Royal Institute presentation that I really enjoyed. Has some visual aspects, but can be mostly listened to while driving:
The Physics and Philosophy of Time - with Carlo Rovelli
> From Boltzmann to quantum theory, from Einstein to loop quantum gravity, our understanding of time has been undergoing radical transformations. Carlo Rovelli brings together physics, philosophy and art to unravel the mystery of time.
I think I'm a simpleton because I could never imagine time being it's own thing. I see time as simply the amount of change in reality we can perceptually sample. Much like how an object in motion will continue in it's motion until it meets resistance,reality in my opinion is in continuous motion that has yet to meet resistance. Time (imo)is our measure of this change divided by our ability to sample it(where this ability could be second,minute,etc...)
Again,that's my opinion as a layman. I've always wondered why time was the focus, when I at least have been more curious about universal change. Why is everything in motion? and how is everything universally connected to where it changes at the same rate?
Maybe there's already plenty of work on this and I'm being ignorant(apologies if so).
Some tangential thoughts: even though I like these popular science (physics, to be precise) books, I have hard times to imagine their writers as a real scientists. Tyson, Greene, Carroll, Kaku, Rovelli... So many writers author so many books about these hey-look!-so-fascinating! things. It looks like a bandwagon and more and more scientists (yes, physicists especially) are getting on it - like they don't have any important research to do, like they are so hopeless and desperate about the current state of physics and they stopped caring about it and found a proxy to monetize their knowledge. But hey, that's not a secret anymore - everyone knows about the crisis, from the Queen of England to the hounds of hell. Sabine Hossenfelder is a legend for me. A few years back, when I was taking a Physics101 class, even the lecturer almost begged for help after the last lecture at the end of the semester: "my fellow students, please, please, consider (to continue your career in the field of) physics. Physics is stuck. It needs new ideas, new theories, new minds. Please consider this." I was stunned. That was some real thing.
I guess the fast advancement of technology in the late ~100 years made even the most brilliant minds (relatively) lazy. They gradually stopped thinking, beating their brains out year after year and here we are. No serious discovery after the quantum theory. String theory? Yeah, gazillions of dimensions - good luck with that. Higgs boson, Gravitational waves? Come on, nothing revolutionary - we're still waiting for the revolution to emerge from (upgraded!) LHC. For me, they are cleverly and beautifully marketed (minor) findings. (Maybe some of you have heard of, some (if not many) of the top universities have teams working hard doing all the "scientific-marketing" for the Nobel Prize - it's a precious prestige win in this popular world we live in).
Minds get eroded by technology by heavily relying on it. And it's getting worse and worse by the distraction caused by all the digital "life" surrounding us, pulling and tightening its ropes every day. I imagine a true scientist as a monk. S/he doesn't think about writing a pop-sci book, appearing on TV and s/he got a distantiation even for interviews about her/his latest important research/discovery. "Monks" are needed more than ever for science nowadays.
"I have hard times to imagine their writers as a real scientists. Tyson, Greene, Carroll, Kaku, Rovelli..."
If you mean by "real scientist" that they are doing real work that advances the field, some of them are and, yes, some of them aren't. I don't mean that as a criticism, because there is real value in being a PR person for science. (Some danger if they do it poorly, but a lot of value, too.) Hawking, for instance, was certainly a real scientist by any measure, right up until his unfortunate passing, but also did good PR and wrote some very popular books. And not to pick on him, but according to his CV [1], Neil deGrasse Tyson hasn't published a paper in a decade, and if you skip three related papers in 2007-2008, hadn't published prior to that since 1998. Doesn't mean he's not doing useful stuff, or that he wasn't at least a scientist in the past, but he's certainly not on the same sort of track as Hawking was.
> Minds get eroded by technology by heavily relying on it
This has been said for thousands of years. Socrates/Plato was complaining about how writing weakens the human memory.
We need to accept that human minds are limited and technology is meant to extend them. Science has advanced considerably due to computers despite the appearances.
The way out of the current “impasse” is through even more technology. We might not be able to solve all the mysteries of the universe without intelligence augmentation or superintelligent AI.
It's funny because as much as you recognize this, the people you describe as being needed are treated terribly not only by the establishment but those who think they are outside of it. Perhaps that explains this state.
Sadly, not humble, and, from my point of view, uninformed, that is, exactly what would be expected from an otherwise uninformed reader of the newspaper articles about the topics touched, especially from one not understanding how science actually works.
