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Brian Greene's 'Fabric of the Cosmos'[1] has some great explanations of space and time and their relationship. If you are very interested, I highly recommend C

by ttcbj 7y ago

Brian Greene's 'Fabric of the Cosmos'[1] has some great explanations of space and time and their relationship. If you are very interested, I highly recommend Carlo Rovelli's 'The Order of Time.'[2] And 'Your Brain is a Time Machine'[3], though I ultimately found it unsatisfying, goes directly at the apparent contradiction between our sense of the 'flow' of time, and the implications of general relativity. Although it doesn't have an answer, it states the problem clearly, and has a lot of other interesting facts about our perceptions of time. Rovelli has also given some interesting talks on YouTube. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Cosmos-Space-Texture-Reality/dp/0375727205/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=green+fabric+of+the+cosmos&qid=1569417422&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Cosmos-Space-Texture-Reality/d... [2] https://www.amazon.com/s?k=carlo+rovelli+order+of+time&crid=1EWAGT03WZTRG&sprefix=Carlo+Rov%2Caps%2C154&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_3_9 https://www.amazon.com/s?k=carlo+rovelli+order+of+time&crid=... [3] https://www.amazon.com/Your-Brain-Time-Machine-Neuroscience/dp/B06XFWCY2Y/ref=sr_1_1?crid=207Q3MQ4VJILB&keywords=your+brain+is+a+time+machine+the+neuroscience+and+physics+of+time&qid=1569417644&sprefix=your+brain+is+a+time+machine%2Caps%2C152&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Your-Brain-Time-Machine-Neuroscience/...

wallace_f 7y ago
Nobody becomes famous, or rarely respected, by saying they don't understand. There are a lot of mysteries, even ones which arise in deceptively ordinary experiences, for example when we try to confront exactly how a gyroscope works(1). My personal opinion is, to make an analogy, that we don't really know the source code of the universe. Every natural law is not really a law, but just a theory, or a mental model, articulated in maths, describing what we see, nothing more than that. This becomes obvious when you consider something famous like Newtonian gravity's obsolecense by GR. GR is also not the source code, just another really good mental model to describe behavioral patterns of the universe. AFAIK time is something we really struggle with wrapping our minds around. There are questions which are so difficult I wonder if they're even worth asking -- such as about places where time would not exist, such as in places outside our universe. 1-https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-forgotten-mystery-of-inertia https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-forgotten-myst...

by ttcbj 7y ago

wallace_f 7y ago

Nobody becomes famous, or rarely respected, by saying they don't understand. There are a lot of mysteries, even ones which arise in deceptively ordinary experiences, for example when we try to confront exactly how a gyroscope works(1). My personal opinion is, to make an analogy, that we don't really know the source code of the universe. Every natural law is not really a law, but just a theory, or a mental model, articulated in maths, describing what we see, nothing more than that. This becomes obvious when you consider something famous like Newtonian gravity's obsolecense by GR. GR is also not the source code, just another really good mental model to describe behavioral patterns of the universe. AFAIK time is something we really struggle with wrapping our minds around. There are questions which are so difficult I wonder if they're even worth asking -- such as about places where time would not exist, such as in places outside our universe. 1-https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-forgotten-mystery-of-inertia https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-forgotten-myst...