Mr. Johnstone,
Having now completed my reading of Sean Carroll's 'From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time,' I can give it my full-throated endorsement as a "must read" for anyone having a serious interest in the nature of time. An excellent book.
Strangely enough, however, it is not until well into the epilogue that he first seriously touches on a view of time which I believe is somewhat aligned with our thinking. He writes,
"There is one other approach lurking in the background, which we occasionally acknowledged but never granted our undivided attention: the idea that 'time' istelf is simply an approximation that is occasionally useful, including in our local universe, but doesn't have any fundamental meaning. This is a perfectly legitimate possibility. Lessons from the holographic principle, as well as a general feeling that the underlying ingredients of a quantum mechanical theory may appear very different from what shows up in the classical regime, make it quite reasonable to imagine that time might be an emergent phenomenon rather than a necessary part of our ultimate description of the world.
"One reason why the time-is-just-an-approximation alternative wasn't emphasized in this book is that there doesn't seem to be too much to say about it, at least within our present state of knowledge."
If I'm not mistaken, you and I would not agree with his conclusion that there is not much to say about this approach, and we have, in fact, already said quite a bit about it, including using this approach as the basis for making at least two falsifiable "predictions," one of which (the equivalence of mass and energy) obviously has already been experimentally borne out.
But our paradigm for the correct way to think about time obviously faces many non-trivial hurdles before it could become mainstream. You yourself have thought and written about some of these hurdles in your various posts to my FQXi essay and elsewhere. But I believe the potential benefits to be gained make the enterprise well worth the candle. I just hope we can eventually convince others such as Mr. Carroll, Mr. Smilin, et al., to give it serious consideration.
At any rate, I believe that Mr. Carroll's book has now in effect thrown down a weighty gauntlet in terms of setting a high bar for future books on the topic, including the rumored and much anticipated books from Messrs. Barbour and Smolin.
I hope this finds you well and enjoying life.
Cheers
