Is Time an Illusion

I know this horse is dead and to continue to beat it is rediculous. That being said I wouldn't normally post an article chunck so long but it is a great read, and I know some of us are just to lazy to click the link and read the whole thing

“Time is a moving image of eternity.” —Plato

We tend to believe that destiny is not fixed and that all time past fades into oblivion, but can the movement be a mere illusion? A renowned British physicist explains that in a special dimension, time simply doesn’t exist.

“If you try to get your hands on time, it’s always slipping through your fingers,” said Julian Barbour, British physicist and author of “The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics,” in an interview with the Edge Foundation. While this poetic statement still resonates in the room, Barbour and the journalist probably do not have any connection with their own selves a second ago.

Barbour believes that people cannot capture time because it does not exist. While this is not a new theory, it has never had the popularity that Einstein’s theory of relativity or the string theory has had.

The concept of a timeless universe is not only irresistibly attractive to a handful of scientists, but such a model may pave the way to explain many of the paradoxes that modern physics faces in explaining the universe.

We tend to think and perceive time to be linear in nature, the course of which inevitably flows from past to future. This is not only a personal perception of all humans, but also the context in which classical mechanics analyzes all mathematical functions within the universe. Without such a concept, ideas such as the principle of causality and our inability to be present simultaneously in two events would begin to be addressed from a completely different level.

The idea of the discontinuity of time proposed by Barbour attempts to explain in a theoretical context a universe composed of many points he calls “now.” But such “nows” would not be understood as fleeting moments that came from the past and will die in the future; a “now” would only be one among the millions now existing in the eternal universal mosaic of a special dimension impossible to detect, each one related in a subtle way to the others, but none more outstanding than the neighboring one. They all exist at the same time.

With such a mix of simplicity and complexity, Barbour’s idea promises a great relief to anyone who is willing to accept the lack of time before the Big Bang.

Barbour thinks the concept of time might be similar to that of integers (whole numbers). All numbers exist simultaneously, and it would be insensible to think that the number 1 exists before the number 20.

At this point of the argument, it is probably inevitable for the reader to ask, “Are you trying to convince me that this movement I’m doing right now with my forearm does not exist? If infinitesimal fractions of ‘nows’ are not connected to each other, how do I remember the first ideas in this article? How do I remember what I ate for lunch? Why do I wake up and go to work if the job belongs to the ‘I’ that has nothing to do with me? If the future is already there, why strive at all?”

Such dilemmas have arisen from the illusory perception that time is fleeting, like water in a river. We can consider a timeless universe as a long vanilla custard, the center of which has been filled with chocolate for the whole length of the custard. If we cut a slice, we get what we call a present, a “now.”

www.theepochtimes.com...

Read the rest it's worth it.

Since we have discussed this into the ground I don;t really have much to add at this time. I'm sure though as always some very interesting points will come up in the posts in reply.



[edit on 7-3-2010 by constantwonder]

reply to post by constantwonder


Hi,

Really pleased you brought attention to Julian Barbour's book. I've read it around 7 times now and each 'time' it reveals more about the possible structure of the universe and our 'false' awareness. That we see movement in life because we play sets of configurations (that have linked histories) as a movie.

Personally, I find the idea that every possibility co-exists and that probabilities search out our realities very appealing.

Thanks for posting.

Peace!

How many miles from L.A. to N.Y.?

Actually, don't bother. The distance between the two is but a product of human imagination.

We live in a world where 3 physical dimensions and one "time" dimension describe our "reality" very well.

Sorry for the inverted comma's I "hate" so much......

Time is every bit as real to us as distance, mass, velocity etc but is it real in the "big picture"?

Who knows.

Originally posted by constantwonder
Read the rest

it's worth it.

Never could get past Gen 19 when tried to do it by the book, line for line.

Since we have discussed this into the ground I don;t really have much to add at this time. I'm sure though as always some very interesting points will come up in the posts in reply.

Only thing to add is that it is only a mere sign that others have started to carry the burden of the thoughts we have always known... just we don't need to become rich in order to answer it for them.