In my next life I want to be a physicist. Or whatever they'll be called when my next life comes around. Pshaw, I hear you say, there are no next lives. Are you sure? Consider this: there are much stranger things in physics than multiple lives.
It doesn't feel like it but the fact is...the absolute fact which physicists can confirm...is that past, present and future are illusions. They exist simultaneously in spacetime or as I prefer to call it, timespace. Think about it and watch the above fascinating Youtube lecture.
And there's this:
Julian Barbour, theoretical physicist, author of The End of Time, describes time as "a succession of pictures, a succession of snapshots, changing continuously one into another. I'm looking at you; you're nodding your head. Without that change, we wouldn't have any notion of time."
"Isaac Newton insisted that even if absolutely nothing at all happened, time would be passing, and that I believe is completely wrong.
"....all the evidence we have for time is encoded in static configurations, which we see or experience subjectively, all of them fitting together to make time seem linear."
2 comments:
No, Natalie, the illusion of time has not been proven, even if there are justifiable grounds for making that claim. To some degree, the argument put forward by Brian Greene [like many others he proposes in his published works] is a mind game. The brain may say one thing, but the mind in its wisdom can over-rule.
Anyway, if you do come back as a physicist I hope you enjoy yourself. Just don't try to bring me back, please, from wherever I happen to be beyond this life.
Tom, physicists don't all agree on time (and on many other mysteries) and that's all to the good. Some years ago, I read Julian Barbour's book The End of Time and was so impressed I conceived a plan to illustrate it. Cheekily, I wrote to him, admitted my ignorance of the subject, and outlined my ideas. To my delighted amazement, he responded courteously and invited me to visit. So I went to lunch with him and his wife at their home, a wonderful occasion, and we talked over possibilities. The project did not continue due to various health reasons, but I'm still entranced by the subject. One day, maybe.
Okay, I won't bring you back.But I might wave to you!
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