A New Theory of Time - Lee Smolin

anyone who believes in indefinite growth on a physical finite panitch is either mad or an economist we don't want to focus politics on the notion that involves the rejection of principles around which the large majority of our fellow citizens we are not as endlessly manipulable and its predictable as you would think I'm honored I'm deeply honored to be here terrified and intimidated by the expertise of the panel that's been assembled and I'm thrilled and puzzled to have been taken so seriously when I wrote maybe I should explain this book comes out of many years of thinking about the puzzles and the problems that physics and cosmology faces it presents it presents views that I came to slowly over many years beginning with actually the discussion of my first book life of the cosmos which already had the idea of laws of nature evolving the background for this book is varied but a very important element of it is a conversation a set of conversations I began to have with the philosopher Roberto mangabeira Unger at Harvard Law School who also from his point of view as a social and political and legal theorist that come to the view that we must live in a universe where laws of nature evolved and where time is real to permit human beings to have the kind of agency that we imagine we need if we're going to address the problems that we face and Roberto and I engaged on a common project one output of which is this book by myself but there are other outputs in progress papers scientific papers philosophical papers in a joint book now I'm going to take as evident and I'm not a scholar so I'm just going to assert that social thought is influenced by our cosmological ideas and vice-versa and there are many examples that scholars cite for example the interchanges between John Locke and Newton and in 20 minutes I won't expand on that but Roberto Unger and myself and some other people are proposing a large shift and our cosmological ideas and I'll frame the shift in a few minutes and what we're here to do today and again I set out this prospect in the epilogue of the book but it's remarkable and it's a wonderful thing I would say about British intellectual life to be taken seriously at this what I set out in the epilogue is the implication some thoughts as a non-expert I'm not an economist I'm not a social theorist or not a politician I'm not an expert on climate change but nonetheless I thought it was important to say that there were implications of this paradigm shift in cosmology for how we conceive of ourselves for how we conceive of the future because how we think about time influences how we think about the future is I'll describe in a minute and for how we think about the possibilities of solving the problems that face us from personal issues in our family lives to economics to climate change now what are the key claims in the book and I'm just going to state them because I just have a short time and I'm going to state first the claims and then characterize the paradigm shift that we are promoting or that we are suggesting the claims of the book are that one in physics as opposed to ordinary life there is a belief that our experience of the daily of the present moment our experience of time as a flow of moments is an illusion Einstein said famously the we who understand physics know that the distinction between past present and future is only a persistently is only a remarkably persistent illusion and this idea that our experience of time is not real but we live in added in a timeless universe the true view of which is a perspective of the whole universe through time as one is central to physics in the 20th century it's central to the country the interpretations of relativity theory central to how we think about quantum theory and as my friend Julian Barbour set out about ten years ago in his book the end of time central to how we think about the unifications of physics that those of us who work on them study so-called quantum theories of cosmology now we oppose this and we oppose this making a move in two steps one of them is to argue that this idea the time is unreal that the future is determined and so forth is an over interpretation of a method and it's a method that is very well suited to studying small parts of the universe where we differ and where we impose a wedge is taking this method in this characterization of nature and extending it from small parts of the universe to the universe as a whole so that move if you have a method which is well suited to study individuals to study small parts of the system whether it's a cosmo or cosmology or social system it's incorrect to just take the same ideas and apply them to a full to the full closed system that they're part of that's the first move we make we then claim that in order to have a theory which can successfully answer the problems and the challenges of a theory of the whole universe it must be one in which embraces the reality of the present moment and the reality of the flow of time and in particular that there be no timeless truths that there will be no laws which hold outside of time but instead that laws of nature has with every other natural phenomenon evolve in time now the science part is hypotheses about how they may evolve testing those hypotheses devout knows I policies that's not what we're talking about tonight but that is developed in the book now here's one way to characterize the shift that we're advocating that we're proposing it's in the context of naturalism naturalism is the philosophical point of view or the framework in which we say that all that exists is the natural world which science studies there is no that separate mental realm there's no a separate realm of the soul apart from what's part of the natural world and there's no other worlds like there's no mathematical world who somehow exists autonomously of the world of the natural world but there are two versions of naturalism which I think have to be teased out and opposed to each other so I'm going to call them naturalism one and naturalism two or timeless naturalism in temporal naturalism so here's naturalism one naturalism one timeless naturalism holds that the laws of nature are timeless immutable they influence what happens they determine what happens in the universe but what happens in the universe does not change them they are immutable hence inexplicable by any means checkable by experiment and that's the problem with naturalism one the experience of the present moment the distinction between past present and future every other kind of human experience that we value sensation will agency imagination the impression we have that life brings forth surprise that life brings forth novelty are all illusions what's real is what the atom is the Greek atom is called just atoms moving in a void this is an expression of that philosophy atoms with timeless eternal properties moving according to timeless laws in a space with his timeless everything else being an illusion in the sense that when you get right down to it when you reduce the phenomena to their essential parts you just have atoms moving and avoid the future by the way is determined the the idea that the future is already determined from the present is part of this naturalism version 1 and survives in quantum theory in versions of quantum theory with the quantum state I'm saying this in case there any quantum physicists around this applies to you too and then the metaphysical or mystical aspect of this is that if all of that are illusions what's real well what's real is claimed to be some quote mathematical reality which is timeless and which mirrors the world in the sense that the true nature the true properties of everything in the real world are mirrored in some mathematical equations in mathematical formula such that anything that develops in time already could be accounted for in the basis of a mathematical computation which is carried out outside of time okay so that's naturalism one timeless naturalism and that's what Einstein was talking about when he said this when he made the quote that I quoted that's what I was brought up and in fact that's what I went into physics to realize is the construction of these timeless laws the discovery of these timeless laws of nature and naturalism to all that is real is real in a moment all that is true is true in a moment which is one of a succession of moments so this is temporal naturalism all that exists is part of nature but nature exists moment to moment to moment to moment and everything that is real or true at a moment is such at a moment of time in other words our experience of the world has lived through a succession of moments is not an illusion is not some peculiarities of our psychology but it is one of the deep insights that we have the privilege of having into the constitution of nature laws cannot be timeless because nothing can be timeless in this domain laws there will be general laws they will hold for some regions of space and time but they're not absolute they're not immutable they evolve like everything else maybe sometimes slower maybe sometimes abruptly the mechanisms by which laws evolve what we should be really interested in as natural ists just like biologists used to be interested in characterizing the absolutes essential properties and species until they realize that there was the story of evolution that connected all the species together and that was the deep structure that one really had to understand is how the species evolved we advocate the cosmology and physics has to make the similar transition the future is certainly predictable to some extent physics works for small regions of space and time but may but the argument that physics is deterministic the nature is deterministic the future is already present in the is already present in the present is