Einstein and Time (Humans)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Sunday, February 05, 2012, 16:38 (4674 days ago)

David, dhw,-I haven't read this book but its synopsis gives another way of explaining what I was trying to convey concerning Einstein's view of time:-" Nevertheless, Einstein said that time is an illusion. Nature's laws, as he and Newton defined them, describe a timeless, deterministic universe within which we can make predictions with complete certainty. In effect, these great physicists contended that time is reversible and thus meaningless."-This is contrasted with the view that "time only marches forward." -dhw's view of time as a sequence of events, is necessarily true as with no object there is no determination of time. However, Einstein's key insight was that because you can determine the state of any object from any set of current or initial conditions, that time was fundamentally nonexistent. This is why time was simply rolled into distance (space-time) and from then on never treated as an actual object of study. -In other words: Time is relative in the absolute sense. There is no fixed time, no clock, no fundamental universal reality for time--it is something that--like atoms--is contingent. Time is real in the sense that we use it to make measurements--what I stated all along. But its made up. -dhw's great bus analogy works thusly: since I can walk in front of the bus and get squished, this doesn't mean that time is a real property. From the universe's perspective, all I am is matter, and therefore even though the bus hits me and kills me, there's been no actual change of state in the universe. We can set up a model for my bus accident and recreate the event using math, and enjoy the replay as I get squished over and over again. (There's a joke in there somewhere...)-In this view however, is an inescapable sense of utter determinism, the likes of which many fundamentalists would agree...

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"