see in Pythagora or Descartes, or in AEinstein the Fathers of 'Quanta' than in M. Planck or N. Bohr.

Dear Alex,

Sorry to miss any specific rejoinder to my comments on Dec., 21 posting.Bit by bit discussion may well lead us to conclusions that may not hold for long. Discussing gravity only in the context of black holes and introducing its quantum aspect on that basis, is not the entire story of the role the Gravity played in the evolutionn of the Universe. That is why we are facing difficulty with its unision into a single Unified Field!

I am sorry but I don't really understand what you mean when you say that Bergson is caught in algebraic web. Moreover, I totally share Carlo Rovelli's views on Aristotle's physics