Newsflash: Time May Not Exist

An Eternal Now SG

Sorry for posting it twice (originally posted in Newsflash: Time May Not Exist), but I'm posting it here for the further discussions in the Buddhist context Smile

Newsflash: Time May Not Exist
06.12.2007
Not to mention the question of which way it goes...
by Tim Folger

No one keeps track of time better than Ferenc Krausz. In his lab at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, he has clocked the shortest time intervals ever observed. Krausz uses ultraviolet laser pulses to track the absurdly brief quantum leaps of electrons within atoms. The events he probes last for about 100 attoseconds, or 100 quintillionths of a second. For a little perspective, 100 attoseconds is to one second as a second is to 300 million years.

But even Krausz works far from the frontier of time. There is a temporal realm called the Planck scale, where even attoseconds drag by like eons. It marks the edge of known physics, a region where distances and intervals are so short that the very concepts of time and space start to break down. Planck timethe smallest unit of time that has any physical meaningis 10-43 second, less than a trillionth of a trillionth of an attosecond. Beyond that? Tempus incognito. At least for now.

Efforts to understand time below the Planck scale have led to an exceedingly strange juncture in physics. The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality. If so, then what is time? And why is it so obviously and tyrannically omnipresent in our own experience? The meaning of time has become terribly problematic in contemporary physics, says Simon Saunders, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford. The situation is so uncomfortable that by far the best thing to do is declare oneself an agnostic.

The trouble with time started a century ago, when Einsteins special and general theories of relativity demolished the idea of time as a universal constant. One consequence is that the past, present, and future are not absolutes. Einsteins theories also opened a rift in physics because the rules of general relativity (which describe gravity and the large-scale structure of the cosmos) seem incompatible with those of quantum physics (which govern the realm of the tiny). Some four decades ago, the renowned physicist John Wheeler, then at Princeton, and the late Bryce DeWitt, then at the University of North Carolina, developed an extraordinary equation that provides a possible framework for unifying relativity and quantum mechanics. But the Wheeler-DeWitt equation has always been controversial, in part because it adds yet another, even more baffling twist to our understanding of time.

One finds that time just disappears from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, says Carlo Rovelli, a physicist at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France. It is an issue that many theorists have puzzled about. It may be that the best way to think about quantum reality is to give up the notion of timethat the fundamental description of the universe must be timeless.

No one has yet succeeded in using the Wheeler-DeWitt equation to integrate quantum theory with general relativity. Nevertheless, a sizable minority of physicists, Rovelli included, believe that any successful merger of the two great masterpieces of 20th-century physics will inevitably describe a universe in which, ultimately, there is no time.

The possibility that time may not exist is known among physicists as the problem of time. It may be the biggest, but it is far from the only temporal conundrum. Vying for second place is this strange fact: The laws of physics dont explain why time always points to the future. All the lawswhether Newtons, Einsteins, or the quirky quantum ruleswould work equally well if time ran backward. As far as we can tell, though, time is a one-way process; it never reverses, even though no laws restrict it.

Its quite mysterious why we have such an obvious arrow of time, says Seth Lloyd, a quantum mechanical engineer at MIT. (When I ask him what time it is, he answers, Beats me. Are we done?) The usual explanation of this is that in order to specify what happens to a system, you not only have to specify the physical laws, but you have to specify some initial or final condition.

The mother of all initial conditions, Lloyd says, was the Big Bang. Physicists believe that the universe started as a very simple, extremely compact ball of energy. Although the laws of physics themselves dont provide for an arrow of time, the ongoing expansion of the universe does. As the universe expands, it becomes ever more complex and disorderly. The growing disorderphysicists call it an increase in entropyis driven by the expansion of the universe, which may be the origin of what we think of as the ceaseless forward march of time.

An Eternal Now SG

Time, in this view, is not something that exists apart from the universe. There is no clock ticking outside the cosmos. Most of us tend to think of time the way Newton did: Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably, without regard to anything external. But as Einstein proved, time is part of the fabric of the universe. Contrary to what Newton believed, our ordinary clocks dont measure something thats independent of the universe. In fact, says Lloyd, clocks dont really measure time at all.

I recently went to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, says Lloyd. (NIST is the government lab that houses the atomic clock that standardizes time for the nation.) I said something like, Your clocks measure time very accurately. They told me, Our clocks do not measure time. I thought, Wow, thats very humble of these guys. But they said, No, time is defined to be what our clocks measure. Which is true. They define the time standards for the globe: Time is defined by the number of clicks of their clocks.

Rovelli, the advocate of a timeless universe, says the NIST timekeepers have it right. Moreover, their point of view is consistent with the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. We never really see time, he says. We see only clocks. If you say this object moves, what you really mean is that this object is here when the hand of your clock is here, and so on. We say we measure time with clocks, but we see only the hands of the clocks, not time itself. And the hands of a clock are a physical variable like any other. So in a sense we cheat because what we really observe are physical variables as a function of other physical variables, but we represent that as if everything is evolving in time.