not applicable so the future may be partly open nature has the capacity to bring forth novel states of affairs to which novel laws may govern and their mathematics while being a useful tool is not the mirror of nature there is no perfect there's no mathematical object which is the perfect mirror of nature and we would argue that if you take seriously that the present moment is part of the natural world that naturalism is supposed to describe and account for then there can't be a perfect mathematical mirror of nature because no mathematical object has the property of existing moment by moment to moment to moment there no present moments there's no flow of moments in any mathematical object so that's naturalism too now that's the scientific claim of the book and that's what most of the book develops in since I thought I'd hadn't taken on enough risk in writing a book that argues that there are no timeless truths I thought to give myself the challenge of writing an epilogue where I addressed this transition from naturalism one to naturalism two as a human being what it meant for me in my personal life which is off the table here but which I hint about there what it means for us as a society which is very much on the table here I think I just want to make a broad ambitious claim and then leave the discussion open so the claim I would make is that it matters when we think about and I'll just focus on climate change because that's such an important issue and it has all the issues related to time because the issue about climate change is the uncertainty of the future is it not the best science will not tell us how bad it will be if we do nothing therefore we face making good decisions about an uncertain future which is of course the situation of human life the situation of human life is to be balanced between danger and opportunity and this is just a particularly acute form of it so when we are balanced between danger and opportunity and the future is unknown how do we think usefully about the future and I think if we imagine ourselves living in the cosmos in which novelty is an illusion agency is an illusion will is an illusion we Louie there's a demoralization that takes place there's an alienation that takes place from between our aspirations and our view of the universe we live in if we imagine ourselves living in the universe in which everything changes and everything involves in which novelty is a real possibility in which the imagination of human beings is an organ that takes advantage of the natural capacity to invent novel phenomenon and for novel regularities to arise then we may have we may get a moral if we may think to ourselves maybe even if we can see how it's possible that we have the agency the imagination the will to invent a way out of the problems that face us and I'll stop there well I start from a very very advantageous position of almost complete ignorance of the cosmology and physics of what Lee has been talking about so that's very useful especially to a philosophize never a barrier to philosophical disposition ignorance um but firstly I have to say that I find Lee's position about the place of the concept of time in discussion of natural law rather attractive and insofar as I'm in any position to judge it looks as though he's issued to challenge to his fellow physicists of a very interesting kind um I do want though to do register just one or two little thoughts some of which tangential perhaps one is that with the very honorable exception of Einstein and relativistic physics well mister all other metaphysical positions which turned on they claim that times is unreal are in fact very unattractive once in almost all other cases the idea that time is an illusion that it's unreal that genuine reality is a temporal in some way it is associated with tradition of metaphysical thinking which is at odds in fact with a lot of other thinking in the history of philosophy and did the history of thought in general for example it's an assumption of history that there is time it is an assumption of our psychological interpretations of the self and about relationships that there is narrative structure to them and that involves time so it may very well be that there is a disconnect in a way between how we think about lived reality as being something essentially a time bound with all the tragedy of aging and the delight of the recurrence of seasons and so on and the kind of view the new electronic view or plagiaristic view about the unreality of time so one thing that perhaps one might guard against the little bit is to equivocate on the idea of time and timelessness I'm here is a timeless truth I'm just about to tell you and I'm sure Lele will enjoy this and you'll notice it takes the form of a conditional if we understand by one plus equals in two what we currently understand then one plus one equals two now that is a timeless truth just by definition so there is a sense in which you could nominate her in fact the whole class in fact an infinite class of timeless truths in that sense they're not an interesting sense from the point of view of physics and of natural law but but it's a really very important to note that there are uses of expressions like timelessness and and truths can become permanent I mean it is now a truth forever that this meeting occurred on this date at this time in this place nothing is going to change that however much future generations may wish to rewrite this out of horror at leas proposals and that nevertheless it is now a truth forever so that there are senses in which one would want to retain some useful notions of timelessness and and and permanence but they don't influence they don't affect really what Lee has to say and so for that reason one can I think be very attracted by the idea that here is an exciting new proposal which needs to be examined by Lee's professional colleagues and to the test and one thing that Lee does say in his book again and again is that good science must issue in predictions and the predictions must be testable and there are a number of things suggested by Lee in the book which would issue I think in experimental tests and so that the proof of the pudding will indeed lie in those tests I think my final two little comments about it are these um is it possible that our experience of trying now the the felt reality of the passage of time is something that we are taking too far in reading into how things might be in the structure of the universe of very different scales so that that's a question it's not a criticism but it's just a question I think that one needs to address and finally that there is one thing that we may come back to a little bit later and that is that um Lee is very scrupulous throughout the book in saying he's a naturist he's a naturalist of type 2 it's a bit like having a blood type I'm a naturalist of type 2 and this is a temporal naturalist that there must be prediction and there must be a testable prediction in this theory and then you you very very slightly disconcerted that towards the end of the book Lee by saying that the phenomenon of consciousness is not one that can be inferred from anything that we know about the central nervous system and so all of a sudden we find ourselves on the blurry margins of naturalism there and perhaps later on you you'll say something about that and if I'm fascinating in terms of the message from professors Merlin's book is it in some ways I was wrong to be criticizing economics for borrowing so heavily from physics because the fact is the issue wasn't the fact that economists were borrowing from physics or mathematics it was rather they were borrowing the wrong type of physics and mathematics they were borrowing this idea of the universe being full of eternal time with truths that essentially could be uncovered and applied to the way that money worked in a rather crude rudimentary fashion and so in many ways I think his work really does challenge us to think not just about the import of quantitative techniques into the world of money and policymaking but also to reflect on what we can perhaps learn from his vision of physics and this new appreciation for time if it's true that in fact physics can or both physical laws can evolve and change through the passage of time and if it's true that essentially physics is path dependent which i think is perhaps that the most important word of all in terms of trying to communicate these ideas to lay people ie human beings can in the past and respond to move forward the natural universe can also learn and change each time a law of physics takes place it changes things and essentially create some form of if not evolution than adaptation or change if that is the case then that has a lot of implications for how we devise policy in terms of running an economy it has implications for how we try and make sense of markets it has implications for simply assuming that what's happened in the past will be the perfect guide to the future so artisan by saying that one of the most inspirational things that I find in his book is this point that actually we don't all need to live in extreme silos in terms of academic and intellectual thought we don't need to assume that there is such a deep divide between the social sciences between relativist context bound anthropologists and the hard sciences we can all learn from each other and we all need to learn from each other not just to try and look afresh at the world of physics but also to look afresh at the border of economics to and frankly if there was ever a really timely moment not to crack a bad joke to be doing this it really is today when the Western world is confronted with so many very very profound intractable economic challenges for which frankly the past is not a very good guide for either predicting the future or trying to fashion policy today you

