Newsflash: Time May Not Exist | Physics & Math | DISCOVER Magazine
Every once in a while I read articles like this to remind myself that there is a lot that can’t be explained in this world, and much of what we experience isn’t as concrete as we like to think. Here’s a good quote from the article:
…the thing we experience as time might emerge from a more fundamental, timeless reality. As Rovelli describes it, “Time may be an approximate concept that emerges at large scales—a bit like the concept of ‘surface of the water,’ which makes sense macroscopically but which loses a precise sense at the level of the atoms.”
That is one of the best analogies I’ve seen. I can actually picture a camera zooming in on a drop of water, magnifying the “edge,” moving through an increasingly foggy reality until we see no distinction between the water and the surrounding air: just distances between atoms, indistinguishable from each other. This is why physics is so cool. Forget about the “time doesn’t exist” idea…. there’s no such thing as an edge! And we walk around like we understand reality….
[tags]physics, philosophy, quantum mechanics, time[/tags]
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