I just don't have enough time right now. My off-chain life and job just leaves me with too little time to make really good posts lately. I'm relatively lucky that I have a whole lot of useless knowledge because of a lifetime of interest for anything to do with science, science-fiction, philosophy, economy, nature and anything else that tickles my curiosity.
Time, Losing Time, Clock - source: publicdomainpictures.net
So, today a short pause to stand still and reflect on that mysterious dimension of time. Scientists have had an evolving understanding of time throughout history. Many ancient cultures saw time as something cyclical, something we can all relate to I think because we also are still under the influence of this cyclical aspect through the returning seasons, sunrises and sunsets.
Ancient Greeks didn't see "eternity" as an infinite amount of time: that was covered by the cyclical nature, as that already lacks a beginning or end. Eternity for them was something "outside of time", and was the place where Gods reside, but also abstract things like geometrical shapes and mathematical laws.
Also in the universe according to Newton, time and space were everlasting, unchangeable and exist apart from each other; they are the stage on which the play of our existence occurs. The earth, sun and planets will keep revolving no matter what happens in our lives, for we are not part of the stage and we cannot influence it in any way. Eternity was now seen as an infinite amount of time, with infinite time in the past and infinite time yet to come. Time and space were apart from us, and together with Calculus Newtonian science introduced linear time as opposed to the cyclical view of time our earlier ancestors had.
This changed again with Albert Einsteins theory of general relativity in which time and space were merged and could be influenced by objects or rather by gravity. Spacetime and all stuff in it became the stage! This also gave birth to spike in deterministic thinking as Einsteins spacetime is seen as a sort of space-time block or loaf in which all time that has ever been and will ever be is already contained. This is the universe in which you could know the future, by applying the laws of cause and effect, if only you were intelligent and all-seeing enough to know the current position and speed of every atom in existence. The future is already set and flows from purely "previously" existing causal conditions.
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows a galaxy cluster, SDSS J1038+4849, that appears to have two eyes and a nose as part of a happy face. Image credit: NASA/ESA - "Those eyes are actually very bright galaxies, and the smile lines are, in reality, arcs caused by an effect known as strong gravitational lensing." - source: jpl.nasa.gov
Thank God or your preferred object of praise for free will and the discovery of quantum mechanics. In this most recent scientific revolution the not deterministic universe of before Einstein has a chance to gain popularity again. Theoretical physicists and other scientists are hard at work to develop a theory of quantum gravity, and it is one of the many fields within quantum mechanics that shows time to be once again separate from the rest of the universe:
A conceptual difficulty in combining quantum mechanics with general relativity arises from the contrasting role of time within these two frameworks. In quantum theories time acts as an independent background through which states evolve
source: Wikipedia
Time is a strange thing and a wonderful concept to theorize about. We experience it on a mainly physical level. There definitely was a past, and in the present I'm typing this post and after the typing something exists that didn't exist before, so in the present the future is created, but the future is only known after it's happened... The one thing that's appealing from Einstein's explanation of space-time, is that all time is personal, and your experience of time is dependent on where you are and at what speed you're moving and to what gravitational forces you are exposed. If I leave now in a rocket-ship and travel close to the speed of light, time slows down drastically for me; if I travel for years, hundreds of years in earth time, before I return, I will have aged only a few years possibly, but everyone I've ever known will be long dead.
There are so much more things to explore about time, such as the "arrow of time" that can only point in one direction, so we can only grow older and can't move freely in the fourth dimension like we can in the three dimensions of space; this has to do with entropy, or the second law of thermodynamics that says, roughly, that everything tends to a configuration of maximal randomness. Everything eventually becomes chaos, like if you build a sand-castle, that takes energy, because the grains of sand have to be in one of very few configurations for them to resemble a castle, where there are many possible configurations, more random configurations to resemble just a heap of sand... Argh... entropy is hard to explain...
And I'm out of time ;-) I hope off-chain life will be more forgiving in the near future. I still hope this little expose about the only really scarce thing in all our lives was somewhat enjoyable and informative. See you all tomorrow! Cheers!
Entropy and the Arrow of Time
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