Channel: RSA

Views: 413,516

Rating: 4.2948718 out of 5

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Id: 6Hi4VbERDyI

Length: 23min 43sec (1423 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 24 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/Tringard]

/r/physics responded to this video (link in Other discussions) last year with a decidedly negative view with additional links to other reviews as well. That said, the other panelists start talking around 15:30 in and are a bit easier to listen to. They offer some interesting starting ideas should there be any truth in his ideas.

[u/toobulkeh]

I found him incredibly hard to listen to. Can someone summarize or explain like im 5?

[u/championruby]

Confusing and incoherent lecture. There was a physicist claiming that physics doesn't work any more because of climate change. A philosopher agreeing by confirming that there is nothing currently new to know about time. And a finance journalist agreeing because economists are using the wrong type of natural science to do economics (which last time I checked is a social science).

[u/khthon]

A cyclic universe running for what's a baffling eternity with no end and no beggining is bound to produce a biocosmos. If every conceivable constant or parameter exists, even if it takes trillions upon trillions of years in constant cycles, it is bound to occur and produce life and intelligence. Perhaps such life/intelligence can warp time to cause itself. A sort of we made the Universe/Multiverse and now control.

If all of time is superimposed, then with all certainty life exists on a fourth or even higher dimensional scales, where time is fused with other dimensions (t XYZ). Difficult to grasp. We may be a long way from manipulating it but our existence is proof it is possible. Unless the simulation hypothesis is true and which gives us 33% of actually being real other than just a simulation projected from a far future.