- December 16th, 2023, 8:03 pm
#451262
" It was a speech that changed the way we think of space and time. The year was 1908, and the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski had been trying to make sense of Albert Einstein’s hot new idea – what we now know as special relativity – describing how things shrink as they move faster and time becomes distorted. “Henceforth space by itself and time by itself are doomed to fade into the mere shadows,” Minkowski proclaimed, “and only a union of the two will preserve an independent reality.” And so spacetime – the malleable fabric whose geometry can be changed by the mass of stars, planets and matter – was born. It is a concept that has served us well, but if physicist Petr Horava is right,
spacetime is no more than a mirage.
Horava, who is at the University of California, Berkeley, wants to rip this fabric apart and set time and space free from one another in order to come up with a unified theory that reconciles the disparate worlds of quantum mechanics and gravity – the most pressing challenge to modern physics.
“ Today, the big-bang theory has become the orthodox cosmology. It nevertheless faces a major hurdle in providing a convincing account of how the universe can come to exist from nothing as a result of a physical process. No greater obstacle lies in the path of explanation than the mystery of how time itself can originate naturally. Can science ever encompass the beginning of time within its scope? […] Despite its popularity, the big-bang theory has not been without its detractors. Right from the start, attempts by astronomers to date the age of the Universe ran into trouble. The age kept coming out wrong. There wasn’t enough time for the stars and planets to come into existence. Worse still, there were astronomical objects that seemed to be older than the Universe – an obvious absurdity. Could it be that Einstein’s time and cosmic time are not the same? Is Einstein’s flexible time simply not flexible enough to stretch all the way back to the moment of Universe’s creation? […] Important though Einstein’s time turned out to be, it still did not solve the riddle of time. The time that enters into physical theory, even Einstein’s time, bears only the vaguest resemblance to the subjective time of personal experience, the time that we know, but cannot explain. For a start, Einstein’s time has no arrow. It is blind to the distinction between past and future. Certainly, it doesn’t flow like the time of Shakespeare or James Joyce, or for that matter of Newton. It is easy to conclude that something vital remains missing, some extra quality of time is left out of the equations, or that there is more than one sort of time. The revolution begun by Einstein remains frustratingly unfinished. […] The broad conclusion I reach, however, is that we are far from having a good grasp of the concept of time. Einstein’s work triggered a revolution in our understanding of the subject, but the consequences have yet to be fully worked out. There are major problems which hint at deep-seated limitations of the theory; discrepancies concerning the age of the Universe and obstacles to unifying Einstein’s time with quantum physics are two of the more persistent difficulties. Perhaps more worryingly, Einstein’s time is seriously at odds with time as we humans experience it. All this leads me to believe that we must embrace Einstein’s ideas, but move on.”
— Prof. Paul Davies, About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution, the Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science
Dr. Bernardo Kastrup — “Materialism is baloney!!!”
Youtube. com/watch?v=FcPyTgLILqA
Dr. Jonathan Österman, Ph.D., ETH Zürich, Switzerland