
Entangled toy universe shows time may be an illusion - jonbaer
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24473-entangled-toy-universe-shows-time-may-be-an-illusion.html#.UmtMd2Rgbes
======
ChuckMcM
Time is weird stuff. When you can tell what altitude your atomic clock is by
the offset in its notion of time with the clock at your side, you start to get
an inkling about that.

The professor who taught quantum mechanics at USC when I was there used to
joke that God told Adam and Eve that it took 7 days to create the universe,
but we know from our observations that it was closer to 14 billion years.
Given these two data points we can calculate how close to the speed of light
God was travelling when he created the universe ...

Interesting to think of time as actually stopped though to an outside
observer. Not sure what a photon is when it isn't moving at all, perhaps a
point with an electric field and equal and perpendicular magnetic field.

~~~
chegra
Isn't that special relativity(time dilation) that your quantum mechanics
teacher talking about there?

~~~
thaumasiotes
Yes, but this is a physics professor making jokes to an audience of physics
students. Why shouldn't he refer to special relativity? It's part of his
training and the training of everyone who can hear him.

I'd be more surprised if the joke came from, say, the professor teaching
egyptian hieroglyphics.

------
RoboTeddy
Related:
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/qp/timeless_physics/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/qp/timeless_physics/)

>> Warning: The central idea in today's post is taken seriously by serious
physicists; but it is not experimentally proven and is not taught as standard
physics.

------
sillysaurus2
Question: Why do some physicists believe it's a problem that physics isn't
unified? It seems odd to assume that just because throughout history we've
unified more and more concepts that all of physics can be unified. What if
there's a limit? It's interesting to think that 100,000 years from now,
physicists will still be working on the problem since no one would know it's
impossible.

~~~
richardjordan
You either believe in natural or supernatural explanations for the universe.
If you accept the latter then the discussion is moot. If you're a scientist
your approach is the first.

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to come up with a philosophically sound
logically consistant explanation for natural phenomenon which isn't unified
and connected at a fundamental level. Two incompatible sets of natural
explanations are vastly less likely than one unless we're falling back on
superstition again.

Hence on some level there will be a unified way of approaching and talking
about physical phenomena. Now, is that underlying consistent theory
achievable? Well that's a different question. If the unified explanation for
all natural things, at its heart, relies on physics we just don't have access
to - either it's too small scale for us to ever probe, or too large scale, or
no longer manifested at this point in the universe's life (there are examples
of this I could describe but that'd make this post too long) - then of course
we would not ever get to a satisfactory scientific account which is unified.

But efforts to get there tend to reveal other interesting things so are
worthwhile even if we never achieve the final goal.

Plus because it's so specialized and inaccessible to the layman, the degree to
which there's already tremendous consistency and unification in our theories
of the underlying nature of things is dramatically underappreciated by most
people.

~~~
sillysaurus2
_It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to come up with a philosophically sound
logically consistant explanation for natural phenomenon which isn 't unified
and connected at a fundamental level. Two incompatible sets of natural
explanations are vastly less likely than one unless we're falling back on
superstition again._

Really? Ancient philosophers argued that it's vastly less likely for there to
be such a huge distance separating celestial bodies than whatever their pet
theory of the day was. Or that it's vastly less likely for planets to travel
in ellipses, because circles were "so perfect." Throughout history, time and
time again, humans seem to have a problem accepting that the imagination of
nature is far greater than that of man.

 _Plus because it 's so specialized and inaccessible to the layman, the degree
to which there's already tremendous consistency and unification in our
theories of the underlying nature of things is dramatically underappreciated
by most people._

I'm trying, but unfortunately you've given no examples.

~~~
asveikau
> Ancient philosophers argued that it's vastly less likely for there to be
> such a huge distance separating celestial bodies than whatever their pet
> theory of the day was.

Is it me or is that a bit handwavy? The Greeks or whoever else got things
awfully right and other things terribly wrong. We have the benefit of
hindsight so we can point at the latter category. It doesn't negate the
former.

Seems like you could take any statement and say "oh yeah? well the ancients
got stuff wrong!"

~~~
richardjordan
You're not comparing apples to apples when you compare ancient "theories" and
modern scientific theory. Predicting that the sun will come up tomorrow, and
why the sun will come up tomorrow are two very different levels of detail and
granularity. The latter will have far more predictive power than the former.

