science
- March 27, 2009
time does not exist
A couple of days ago i stumbled over this article in New scientist. And i have been thinking about eriting something about it, but i have been to busy with other stuff to really put an effort into this post. So i just decided to throw it out to you so it gets some attention, and in the same time i get it out of my brain…
Quantum physics have a hard time integrating gravity into the theory. Basically they would like to have a quantum theory of gravity to reconcile Einstein’s general relativity, which describes gravity at the largest scales, with quantum mechanics. And time is one of the things getting in the way all the time. So some researchers are considering that time might just be a derivative effect of some thing else going on. Wait, stop you might say, time is very real! But there is a great analogy in the article:
Temperature is very real for us. But the definition of temperature is the energy in the motion of atoms and molecules swirling around in the sample. So temperature is just a macroscopic average of the momenta of all the microscopic molecules. If we would have been (a lot…) better at seeing end feeling atoms and molecules we would not have temperature, but a collection of momenta for all the molecules in the sample.
So one line of reasoning right now is that time is also a derative, it dosn’t exit on a microscopic level. It only exits in our approximation of “reality”.
Read the original article here at New Scientist – Is time an illusion?