What happens with the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is that we have to stop playing this game. Instead of introducing this fictitious variabletime, which itself is not observablewe should just describe how the variables are related to one another. The question is, Is time a fundamental property of reality or just the macroscopic appearance of things? I would say its only a macroscopic effect. Its something that emerges only for big things.

The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality.

By big things, Rovelli means anything that exists much above the mysterious Planck scale. As of now there is no physical theory that completely describes what the universe is like below the Planck scale. One possibility is that if physicists ever manage to unify quantum theory and general relativity, space and time will be described by some modified version of quantum mechanics. In such a theory, space and time would no longer be smooth and continuous. Rather, they would consist of discrete fragmentsquanta, in the argot of physicsjust as light is composed of individual bundles of energy called photons. These would be the building blocks of space and time. Its not easy to imagine space and time being made of something else. Where would the components of space and time exist, if not in space and time?

As Rovelli explains it, in quantum mechanics all particles of matter and energy can also be described as waves. And waves have an unusual property: An infinite number of them can exist in the same location. If time and space are one day shown to consist of quanta, the quanta could all exist piled together in a single dimensionless point. Space and time in some sense melt in this picture, says Rovelli. There is no space anymore. There are just quanta kind of living on top of one another without being immersed in a space.

Rovelli has been working with one of the worlds leading mathematicians, Alain Connes of the College of France in Paris, on this notion. Together they have developed a framework to show how the thing we experience as time might emerge from a more fundamental, timeless reality. As Rovelli describes it, Time may be an approximate concept that emerges at large scalesa bit like the concept of surface of the water, which makes sense macroscopically but which loses a precise sense at the level of the atoms.

Realizing that his explanation may only be deepening the mystery of time, Rovelli says that much of the knowledge that we now take for granted was once considered equally perplexing. I realize that the picture is not intuitive. But this is what fundamental physics is about: finding new ways of thinking about the world and proposing them and seeing if they work. I think that when Galileo said that the Earth was spinning crazily around, it was utterly incomprehensible in the same manner. Space for Copernicus was not the same as space for Newton, and space for Newton was not the same as space for Einstein. We always learn a little bit more.

Einstein, for one, found solace in his revolutionary sense of time. In March 1955, when his lifelong friend Michele Besso died, he wrote a letter consoling Bessos family: Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Rovelli senses another temporal breakthrough just around the corner. Einsteins 1905 paper came out and suddenly changed peoples thinking about space-time. Were again in the middle of something like that, he says. When the dust settles, timewhatever it may becould turn out to be even stranger and more illusory than even Einstein could imagine.

An Eternal Now SG

I think this is a very significant piece of article, as Thusness said, it is about the deconstruction of time.

...Time, in this view, is not something that exists apart from the universe. There is no clock ticking outside the cosmos. Most of us tend to think of time the way Newton did: Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably, without regard to anything external. But as Einstein proved, time is part of the fabric of the universe. Contrary to what Newton believed, our ordinary clocks dont measure something thats independent of the universe. In fact, says Lloyd, clocks dont really measure time at all.

I recently went to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, says Lloyd. (NIST is the government lab that houses the atomic clock that standardizes time for the nation.) I said something like, Your clocks measure time very accurately. They told me, Our clocks do not measure time. I thought, Wow, thats very humble of these guys. But they said, No, time is defined to be what our clocks measure. Which is true. They define the time standards for the globe: Time is defined by the number of clicks of their clocks.

Rovelli, the advocate of a timeless universe, says the NIST timekeepers have it right. Moreover, their point of view is consistent with the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. We never really see time, he says. We see only clocks. If you say this object moves, what you really mean is that this object is here when the hand of your clock is here, and so on. We say we measure time with clocks, but we see only the hands of the clocks, not time itself. And the hands of a clock are a physical variable like any other. So in a sense we cheat because what we really observe are physical variables as a function of other physical variables, but we represent that as if everything is evolving in time.

What happens with the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is that we have to stop playing this game. Instead of introducing this fictitious variabletime, which itself is not observablewe should just describe how the variables are related to one another. The question is, Is time a fundamental property of reality or just the macroscopic appearance of things? I would say its only a macroscopic effect. Its something that emerges only for big things.

The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality...

Nondual Thinking and the Mahayana Deconstruction of Time

....If we are thus trapped in time, how can we escape? The paradoxical nondual solution is to eliminate the dichotomy dialectically by realizing that I am not in time because I am time, which therefore means that I am free from time.