No ancient theories had anything like the predictive power of modern theories,
so were far less powerful. So when we talk about how the ancients had theories
for this - we're talking orders of magnitude less complexity.

An analogy: when we were kids my brother took part in a guess the weight of
the cake. The answer was 1.010 kg. My brother had guessed 1.005 kg and another
boy had guessed 1.04 kg. They tried give it to the other kid - well his
difference was "3 different" whereas my brother's was "5 different". Obviously
anyone with a brain could see there was an order of magnitude difference in
the precision of the two predictions.

Ancient theories are like that. Orders of magnitude less precise and therefore
less predictive than modern theories. The differences tend to lead to dramatic
differences in outcome making them fail to interweave in ways that are useful
for us in the modern world - this is why, after all, we moved to the modern
theories and they led to everything we have today.

Ancient theories didn't tend to connect in philosophically logical ways as do
modern theories - this is reflected in their lack of predictive power. So when
I say that the problems with tying theories together that modern physicists
have are vast in our minds, but really amount to splitting hairs when we
compare them to the differences between theories that preceded them, this is
why.

------
mentos
As a layman I don't understand the 'problem' with time?

To me, time is relative to 'timers'. So how I perceive the world passing is a
function of a electro/chemical activity in my head. I'd imagine if you could
somehow 'double' this function I'd perceive time at half the speed. And I
imagine if you were to turn off my 'timer' the world would pass by
instantaneously.

I've heard that 'time' is the fourth dimension? But again, as a layman, I have
to ask why isn't 'thought' the fourth dimension? Isn't it only by being
conscious, by being a 'timer', that 'time' can even be perceived?

~~~
rnd33
Because time has a direction (for some reason it doesn't seem possible to go
backwards though), and a value. I can't think of similar analogies for
'thought' that makes it fit with the other 3 room dimensions.

------
mappu
Lunchtime doubly so.

~~~
GhotiFish
it's funny, I know I shouldn't upvote that, but I appreciate that. So here's a
comment.

------
tehwalrus
> _But if a hypothetical observer existed outside the universe, when they
> looked in, everything would appear stationary._

 _" when" they looked in_. They who are outside time.

This article gave me a headache. Maybe English isn't currently adequate to
describe the ideas of a timeless universe..

~~~
richardjordan
Right. But most people don't read math and reporters don't write it.

------
officemonkey
I told my son not to let the DC LEGO play with the Marvel LEGO. But did he
listen? No.

------
tiatia
"It's a visualisation of the phenomenon, it's not a proof," Genovese says of
the experiment.

Wow. They now have "proof" in Science. Genovese has brought the scientific
method to a complete new level.

~~~
glitvh
Or this is just a researcher stating to a reporter that he does not have
proof, to avoid false headlines. The underlying reason of course being that
there is not such a thing as "proof" in physics.

------
weatherlight
I was under the impression that photons couldn't experience time because they
travel at the speed of light.

------
dschiptsov
One universal time for everything is definitely an illusion, even guys who
wrote Upanishads knew that.

Each process has its own properties, to put it differently, one-time-for-it-
all is just a concept of the mind and doesn't exist outside our head.

~~~
wrongc0ntinent
"Knew" is a big stretch there.

~~~
richardjordan
Agreed. Taking "ancient wisdom" too seriously and seeing it through a modern
scientific lens is pretty much always too big-a-stretch to make.

Plus there's a difference between talking about psychological perception of
time, as most religious texts do, and time as a measure of the evolution of
physical systems in the scientific sense. Not the same thing.

~~~
wrongc0ntinent
Thanks, pretty much what I meant.

~~~
richardjordan
gotta love agreement :-)

------
jordan_litko
I didn't read the article because I can never wrap my mind around anything to
do with the true nature of time...

But it is kind of beautiful to think that all of human history took place
during an 'illusion'.

~~~
richardjordan
This is one of those cases where the poetic language used to try to explain
complex phenomena to lay persons is unhelpful. It doesn't really mean illusion
in any sense consistent with what people might imagine that to mean.

Indeed it's not really that revelatory. "Experiment agrees with what we
already pretty much know" would have been less interesting.