In reality, the "failed" fulfillment of some expectations when the best experiments up to now are performed is also what advances our knowledge, greatly, you can read, for an example, here:
Look from this perspective: not only that what some theoretical scientists whose direct "expectations" came to be unconfirmed by the LHC experiments "expected" would remain just a "plain imagination" without a huge investment in extremely advanced experiments, the same would remain for any scientist having some other ideas.
We need so advanced experiments because anything else is already known. And what we know today we wouldn't without the experiments, especially such producing "unexpected" results. There's is not an actual "crisis" in science advancing, exactly by doing experiments never before done the science does advance. The experiments like LHC are indeed a precondition for any new advancement.
For every complex problem there exists a nice and easily understandable solution... that is wrong. Even the basic explanation in many articles written about the science the authors get wrong, and the casual readers get even more wrong.
The typical complaint is that the experiments "cost much" and then the wishes of some aren't "confirmed"? Well they cost peanuts compared to the investment in military.
"Program cost US$1.508 trillion (through 2070 in then-year dollars), US$55.1B for RDT&E, $319.1B for procurement, $4.8B for MILCON, $1123.8B for operations & sustainment (2015 estimate)"
Compare with the total budget of LHC experiment of just €7.5 billion:
You'd get surely more than 200 LHCs for just one type of a military plane.
Also, the expected cost of measuring gravitational waves from space, the way that would also give us a new and otherwise inaccessible information about the Universe is 1000 times smaller than the cost of the above military plane.
The typical complaint goes on with the idea that the if scientists work on something, and it's unconfirmed by the experiment, it was unnecessary work. That's also not true at all. Most of hypotheses of what is behind the limits of our current experiments will not be confirmed by definition. If we knew, we wouldn't need to perform the experiments.
The crisis in physics is due to Kant. As long as physicists are disdainful of philosophy the crisis and deterioration will continue. They are Kantians and don't even know it.
Ayn Rand identified Kant's error in his Critique of Pure Reason and destroyed his program, she rejected Hume's rank skepticism (which Kant was answering) and showed Descartes how to validate reason (i.e. to be certain) without being omniscient. Descartes was the intellectual who started this ball rolling by turning reason unto itself and asking how does it work. He was not up to the task and injected a crude circularity at the base of reason, i.e. "I think therefore I am", which Rand identified and fixed but she is now completely ignored.
And what do those "time quanta" represent? "Time of light traversing the radius of an electron", really? Isn't that just another measurement device based on light quanta and distance?
Time does not exist. It is an abstraction based on the movement of matter. We use time to compare the relative motions of things.
Every instrument we use to "measure" time involves movement: pendulum, sandglass, rotation of Earth, translation of Earth around the Sun, vibration of atoms, etc.
Don't you need time to even define movement? Movement is a change of the position with respect to time. So without time you can't have movement. But obviously you are right that the two concepts are strictly related, that doesn't mean time doesn't "exist" (however you define "exist").
The most surprising fact is that the readings of all these instruments are in sync with each other! We take it for granted, and don't appreciate the mystery. It very well might be that the Universe forms a complex landscape with varying "laws", with the pockets where the notions of space and time become quite fuzzy and inconsistent; we might live in a rare oasis where the things more or less "make sense". Elsewhere, there might be no time at all. Popular books on physics never mention this possibility.
By similar logic you could argue all physical units are abstractions, which I guess they are. They are very useful in creating a simple accurate predictive model of things we observe on many scales. What's the utility of a distinction between existence and abstraction?
Wow ... Since you are so certain that time does not exist, why don't you write a paper showing the implications for quantizing gravity, and why the standard spacetime picture of both Special and General relativity is wrong?
Also the origin of the universe, why it's accelerating its expansion, how are gravity and quantum phenomena reconciled and how do they work.... I'd say it's a great time to be alive and there's no shortage of important questions!
I dont think time is any more mysterious a concept than space. Asking "what is time" is just as enigmatic as "why are there 3 dimensions and not 1,2,4 or many more?"
How can you have a thing that is "left" or "up" of another thing? How come "all the things" aren't in the same place?
Disclaimer: I'm a physicist who didn't finish the Phd and went to work in the tech field instead.
I wish physicists would stop writing these bullshitty popular science books. A lot of the books are popularizing unverified / unverifiable things like String Theory or Multiverse or Arrow of Time. And when they're talking about more plain things like Special Relativity, then I still cringe, because it's not something that's worth explaining to lay people: there is no situation in which some high-level bullshitty understanding of GR or SR or QM will be helpful or relevant in life, at best it will confuse you.