Much of our difficulty in understanding time is due to the unwise use of spatial metaphors -- in fact, the objectification of time requires such spatial metaphors -- but in this case another spatial metaphor is helpful. We normally understand objects such as cups to be "in" space, which (as explained above in relation to time) implies that in themselves they must have a self-existence distinct from space. However, not much reflection is necessary to realize that the cup itself is irremediably spatial. All its parts must have a certain thickness, and without the various spatial relations among the bottom, sides, and handle, the cup could not be a cup. Perhaps one way to express this is to say that the cup is not "in" space but itself is space: the cup is "what space is doing in that place," so to speak. The same is true for the temporality of the cup. The cup is not an atemporal, self-existing object that just happens to be "in" time, for its being is irremediably temporal. The point of this is to destroy the thought-constructed dualism between things and time. When we wish to express this, we must describe one in terms of the other, by saying either that objects are temporal (in which case they are not "objects" as we usually conceive of them) or, conversely, that time is objects -- that is, that time expresses itself in the manifestations that we call objects. Probably the clearest expression of this way is given by Dogen: "The time we call spring blossoms directly as an existence called flowers. The flowers, in turn, express the time called spring. This is not existence within time; existence itself is time."[20] This is the meaning of his "being-time" (uji):

"Being-time" means that time is being; that is, "Time is existence, existence is time." The shape of a Buddha-statue is time.... Every thing, every being in this entire world is time....Do not think of time as merely flying by; do not only study the fleeting aspect of time. If time is really flying away, there would be a separation between time and ourselves. If you think that time is just a passing phenomenon, you will never understand being-time.[21]

Time "flies away" when we experience it dualistically, with the sense of a self that is outside and looking at it. Then time becomes something that I have (or do not have), objectified and quantified in a succession of "now-moments" that cannot be held but incessantly fall away. In contrast, the "being-times" that we usually reify into objects cannot be said to occur in time, for they are time. As Nagarjuna would put it, that things (or rather "thingings"Wink are time means that there is no second, external time that they are "within."....

An Eternal Now SG

(continued)

...This brings us to the second prong of the dialectic. To use the interdependence of objects and time to deny only the reality (svabhava) of objects is incomplete, because their relativity also implies the unreality of time. Just as with the other dualities analyzed earlier in section II, to say that there is only time turns out to be equivalent to saying that there is no time. Having used temporality to deconstruct things, we must reverse the analysis and use the lack of a thing "in" time to negate the objectivity of time also: when there is no "contained," there can be no "container." If there are no nouns, then there can be no temporal predicates because they have no referent. When there are no things which have an existence apart from time, then it makes no sense to speak of" them" as being young or old: "so the young man does not grow old nor does the old man grow old" (Nagarjuna).[22] Dogen expressed this in terms of firewood and ashes:

... we should not take the view that what is latterly ashes was formerly firewood. What we should understand is that, according to the doctrine of Buddhism, firewood stays at the position of firewood.... There are former and later stages, but these stages are clearly cut.[23]

Firewood does not become ashes; rather, there is the "being-time" of firewood, then the "being-time" of ashes. But how does such "being-time" free us from time?

Similarly, when human beings die, they cannot return to life; but in Buddhist teaching we never say life changes into death.... Likewise, death cannot change into life.... Life and death have absolute existence, like the relationship of winter and spring. But do not think of winter changing into spring or spring into summer.[24]

Because life and death, like spring and summer, are not in time, they are in themselves timeless. If there is nobody who lives and dies, then there is no life and death -- or, alternatively, we may say that there is life-and-death in every moment, with the arising and disappearance of each thought, perception, and act. Perhaps this is what Heraclitus meant when he said that "both life and death are in both our living and dying."[25] Certainly it is what Dogen meant when he wrote that we must realize that nirvana is nothing other than life-and-death, for only then can we escape from life and death.

In terms of time, this paradox can be expressed in either of two contradictory ways. We may say that there is only the present: not, of course, the present as usually understood -- a series of fleeting moments which incessantly fall away to become the past -- but a very different present which incorporates the past and the future because it always stays the same.

We cannot be separated from time. This means that because, in reality, there is no coming or going in time, when we cross the river or climb the mountain we exist in the eternal present of time; this time includes all past and present time.... Most people think time is passing and do not realize that there is an aspect that is not passing. (Dogen)[26]

Dogen's "eternal present of time" -- the "standing now" (nunc stans) of medieval Western philosophy -- is eternal because there is indeed something which does not change: it is always now. Alternatively, this nondual way of experiencing time may be described as living in eternity: of course, not eternity in the usually sense, an infinite persistence in time which presupposes the usual duality between things and time. There is an "eternity on this side of the grave" if the present is not devalued:

For life in the present there is no death. Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact of the world. If by eternity is understood not infinite temporal duration but non-temporality, then it can be said that a man lives eternally if he lives in the present.[27]....

Yes, I agree, countless others have realised that before Wink