A few ideas about time..

So say the latest research in the field of quantum physics –

time does not exist, did not exist and will never exist

, the idea that time passes, it runs out, it’s absurd. As you read this sentence, you’re probably thinking that this moment, now, is corresponding to something that has just passed. The moment has something real, at this moment we can remember events of the past or we can anticipate something from the future, but to live only in the present. We have the feeling of the passage of time, our intuition, our way of being, our habits, everything we have learned tells us that the future is open until it becomes present, and the past is unchangeable. Such a perception of time is indisputably fixed in our language, in our thoughts, in our behavior and, if there is time, why is it so present in everything we do?

Researchers in the field, especially those specializing in quantum physics, are increasingly concerned about this divergence between the scientific understanding of time and its intuitive perception at the individual level. As early as 1905, Einstein, defining the theory of restricted relativity, broke away from the perspective imposed by traditional physics, showing that time is not a universal constant, so the past, present and future are relative notions, and in 1915, he completed his theory, including, in his demonstration, the effect of gravity.

Equation of the Universe without the concept of time

A step forward in demonstrating that time does not exist was taken in 1967, when physicists John Wheeler et Bryce DeWitt devised the equation that bears their name – the Wheeler – DeWitt equation – or the “wave function of the Universe”, in which the notion of time no longer exists. It is a still controversial theory, at a scientific representation of the Universe without the idea of time considering that it will only be reached when the formula that brings together Einstein’s general relativity, the Wheeler equation – DeWitt and the principles of quantum physics.

English physicist Julian Barbour (born 1937) channeled his research into this, the reconciliation of the three aspects mentioned above, explaining why “people are sure that time exists, but always slips through their fingers”. It slips through their fingers, Barbour says, because, in fact, “time, on the whole, exists in “slices” of space.” Our past is another world or another possible configuration of the Universe. It’s another “now.” We have no proof of the past, Barbour said, except our memory. And the future is only as far as we think of it. The moment is not time, time is in the moment.”

At the level of deep reality, there is no time, says the English physicist, what matters is how objects interact, on the various tranches of space. It is our brain that assembles these interactions, sending them to our spirit in the same way that, if we see photos succeeding at the speed of 24 images per second, we get the impression of movement. But nothing moves. What people call time is an illusion. The quantum universe is static, nothing changes, the various snapshots exist simultaneously. It is important to know that Julian Barbour has done his research outside the institutions to avoid “publish or perish” syndrome ( “public or lose”), in order to have complete freedom in what he says. To this end, he bought a small farm near Oxford, living off the English translation of russian scholars’ books.

Italy’s

Carlo Rovelli

(born 1956), specializing in quantum gravity, director of CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research, France), also considers that the passage of time is an illusion generated by incomplete knowledge of the laws and rules of the Universe. His theory is based on the concept of quantum gravity in loops, claiming that each object has its own time, which does not “leak” in the same way if the object is, for example, inside or outside the galaxy, so it depends on the gravitational field in which it is found. Very suggestively, the Italian physicist compares time, in the traditional sense, with the surface of a waters that loses its meaning if analyzed at the atomic level. The same was conveyed, in other words, to Einstein, in 1955, when his good friend Michele Besso, who said he “left this world, but it means nothing, because people like us know that the distinction between past, present and future is just an illusion”.

In 2007,

Benjamin Libet

, researcher in the department of psychology of the University of San Francisco, the first to receive a “Virtual Nobel Prize”, from the Austrian University Klagenfurt, for outstanding results in the research of consciousness and free will, published a book entitled “Spirit Beyond Neurons”, in which he demonstrates that when we make a decision, it is only an illusion that the decision belongs to us, in reality a group of neurons , in extremely complex processes, in doing so, we are just “choosing” something that has already happened. I mean, there’s a gap between subjective time, when we think we’re “making decisions” and what our neural mechanism has already done.

“The
Arrow of Time” and Time Travel

When it comes to the existence/non-existence of time, everyone, from scientists to laypeople, wonders why the “time arrow” has a unique meaning, towards the future, and what is the truth about time travel, as long as, at least on a theoretical level, the “wormholes” that link “black holes”, like tunnels, having one end in the past and another in the present time, could give this possibility. On a strictly theoretical level for the time being, a time travel would involve the creation of a “wormhole” (also called the bridge-Einstein-Rosen), the acceleration, to the speed of light, at one end of the “black hole”, of a space shuttle, and the return would not mean “the passage of time”, because, from the perspective of an external observer, only a “dilation” of time would occur. In other words, whoever enters the accelerated extremity would “come out” at the stationary extremity at the same time as the original one. For all this, it is estimated that it would take as much energy as the Sun emits during its existence. For the journey into the past, a team of Israeli researchers, led by



Amos Ori





, designed a model based on the curvature of space-time, study that was published, as early as 2007, in the journal “Physical Review”.

Trapped in what he himself thought about

time

, as linear and irreversible, man, regardless of age, has lived and lives this dream of the possibility of mastering time, of evading time, of returning to the past or of traveling into the future. The “arrow” of time seems to have a unique meaning, but the mechanisms of our thinking are not yet prepared to accept what recent research esparitions in quantum physics seem to be increasingly convincing, namely that “clocks do not measure time, time is defined by what clocks measure.” “We’re used to cheating,” as the aforementioned physicist Carlo Rovelli said very suggestively.

We are caught between truths, illusions, subjective perceptions, past, present and future, our brains seem to make decisions without notifying us, we just seeing what actually occurred, a lot of paradoxes and uncertainties, which represent the “time” of our lives, and a hunger to “know” stronger now (“now”, the only certainty!) than ever. How can we accept, under the circumstances that there is no thought, action of ourown, in which it is not about time, that “Time does not exist, did not exist and never will”! What is indisputable, however, is that science, our knowledge of the Universe and ourselves are rewritten. At the speed of light!

Source: here