>> This notion that time is just a fourth dimension is highly misleading. In special relativity, the time directions are structurally different from the space directions.
In "A World without Time" Palle Yourgrau makes it clear that Kurt Gödel didn't think so, and that Einstein himself, who was good friends with Gödel, mostly agreed with him on this. I'll take Einstein's word above Maudlin's here... I don't mean to make this an "argument by appeal to authority", but Maudlin starts out by making this dubious assertion about special relativity, which I think is the wrong move if he wants to convince anyone.
As for the rest of the interview, I don't understand his geometry, but he also goes on about "the problem of why things started out in a low-entropy state", and I think that there are many ways of envisioning cosmology and/or metaphysics under which this isn't a problem at all. I just started reading Carlo Rovelli's "The Order of Time", which comes down firmly on the other side of this argument, for example.
In "A World without Time" Palle Yourgrau makes it clear that Kurt Gödel didn't think so, and that Einstein himself, who was good friends with Gödel, mostly agreed with him on this. I'll take Einstein's word above Maudlin's here... I don't mean to make this an "argument by appeal to authority", but Maudlin starts out by making this dubious assertion about special relativity, which I think is the wrong move if he wants to convince anyone.
As for the rest of the interview, I don't understand his geometry, but he also goes on about "the problem of why things started out in a low-entropy state", and I think that there are many ways of envisioning cosmology and/or metaphysics under which this isn't a problem at all. I just started reading Carlo Rovelli's "The Order of Time", which comes down firmly on the other side of this argument, for example.