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I once saw a fridge magnet that said "time is natures way of making sure everything doesn't happen all at once," and it's stuck with me. The concept of time no

I once saw a fridge magnet that said "time is natures way of making sure everything doesn't happen all at once," and it's stuck with me. The concept of time not being "real," can be useful as an exercise for modelling problems where to fully explore the problem space, you need to decouple your solutions from needing them to occur in an order or sequence. From an engineering perspective, "removing" time means you can model problems abstractly by stepping back from a problem and asking, what are all possible states of the mechanism, then which ones are we implementing, and finally, in what order. This is different from the relatively stochastic approach most people take of "given X, what is the necessary next step to get to desired endstate." More simply, as a tool, time helps us apprehend the states of a system by reducing the scope of our perception of them to sets of serial, ordered phenomena. Whether it is "real," or an artifact of our perception is sort of immaterial when you can choose to reason about things with it, or without it. A friend once joked that math is what you get when you remove time from physics. I look forward to the author's new book.

mcguire 9y ago
If I remember correctly, the full form of that joke is that time is nature's way of preventing everything from happening at once and space is nature's way of preventing everything from happening in Cambridge.
- gowld 9y ago
  That may be a variant. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler cites some old sources that are (probably) a few years older than the Cambridge version: http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/Personal/Autobiog1994.pdf http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/Personal/Autobiog1994.pdf says: > As Dharma Kumar paraphrased Joan Robinson, "time is a device to prevent everything happening at once, space is a device to prevent it all happening in Cambridge".
solipsism 9y ago
What does the idea of time not being real have to do with thinking about a system across different points in times in its evolution?
- motohagiography 9y ago
  The idea of time being real or not raises the question of whether it's, a) always necessary to consider, and b) whether viewing a problem in the scope of a time domain always necessarily adds more information than it removes from scope. It's just interesting to consider whether assuming time as a necessary variable can create an artificial constraint on reasoning. The specific example I was thinking of is in an ontology, where you have all these types of information, related in different ways, that are all factors in each others behavior, but you can't model the whole thing as a function or transaction. That is, adding time (a transaction order) reduces the scope of what you can include in your model. From a writerly laymans perspective, asking whether time is a real and universal property of all systems or an artifact of how we interpret them, is analogous to imagining we were studying physics with a heuristically useful, but generally limiting presupposition. One which would be like presuming all algorithms were in P, all graphs had hamiltonian cycles, all consistent theorems were true, etc. Then considering the consequences of the alternative. It's all very meta and fun to think about, but I suppose that's what this topic is about.
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    > The idea of time being real or not raises the question of whether it's, a) always necessary to consider... Not really. Time could be real, and still not necessary to consider in all situations. I think this argument applies to your b) as well, but I'm less sure of that...
    - motohagiography 9y ago
      So to clarify, we can choose to use time whether it's real or not. The question is, given it isn't always applicable, and it may not always be necessary where it is partially so, are there situations where it causes paradoxes where it is a source of noise instead of information, and how can we know when applying it whether it causes one or the other? Godel as a logician would have approached it as just another formalism. If reconciling models of physical phenomena with models of time produces inconsistency and paradoxes, he'd ask whether we were first sure that was time intrinsic to those physical phenomena, or does our model of time impose an arbitrary constraint on our ability to reason more abstractly about them. My point is that it's a reasonable question with related applications. Not sure there is a wrong to be here.

mcguire 9y ago

If I remember correctly, the full form of that joke is that time is nature's way of preventing everything from happening at once and space is nature's way of preventing everything from happening in Cambridge.

gowld 9y ago
That may be a variant. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler cites some old sources that are (probably) a few years older than the Cambridge version: http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/Personal/Autobiog1994.pdf http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/Personal/Autobiog1994.pdf says: > As Dharma Kumar paraphrased Joan Robinson, "time is a device to prevent everything happening at once, space is a device to prevent it all happening in Cambridge".

solipsism 9y ago

What does the idea of time not being real have to do with thinking about a system across different points in times in its evolution?

motohagiography 9y ago
The idea of time being real or not raises the question of whether it's, a) always necessary to consider, and b) whether viewing a problem in the scope of a time domain always necessarily adds more information than it removes from scope. It's just interesting to consider whether assuming time as a necessary variable can create an artificial constraint on reasoning. The specific example I was thinking of is in an ontology, where you have all these types of information, related in different ways, that are all factors in each others behavior, but you can't model the whole thing as a function or transaction. That is, adding time (a transaction order) reduces the scope of what you can include in your model. From a writerly laymans perspective, asking whether time is a real and universal property of all systems or an artifact of how we interpret them, is analogous to imagining we were studying physics with a heuristically useful, but generally limiting presupposition. One which would be like presuming all algorithms were in P, all graphs had hamiltonian cycles, all consistent theorems were true, etc. Then considering the consequences of the alternative. It's all very meta and fun to think about, but I suppose that's what this topic is about.
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  > The idea of time being real or not raises the question of whether it's, a) always necessary to consider... Not really. Time could be real, and still not necessary to consider in all situations. I think this argument applies to your b) as well, but I'm less sure of that...
  - motohagiography 9y ago
    So to clarify, we can choose to use time whether it's real or not. The question is, given it isn't always applicable, and it may not always be necessary where it is partially so, are there situations where it causes paradoxes where it is a source of noise instead of information, and how can we know when applying it whether it causes one or the other? Godel as a logician would have approached it as just another formalism. If reconciling models of physical phenomena with models of time produces inconsistency and paradoxes, he'd ask whether we were first sure that was time intrinsic to those physical phenomena, or does our model of time impose an arbitrary constraint on our ability to reason more abstractly about them. My point is that it's a reasonable question with related applications. Not sure there is a wrong to be here.