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A few ideas about time..

So says the latest research in quantum physics – time does not exist, has not existed and will never exist, the idea that time passes, it runs out, it’s absurd. As you read this sentence, you are probably thinking that this moment, now, corresponds to something that has just passed. The present moment has something real, in this moment we can remember events from the past or we can anticipate something from the future, but to live we 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 no 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 special 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 proof, the effect of gravity.

<>The equation of the Universe without the concept of time

A step forward in proving that time does not exist was made in 1967, when physicists John Wheeler and 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 still a controversial theory, a scientific representation of the Universe without the idea of time being considered to be reached only when the formula that brings together Einstein’s general relativity, the Wheeler-DeWitt equation and the principles of quantum physics will be discovered.

English physicist Julian Barbour (born in 1937) channeled his research into this, of reconciling the three aforementioned aspects, explaining why “people are sure that time exists, but it always slips through their fingers”. They slip through their fingers, says Barbour, because, in fact, “time, as a 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, across 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 photographs succeeding each other at the speed of 24 frames per second, we have 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 did his research outside the institutions, in order to avoid the “publish or perish” syndrome, in order to have total freedom in what he says. To this end, he bought a small farm near Oxford, living on the English translation of the books of Russian scholars.

Italy’s

Carlo Rovelli

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

In 2007,

Benjamin Libet

, a researcher in the Department of Psychology at the University of San Francisco, the first to receive a “Virtual Nobel Prize” from the Austrian University of Klagenfurt for outstanding results in the research of conscience and free will, has published a book entitled “The 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, doing this, we are just “choosing” something that has already happened. That is, there is a gap between subjective time, when we think we are “making decisions” and what our neural mechanism has already done.

<>“The Arrow of Time” and Time Travel

When the question of the existence/non-existence of time is raised, everyone, from scientists to non-specialists, wonders why the “arrow of time” 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 connect the “black holes”, like tunnels, having one end in the past and the other in the present time, could give this possibility. On a strictly theoretical level for now, time travel would involve the creation of a “wormhole” (also called the Einstein-Rosen bridge), the acceleration, up to the speed of light, at one of the ends 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, there would only be a “dilation” of time. In other words, whoever entered the accelerated extremity, would “exit”, at the stationary extremity, at the same moment of time as the initial one. For all this, it is estimated that as much energy as the Sun emits during its existence would be needed. For the journey into the past, a team of Israeli researchers, led by Professor Amos Ori designed a model based on the curvature of space-time, a study that was published, as early as 2007, in the journal “Physical Review”.

Caught up in what he himself thought about time, as linear and irreversible, man, regardless of the era, has lived and lives this dream of the possibility of mastering time, of escaping time, of returning to the past or of traveling to the future. The “arrow” of time seems to have a unique meaning, but the mechanisms of our thinking are not yet ready to accept what recent research in quantum physics seems to argue increasingly convincingly, namely that “it is not clocks that measure time, time is defined by what clocks measure.” “We are 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 brain seems to make decisions without letting us know, we only ascertain what has actually happened, a lot of paradoxes and uncertainties, which represent the “time” of our lives, and a hunger for “knowing” stronger now (“now”, the only certainty!) than ever before. 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, has not existed and will never exist”! What is undeniable, however, is that science, our knowledge of the Universe and of ourselves, is being rewritten. At the speed of light!

Source: here