My humble attempt to understand what Julian Barbour is saying in ... Never
Enough Time, leads me to believe that some parts are not so difficult, and
some parts are like a cow trying to understand our world. The essence, I
believe is simple and important: There is no time. There is no space. All
there is, is stuff, and stuff happens (sanitized translation!) . It happens
in what we perceive as space and time, but actually there is no ether and
now we find out there is no time. So what? The essence of space and time
remain; though they are no longer absolute, tangible realties. It is no
more complex than 0 being a space holder between the actual whole numbers
1 and -1, thus representing the nothing that is there. There is no physical
stuff to measure in the nothing that is in-between things and there is no
absolute fabric or increment to time, just a relative accounting of passing
events. We can measure time by the revolution of the earth around the sun
and subdivide it into daily rotation and fractions thereof. We can use the
vibrations of excited cesium to stabilize a quartz counter with an output of
a mere 10 million counts per second. The harder we try to define the
smallest, most accurate amount of time, the more it disappears. It seams to
end with time becoming a statistical probability of an occurrence. All of
this has no more relevance to our normal world than relativity does to our
Newtonian world. It just implies that there is no physical thread of
actual, absolute time.
The difficult task is to understand all of the imaginary realities possible,
once you have determined that space and time are relative. It seems an
impossible task, with our limited understanding and perspective of
reality. The theorists are as free as a Hollywood cinematographer, to
create any reality imaginable. This does not imply that they are
probabilities or even possibilities in the actual world we live in. It is
no wonder that some become disoriented as to what is real in science and
in life. Many farseeing geniuses have suffered this fate. There can be a
great joy though, derived from fiction as it opens views of possibilities
and actual new realities in our apparently non-fiction lives.
Remember:
TIME is just God's way of keeping everything from happening all at once
and
DEATH is just nature's way of telling you to slow down.
Happy Holidays
Fritz Stumpges