It is a good and necessary thing to tell students about this, so some of them become physicists, but you don't need popular science books for that, it should happen in schools, for free.
If you're going to speak about Physics to lay people, at least do it it in a way that's relevant to them, eg. look at how Feynman taught Physics. Explain how a boomerang works, or how thermodynamics relates to photosynthesis.
> it's not something that's worth explaining to lay people
Lay person here. I'd just like you to know that we experience curiosity too. Also, having read some Rovelli, I should point out that he's pretty good at highlighting when and how he's simplifying, and flagging up when he strays beyond the scientific consensus into the unverified.
> there is no situation in which some high-level bullshitty understanding of GR or SR or QM will be helpful or relevant in life, at best it will confuse you.
If I only learned and experienced things that would be 'helpful' or 'relevant' it would be a very dull life.
Planck's constant, speed of light travel when you chain across space which Planck himself should have understood if he thought about transmissions of information in series. Curves when gravity pushes/pulls light from straight paths. What questions are there?
[+] [-] ballenf|7 years ago|reply
The Physics and Philosophy of Time - with Carlo Rovelli
> From Boltzmann to quantum theory, from Einstein to loop quantum gravity, our understanding of time has been undergoing radical transformations. Carlo Rovelli brings together physics, philosophy and art to unravel the mystery of time.
https://youtu.be/-6rWqJhDv7M
Posted 13 June 2018, recorded 30 April 2018.
[+] [-] howard941|7 years ago|reply
https://www.c-span.org/video/?445419-2/the-order-time
[+] [-] badrabbit|7 years ago|reply
Again,that's my opinion as a layman. I've always wondered why time was the focus, when I at least have been more curious about universal change. Why is everything in motion? and how is everything universally connected to where it changes at the same rate?
Maybe there's already plenty of work on this and I'm being ignorant(apologies if so).
[+] [-] gowld|7 years ago|reply
That's what Rovelli is investigating/theorizing about.
[+] [-] andrepd|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmoriarty|7 years ago|reply
So if there was no one to perceive the change, there'd be no time?
Also, what is change?
[+] [-] dyukqu|7 years ago|reply
Minds get eroded by technology by heavily relying on it. And it's getting worse and worse by the distraction caused by all the digital "life" surrounding us, pulling and tightening its ropes every day. I imagine a true scientist as a monk. S/he doesn't think about writing a pop-sci book, appearing on TV and s/he got a distantiation even for interviews about her/his latest important research/discovery. "Monks" are needed more than ever for science nowadays.
Those were my humble 2 cents.
[+] [-] jerf|7 years ago|reply
If you mean by "real scientist" that they are doing real work that advances the field, some of them are and, yes, some of them aren't. I don't mean that as a criticism, because there is real value in being a PR person for science. (Some danger if they do it poorly, but a lot of value, too.) Hawking, for instance, was certainly a real scientist by any measure, right up until his unfortunate passing, but also did good PR and wrote some very popular books. And not to pick on him, but according to his CV [1], Neil deGrasse Tyson hasn't published a paper in a decade, and if you skip three related papers in 2007-2008, hadn't published prior to that since 1998. Doesn't mean he's not doing useful stuff, or that he wasn't at least a scientist in the past, but he's certainly not on the same sort of track as Hawking was.
[+] [-] glorkk|7 years ago|reply
This has been said for thousands of years. Socrates/Plato was complaining about how writing weakens the human memory.
We need to accept that human minds are limited and technology is meant to extend them. Science has advanced considerably due to computers despite the appearances.
The way out of the current “impasse” is through even more technology. We might not be able to solve all the mysteries of the universe without intelligence augmentation or superintelligent AI.
[+] [-] blueprint|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acqq|7 years ago|reply
Sadly, not humble, and, from my point of view, uninformed, that is, exactly what would be expected from an otherwise uninformed reader of the newspaper articles about the topics touched, especially from one not understanding how science actually works.
In reality, the "failed" fulfillment of some expectations when the best experiments up to now are performed is also what advances our knowledge, greatly, you can read, for an example, here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17363056
Look from this perspective: not only that what some theoretical scientists whose direct "expectations" came to be unconfirmed by the LHC experiments "expected" would remain just a "plain imagination" without a huge investment in extremely advanced experiments, the same would remain for any scientist having some other ideas.
