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Do physicists think time actually exists? I wonder if someone has reasoned that time is an accounting method that humans have developed to make sense of their e
by nis0s 2y ago
Do physicists think time actually exists? I wonder if someone has reasoned that time is an accounting method that humans have developed to make sense of their experienced change of systems.
Wolfram uses the words progression and computation a lot in his essay, but there’s an implicit bias there of assuming a process is deterministic, or has some state it’s driving towards. But none of these “progressions” mean anything, I think. It seems they are simply reactions subject to thermodynamics.
If no one observed these system changes, then the trends, patterns, and periodicity of these systems would just be a consequence of physics. It seems what we call “time” is more the accumulation of an effect rather than a separate aspect of physics.
For example, I wonder what happens in physics simulations if time is replaced by a measure of effect amplitude. I don’t know, tbh, I am not a physicist so maybe this is all naïve and nonsense.
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- goatlover 2y ago> Do physicists think time actually exists? Yes, spacetime is important for General Relativity, cosmology and thermodynamics. Whether it's fundamental or emerges from something more fundamental is an open question though.
- mensetmanusman 2y agoTime is just a measure of change. No change. No time. We are interested in a peculiar rate of time based on the heart beat of our experience.
- deepfriedchokes 2y agoIt could be that what changes is our perception of reality, not reality itself.
- bubblyworld 2y agoTime "exists" in physics in the same way everything else in physics does - namely, the value we measure with clocks in the real world satisfies all of the same properties (at least in certain regimes of the universe) as the thing we call "time" in various physics theories like relativity/classical mechanics. And those theories make (reasonably) correct predictions about the values we measure in the real world. Is it possible that these properties are the result of some other interactions that have very different laws at a lower level? Absolutely! But the discovery of particles didn't cause the sun to disappear, if that makes sense.
- defaultcompany 2y agoI don't know the answer to your question but tangentially, many human concepts related to time definitely do not exist in a purely physical sense. Like being "late" or "early", things "taking too long" or "being slow". Being "out of time" or "just in time". These are all human concepts. Physically speaking (classically anyway), things all happen right when they are supposed to.
- accrual 2y agoI find a lot of interesting links between spirituality and physics like this. One idea or message in spirituality is that everything happens exactly as as "the universe" intends it to. It's meant to be a comforting thought as events (good and bad) occur in one's life and to encourage one to detach from outcomes. Yet, it's more or less parallel to classical determinism as you mentioned. > Physically speaking (classically anyway), things all happen right when they are supposed to.