Lawrence Crowell I love his ideas, they deliver answers to many fundamental questions - why there is something rather than nothing, why Mathematics is so much effective in Physics, what is consciousness etc.
Let me quote a passage about time from his article: [quote] "Similarly, space and time are fundamentally different, and not just mathematically, as real and imaginary quantities. The root cause is that time is continuous and space is not. Time’s continuity has many consequences. It means that time is irreversible. To reverse time, we would have to create a discontinuity, a zero-point, and it would no longer be continuous. Time also is not an observable in quantum mechanics, because observables must be discrete. And it is always treated as the independent variable; we write dx / dt, not dt / dx. The absolute continuity of time is important in the explanation of the paradox of Zeno in which Achilles never catches the tortoise, however fast he runs, if he gives it a start, and the same is true of other paradoxes of a similar nature. Various authors have seen that the problem lies in the assumption that one can divide time into observational units like space. Whitrow, for example,3 writes that: ‘One can, therefore, conclude that the idea of the infinite divisibility of time must be rejected, or … one must recognize that it is … a logical fiction.’ Motion is ‘impossible if time (and, correlatively, space) is divisible ad infinitum’. And Coveney and Highfield4 propose that: ‘Either one can seek to deny the notion of ‘becoming’, in which case time assumes essentially space-like properties; or one must reject the assumption that time, like space, is infinitely divisible into ever smaller portions.’ Perhaps because of the many historical efforts to link space and time in a more than mathematical sense, such authors seem to be reluctant to draw the logical conclusion that the paradox, like many others, really is a result of making things that are fundamentally unlike have the same properties. Space is ‘infinitely divisible into ever smaller portions’; time is not divisible at all. What we call ‘divisions of time’ are not observed through time at all. Again, all normal physical equations are time-reversible, but time is not. We know this from the second law of thermodynamics." [/quote] https://www.google.com/amp/s/bsahely.com/2018/06/17/are-there-alternatives-to-our-present-theories-of-physical-reality-by-peter-rowlands/amp/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/e0568f0c-c153-4da6-8ea8-8ac6d25b4cce%40googlegroups.com.