We need so advanced experiments because anything else is already known. And what we know today we wouldn't without the experiments, especially such producing "unexpected" results. There's is not an actual "crisis" in science advancing, exactly by doing experiments never before done the science does advance. The experiments like LHC are indeed a precondition for any new advancement.
For every complex problem there exists a nice and easily understandable solution... that is wrong. Even the basic explanation in many articles written about the science the authors get wrong, and the casual readers get even more wrong.
The typical complaint is that the experiments "cost much" and then the wishes of some aren't "confirmed"? Well they cost peanuts compared to the investment in military.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...
"Program cost US$1.508 trillion (through 2070 in then-year dollars), US$55.1B for RDT&E, $319.1B for procurement, $4.8B for MILCON, $1123.8B for operations & sustainment (2015 estimate)"
Compare with the total budget of LHC experiment of just €7.5 billion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider
You'd get surely more than 200 LHCs for just one type of a military plane.
Also, the expected cost of measuring gravitational waves from space, the way that would also give us a new and otherwise inaccessible information about the Universe is 1000 times smaller than the cost of the above military plane.
The typical complaint goes on with the idea that the if scientists work on something, and it's unconfirmed by the experiment, it was unnecessary work. That's also not true at all. Most of hypotheses of what is behind the limits of our current experiments will not be confirmed by definition. If we knew, we wouldn't need to perform the experiments.
[+] [-] wallace_f|7 years ago|reply
>I have been thinking of how very gently I have always been dealt with. I have never so much as had a violent shove in my entire life
-Maxwell
Also: do we need monks in other places? In the courts--removed from the carrots and sticks society can throw at them?
[+] [-] dmfdmf|7 years ago|reply
Ayn Rand identified Kant's error in his Critique of Pure Reason and destroyed his program, she rejected Hume's rank skepticism (which Kant was answering) and showed Descartes how to validate reason (i.e. to be certain) without being omniscient. Descartes was the intellectual who started this ball rolling by turning reason unto itself and asking how does it work. He was not up to the task and injected a crude circularity at the base of reason, i.e. "I think therefore I am", which Rand identified and fixed but she is now completely ignored.
[+] [-] FrozenVoid|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dschuetz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GnarfGnarf|7 years ago|reply
Every instrument we use to "measure" time involves movement: pendulum, sandglass, rotation of Earth, translation of Earth around the Sun, vibration of atoms, etc.
[+] [-] fela|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] resource0x|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fantispug|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aroberge|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pmoriarty|7 years ago|reply
The nature of consciousness, life, and death can all certainly give it a run for its money.
Incidentally, would anyone happen to have a direct link to a version of this article that could be read without enabling javascript?
[+] [-] jfaucett|7 years ago|reply
1. Nature of Life (we are still nowhere near understanding how it arose or how living organisms work in all their intricate detail).
2. Nature of Consciousness - what is consciousness, how can living matter instantiate it, how can we quantify it, etc?
3. Origin of the Universe
4. Why do we seem so alone in the Universe?
5. Resolving Quantum Mechanics / Gravity
6. Understanding Time
[+] [-] imglorp|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trevyn|7 years ago|reply
Life and death: Molecular biology
[+] [-] mikec3010|7 years ago|reply
How can you have a thing that is "left" or "up" of another thing? How come "all the things" aren't in the same place?
[+] [-] everdev|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perl4ever|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] make3|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Maro|7 years ago|reply
I wish physicists would stop writing these bullshitty popular science books. A lot of the books are popularizing unverified / unverifiable things like String Theory or Multiverse or Arrow of Time. And when they're talking about more plain things like Special Relativity, then I still cringe, because it's not something that's worth explaining to lay people: there is no situation in which some high-level bullshitty understanding of GR or SR or QM will be helpful or relevant in life, at best it will confuse you.
It is a good and necessary thing to tell students about this, so some of them become physicists, but you don't need popular science books for that, it should happen in schools, for free.
If you're going to speak about Physics to lay people, at least do it it in a way that's relevant to them, eg. look at how Feynman taught Physics. Explain how a boomerang works, or how thermodynamics relates to photosynthesis.
[+] [-] boffinism|7 years ago|reply
Lay person here. I'd just like you to know that we experience curiosity too. Also, having read some Rovelli, I should point out that he's pretty good at highlighting when and how he's simplifying, and flagging up when he strays beyond the scientific consensus into the unverified.
[+] [-] jpmoral|7 years ago|reply
If I only learned and experienced things that would be 'helpful' or 'relevant' it would be a very dull life.
[+] [-] rufugee|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crb002|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrepd|7 years ago|reply