What is Time?

Chapter 3

Old Time Problems

Time grew out of the shadows of a star that obediently circled around us everyday. What a surprise it must have been when it was discovered we circled the sun rather than the other way around. As a matter of fact, Copernicus' heliocentric system was considered heretical by some of the most important officials who had devoted their lives to shielding everyone from their ignorance with their own invincible and specialized ignorance. The Ptolemaic system of epicycles used to explain the motion of what turned out to be other planets had to be junked. What an outrage for dedicated astronomers! However, shadows cast by the sun could still be used to measure the flow of time through sunny days. Also, the old calendars could still be used. It was not a complete disaster.

As time passed, machines advanced even as humanity stagnated, and it became possible to read the exact zenith of the sun over a particular spot on Earth. In the nineteenth century the sun's zenith was taken to be high noon in each locality. Each local time belonged to each

16

town; and many times were therefore different. Of course it has always been known that the sun has been up for hours in Maine at dawn on the left hand coast. In this golden age, each town had its own time, each bank it own currency, and every railroad its own time dictated by its headquarters's time.

It was an actual advance in understanding, a very rare thing in our history, that we traveled around the sun rather than vice versa. Of course it came late in our career as a species, late in the career of homo sapiens; or should we call ourselves homo moroni or homo imbecili in honor of our violent and fairly idiotic history? Of course wisdom couldn't exist without stupidity; therefore we can perhaps forgive ourselves.

The new understanding of our whirling orbit around the sun led to both the ideas of local solar noon and to a precise calendar. Unfortunately before the age of cartels and monopoly each railroad's different time led to confusion. A Canadian, Sanford Fleming, designed a system to divide the planet into 24 time zones to correspond to the 24 hours in a day, and introduced the idea of an international date line to prevent us from repeating the same day ad infinitum. This system was adopted after much deep thought about where the

17

beginning or prime meridian would be. Since most ships at sea used Greenwich time; the railroads and localities accepted the same prime meridian. The Greenwich prime meridian is one of many relics of the British Empire scattered all over the planet such as the British Commonwealth, the C.I.A., American Ivy League colleges, Indian railways, etc.

The idea of each locality having its own time based on the apparent position of the sun was extended or embellished over a hundred years ago in the theory of special relativity to include every observer. In other words, each person, depending on his position and movement, had his own version of time according to this theory.

In order to look at the various ideas of the nature of time, some physics must be considered. This is unfortunate because modern physics seems to be afflicted with the same disease as economics and some of the other social sciences; questionable if not wrong applications of mathematics. In the case of some physics the misapplications are so bad that they are “not even wrong,” a famous phrase Wolfgang Pauli would use to humiliate floundering students. “Not Even Wrong” is the title of a book by a mathematical physicist, Peter Woit, discussing the currently fashionable string theory used in particle theory and to fill entire volumes of the

18

Physical Review, one of the principal publications of mainstream physics.

Eugene Wigner, an accomplished mathematical physicist and one of the founders of quantum theory, wondered why mathematics should be so useful and essential to a description and understanding of physical reality. Wigner was one of the men responsible for applying group theory to particle theory, a process called Gruppenpest by the sharp tongued Pauli. There is no clear reason why group theory should apply to tiny physical particles; or at least that was probably the opinion of Pauli who passed from the scene many years ago to some theoreticians relief.

Unfortunately, there is also no clear reason why eigenvalue spectra, a part of the theory of differential equations, should give the physical values of measurements on these same tiny particle. This is called the measurement problem, a problem that is not ever mentioned in polite company in the same manner that the emperor's lack of clothes was never mentioned in polite society. Most of those who take up this problem are not initiates in the high physics priesthood, and are therefore ignored.

There is no clear reason why large objects should follow

19

classical mechanics while very small systems follow quantum mechanics. This is called decoherence theory, which invokes whole systems of particles to achieve the coherence of a large object or system.

Incidentally, quantum theory or mechanics is the primary theory of modern physics and commands the attention of many more scholars than relativity or cosmology or any other part of modern physics.

Considering the questionable applications of group theory, eigenvalue mathematics, and many-particle theories in decoherence, it should be no surprise that conventional physicists have some very surprising ideas about time itself. According to Julian Barbour time does not exist; the passing of time is an illusion. Perhaps he believes old age and death is an illusion also. Kurt Godel, who was primarily a logician rather than a physicist, believed he had proved the nonexistence of time by constructing a universe in which Einstein's equations of general relativity yielded the possibility of time travel. Godel's universe was very strange, if not physically impossible. Of course physical impossibility is not something that would stop a devout logician. And then there's the arrow of time. Physicist have a lot of trouble with the arrow of time since it's not obvious, at least to them, why time should flow forwards rather than

20

backwards. Philip K. Dick, the master story-teller whose paranoid fantasies seem to be a template for the future, wrote an entire novel in which time turned around and began to flow backwards. The story is told from the point of view of a grave-digger whose job is to dig up the people who are coming back to life.

(continued 9/27/2021)