Albert Einstein and the Fabric of Time
Surprising as it may be to most non-scientists and even to some
scientists, Albert Einstein concluded in his later years that the
past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. In 1952, in his
book Relativity, in discussing Minkowski’s Space World
interpretation of his theory of relativity, Einstein writes:
Since there exists in this four dimensional structure
[space-time] no longer any sections which represent “now”
objectively, the concepts of happening and becoming are indeed not
completely suspended, but yet complicated. It appears therefore
more natural to think of physical reality as a four dimensional
existence, instead of, as hitherto, the evolution of a three
dimensional existence.
Einstein’s belief in an undivided solid reality was clear to
him, so much so that he completely rejected the separation we
experience as the moment of now. He believed there is no true
division between past and future, there is rather a single
existence. His most descriptive testimony to this faith came when
his lifelong friend Besso died. Einstein wrote a letter to Besso’s
family, saying that although Besso had preceded him in death it was
of no consequence, ”...for us physicists believe the separation
between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a
convincing one.”
Most everyone knows that Einstein proved that time is relative,
not absolute as Newton claimed. With the proper technology, such as
a very fast spaceship, one person is able to experience several
days while another person simultaneously experiences only a few
hours or minutes. The same two people can meet up again, one having
experienced days or even years while the other has only experienced
minutes. The person in the spaceship only needs to travel near to
the speed of light. The faster they travel, the slower their time
will pass relative to someone planted firmly on the Earth. If they
were able to travel at the speed of light, their time would cease
completely and they would only exist trapped in timelessness.
Einstein could hardly believe there were physicists who didn’t
believe in timelessness, and yet the wisdom of Einstein’s
convictions had very little impact on cosmology or science in
general. The majority of physicists have been slow to give up the
ordinary assumptions we make about time.
The two most highly recognized physicists since Einstein made
similar conclusions and even made dramatic advances toward a
timeless perspective of the universe, yet they also were unable to
change the temporal mentality ingrained in the mainstream of
physics and society. Einstein was followed in history by the
colorful and brilliant Richard Feynman. Feynman developed the most
effective and explanatory interpretation of quantum mechanics that
had yet been developed, known today as Sum over Histories.
Just as Einstein’s own Relativity Theory led Einstein to reject
time, Feynman’s Sum over Histories theory led him to describe time
simply as a direction in space. Feynman’s theory states that the
probability of an event is determined by summing together all the
possible histories of that event. For example, for a particle
moving from point A to B we imagine the particle traveling every
possible path, curved paths, oscillating paths, squiggly paths,
even backward in time and forward in time paths. Each path has an
amplitude, and when summed the vast majority of all these
amplitudes add up to zero, and all that remains is the comparably
few histories that abide by the laws and forces of nature. Sum over
histories indicates the direction of our ordinary clock time is
simply a path in space which is more probable than the more exotic
directions time might have taken otherwise.
Other worlds are just other directions in space, some less
probable, some equally as probable as the one direction we
experience. And some times our world represents the unlikely path.
Feynman’s summing of all possible histories could be described as
the first timeless description of a multitude of space-time worlds
all existing simultaneously. In a recent paper entitled Cosmology
From the Top Down, Professor Stephen Hawking of Cambridge writes;
“Some people make a great mystery of the multi universe, or the
Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum theory, but to me, these are
just different expressions of the Feynman path integral.”
(below is not in book)
What is still not quite resolved in modern physics is how to
properly combine Quantum theory with Einstein’s Relativity Theory.
It appears evident that time is purely a direction in space but how
then do we explain the uncertainty of quantum mechanics? Why does
it appear that God plays dice with the world. The two theories,
each having been proven by their usefulness, do of course tell the
same story about this one universe, but we just haven’t learned yet
to hear the story right. The best modern theory going is probably
the No Boundary Proposal, put fourth by Stephen Hawking and Jim
Hartle. This theory introduces a second reference of time which has
been inappropriately named Imaginary time. Hawking, writes of the
no boundary proposal, “The universe would be completely self
contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would
neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE.”
