It was reported/rumored that Albert Einstein, when he heard of his dear friend Michele Besso’s death, was quoted as saying: “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” When I think of the concept of ''time'' I think of it only moving forward, but if time is but an illusion, that opinion would be incorrect, right? Can time actually be ''spent,'' or is that an illusion, as well?
Be careful. Einstein did not say time is an illusion. He said our concepts of "past", "present" and "future" are an illusion. There is a difference. I'm no expert on relativity but I think what he was getting at is the idea in relativity that there is a "world line" for an object that shows the evolution of its position in 3 spatial coordinates plus one of time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_line From this 4D perspective, past, present and future seem unhelpful ideas. I think that's what he meant, or something like it.
If anyone understands this Carl Sagan clip perhaps they could share .Personally I thought he was taking the piss but since he is so well thought of it is probably be down to my lack of comprehension or imagination It is relevant to the topic.
He also thought in terms of a more deterministic universe at the smallest levels. If you knew where every atom was you could go forward and backward in terms of predictions and that kind of muddies the concept of time. Quantum Physics isn't so deterministic in this way and it bothered him. It's a more probabilistic concept. This is where, as I recall, Einstein said that God doesn't roll the dice or something to that effect. Nils Bohr then said something to the effect of "I wouldn't presume to tell God what to do". For the professional scientists out there feel free to correct away at will but I think my general point applies here as well. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Yes, but determinism in the way he was talking about was at the atomic level. If you know where ever atom is and what the temperature is and every other piece of information you can tell where it was or where it will be. Quantum physics is more random. If you know where a particle is you can't know its momentum. If you know its momentum you can't know exactly where it is. Einstein didn't like that but it turns out that's the way it is so what we really learn is that our intuition isn't programmed for worlds that we aren't apart of (so to speak). Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Einstein gets a bit of a defense here : http://phys.org/news/2014-06-einstein-quantum-mechanics-hed-today.html It pains me to think Einstein was a weirdo who wouldn't accept a new reality . Maybe he wasn't.
I don't think he was a weirdo. I think he was stubborn. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I don't quite see how that would follow. All determinism implies, surely, is that all later states can be calculated from earlier ones by applying the laws of nature, isn't it? By contrast, the heart of what ID proposes is that there has been supernatural tinkering with the physical world to overrule the laws of nature.
I don't see why we expect our heroes to be flawless. Bach never thought the piano would catch on! But Einstein was very reluctant to give up determinism, certainly. And it remains the case that there is not yet a full synthesis between QM and GR, so he was right to feel a nagging doubt, at the very least.
I wonder whether determinism breaks down because things which interact are never in 100% full contact or even ever stationary wrt to each other.
Well that's not really the Uncertainty Principle explanation. That arises from the wavelike nature of matter at the atomic scale - though I suppose very loosely one might say the description of an object by a wavefunction implies it is not totally static in a classical sense - zero point motion etc. But then, quite separately, there is Chaos Theory, according to which there are systems which, although deterministic from any single, exactly specified, initial state, result in wildly different outcomes from arbitrarily small changes to that initial state. (You know, the "butterfly's wings" one.) ......But we're getting away from wegs's original subject, which was about time.....
Time should be thought of in intervals not as infinity. Size is also infinite but when someone asks you if the earth and a bug are the same size you don't hang your head and say "I guess they're same since infinity makes them both so small."
There's two schools of thought when it comes to Intelligent Design. There's those who ''believe'' that ID overrules laws of nature, and those who believe that ID was the impetus behind the laws of nature. ID has the potential to intersect with determinism, in that many people who believe in it, feel that their actions were all part of a plan, that no matter what they choose, the plan (God's plan) will be carried out. So, there's hints of determinism in some religious people's minds, but it's not a hard and fast rule.
That isn't quite right either: those are all sections or pieces of time, not descriptions of it. It's a bit like saying that "two slices" is a description of pizza.
Maybe at one time that was true but it isn't any longer. Intelligent Design has come to mean the notion that supernatural intervention is required in scientific explanations of certain features of the world, notably life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design What I think you are describing is the much older and well-respected view of many religious people that the physical world we see, with all its order and what we call "laws", has a creator who set it up this way and maybe in some way upholds the order - and the further idea, held by some, that God has a plan for everything that happens. (That latter aspect appears to me to conflict with free will, but that would not bother those who believe in predestination - an idea I personally find distasteful, by the way.)
The flaw, such as it is, is that the evidence from quantum theory so far is that he was wrong: nature is (apparently) not fully determinable, as he evidently wanted it to be.