In my book Everything Forever, and here at my website, I explain
how fourth dimensional spatial directions travel through a series
of independent three dimensional block-like spaces, which in
science we call states, but they can also be thought of simply as
patterns. Hawking has already proposed that imaginary time can be
found at right angles to ordinary time. I further explain that it
is possible in an objective way to understand the universe to be
like a book or a movie film. Each moment is a separate universe
just like each frame of a movie or page of a book is separate. Yet
those separate states simultaneously form the larger whole of the
movie or the book. Seeing each moment as a continually existing
place sheds light on why particles would then travel as a quantum
wave, rather than linearly from point a to point b. This is
explained better elsewhere, but if each moment of ordinary time is
a solid, static, “block of now”, or field of space, then time each
new moment is a distinctly different universe. What we call time is
a spatial direction that travels through many static three
dimensional universes.
In such a model, what we call time is created purely out of
space. Special directions in space travel through each static three
dimensional space, therein producing a new realm of space beyond
three dimensions, which we call time. The interesting quality this
produces, is how the inhabitants of this fourth dimension of space
travel a linear path from past to future, but the surrounding
environment of each path is shifting from one pattern to the next.
This sends particles from one position in four dimensional space to
the next without moving linearly. As a result, each individual
observer in the fourth dimension experiences a continuous linear
time, even though everything in their immediate environment is
moving sequentially from place to place. Hence each temporal
environment of four dimensional space is constructed relative to
each independent observer.
One can imagine oneself smoothly traveling a direct and
interconnected path through time, but in looking around at one’s
environment, one sees that all other directions of time are broken,
causing particles to appear to sequentially leap from one place to
another. Paradoxically, everyone observes their own path and
experience of time to be linear, while all else around them is
sequential. In fact, when we explore time as a direction through
many 3D spaces, we find qualities of curvature, time dilation, and
spatial contraction, precisely as relativity describes those
qualities within our own spacetime.
There is one quote I have found from Einstein which is more or
less a contemplative mental thought about the notion of infinite
spaces, which doesn’t directly relate to my own approach of
describing a shape to all possible spaces, but it does at least
open up the subject of an infinite number of spaces to speculation.
And it also shows the open minded nature of Einstein’s thoughts
about empty space, which some have thought were closed.
When a smaller box s is situated, relativity at rest, inside the
hollow space of a larger box S, then the hollow space of s is a
part of the hollow space of S, and the same “space,” which contains
both of them, belongs to each of the boxes. When s is in motion
with respect to S, however, the concept is less simple. One is then
inclined to think that s encloses always the same space, but a
variable part of the space S. It then becomes necessary to
apportion to each box its particular space, not thought of as
bounded, and assume that these two spaces are in motion with
respect to each other…
Before one has become aware of this complication, space appears
as an unbounded medium or container in which material objects swim
around. But it must be remembered that there is an infinite number
of spaces, which are in motion with respect to each other…
The concept of space as something existing objectively and
independent of things belongs to pre-scientific thought, but not so
the idea of the existence of an infinite number of spaces in motion
relatively to each other. This latter idea is indeed unavoidable,
but is far from having played a considerable role even in
scientific thought.
I can testify that Einstein’s speculations revealed here
concerning infinite spaces in motion do at least carry us in the
right direction in how they suggest space might have an unseen and
possibly infinite content. Similar ideas were introduced by David
Bohm, who claimed there are two kinds of order in nature, what he
called explicate order and implicate order. Implicate order for
Bohm was a way of acknowledging how quantum mechanics reveals a
hidden order where our world is influenced by the whole of all
possible states. However, that order is much more visible than Bohm
ever realized, as explained in part two.
Unfortunately it wasn’t until Einstein died that scientists
began to consider the a Many Worlds Theory in science. It’s safe to
say that in Einstein’s time we were still getting used to the idea
of the Big Bang, adjusting to the ever more visible vast sea of
other galaxies, and the possibility of alien life on other planets.
The universe and reality were still primarily considered purely
solid and material based. Quantum theory, which eventually led to
the theory of many worlds, had not yet fully withstood the test of
time. Einstein even rejected its implications, saying “God does not
play dice” with the world, even as he himself established that
there is more to the universe than a single evolving moment of
now.
In my explorations of timelessness I reveal that ordinary space
is not merely full of other empty spaces, but empty space is
actually the whole of all physical realities; all the universes of
the many worlds theory. Profound as it may be, if the theories I
propose are correct, space is full, rather than empty. Material
things are less than the fullness of space. In fact, it may be that
space must include all possibilities in order to seem empty to us.
So in summary, the universe we see is just a fragment nested in a
timeless (everything) whole, rather than a single material world
magically arisen above some primordial nothing. All universes exist
without beginning or end in the ultimate arena of time, and each
moment we experience exists forever.
http://everythingforever.com/einstein.htm