The Far Horizons of Time Time and Mind in the Universe

160 Pages·2015·1.02 MB·English

by  H. Chris Ransford

H. Chris Ransford
The Far Horizons of Time
Time and Mind in the Universe
H. Chris Ransford
The Far Horizons of Time
Time and Mind in the Universe
Managing Editor: Paulina Leśna-Szreter
Language Editor: Andrew Laister
Published by De Gruyter Open Ltd, Warsaw/Berlin
Part of Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Munich/Boston
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license, which means that the text may be
used for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author.
For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/.
Copyright © 2014 H. Chris Ransford
ISBN 978-3-11-044027-0
e-ISBN 978-3-11-044028-7
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the
Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
Managing Editor: Paulina Leśna-Szreter
Language Editor: Andrew Laister www.degruyteropen.com
Cover illustration: © Stocktrek Images
Contents
Acknowledgements & Thanks
Introduction
Prologue: Walk Towards A Distant Star
1 Time - Part 1
2 When is Now?
3 The Time Explorer’s Toolkit
4 Infinity & Infinities
5 Our Quantized Reality: Life in the Strobe Lights
6 A Surprisingly Puzzling Reality
7 Wave Functions: Mathematics Is Reality
8 The Most Complex Object in the Known Universe
9 Heisenberg’ls Uncertainty Principle (aka Indeterminacy)
10 Time - Part 2: the Guises of Time
10.1 Time as an Emergent Property?
10.2 Time as a Dimension?
11 Gödel Universes?
12 Big Bangs
13 Bubbles of Time
14 Multiverse Scenarios
15 In Search of OM
End Notes
Further Reading
Index
Acknowledgements & Thanks
First and foremost, I am indebted to Dr. Paulina Lesna-Szreter at de Gruyter
Open who helped make a book out of a rather formless original
manuscript, and whose advice was precious at every step of the way. I am
also deeply indebted to all the teachers who ignited and then fed a thirst
for always understanding “what lies beneath”, why is reality that way and
not some other way. They are far too numerous to mention, and some have
by now left us, but let me at least mention here Jean-François Guyot and
Jean Besson in Grenoble, Klaus Tödheide in Karlsruhe, and Charles
Joachain in Brussels.
There are also those who have written remarkable contributions in the
form of books, articles or treatises and who, by doing so, have extended
their influence well beyond their narrow confines of time and space. Some
have been kind enough to occasionally correspond with me by email. For
their kindness and discussions I am forever indebted to, among others,
John D. Barrow, the late Evan Harris Walker, Dieter Zeh. Among those I did
not correspond with but whose books and writings inspired me may I cite
Stephen Hawking, Charles Joachain, Paul Davies, John Gribbin, Bernard
d’Espagnat, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, all those whose names are cited in
the index, and many others.
My deep gratefulness extends to my language editor, Andrew Laister,
my esteemed friends and colleagues, Jean François Lacoste-Bourgeacq,
Jean Bornarel, Bodil Jönsson, France Citrini, Andrew Greentree, Ulrich
Mutze, Joachim Kalden, Claus Janew, Issam Sinjab, David Johnson, Daniel
Peterson, Ben Thomas, Luciano Cassata, Jacques de Schryver, Charles
Hirlimann, Johannes Grünwald, Andrzej Szymanski, Frank Volke,
Muhammad Farooq, Erkki Bründas, Jean Claude Dutailly, Abedallah
Rababah, Sergio Wechsler, Fethi Belgacem, Costas Drossos, H.E. Lehtihet,
Hemanta Baruah, Mohammad Ayaz Ahmad, Vitaly Voloshin, Michael
Brückner, Anatolij Prykarpatski, Yuri Gornostyrev, Octav Olteanu, Dmitry
Kazansky, Abderrahmane Kadri, Nageswara Posinasetti, and countless
others far too numerous to mention, some of whom I may only have
interacted with electronically, but who have all proved stimulating,
challenging, and enlightening. Of course, the ideas presented herein are
mine, and discussion partners may have held different views.
Second - therein lies a tale. One of my earliest memories is a class at
primary school - it had to be primary one, because that’s when they teach
about time and clocks. The teacher, a kind old man - although any man at
any age must have looked positively ancient to us youngsters - was telling
us about the time and its subdivisions, an hour, a minute, a second, and
how they were clearly marked on the faces of our then exclusively analog
watches.
He then volunteered a pretty odd comment which instantly indelibly
etched itself on my young impressionable mind.
I still see him, wistfully peering at the bleak outside weather lashing the
classroom’s window panes with rain, when he mused half aloud, probably
more to himself than to us: “Some people say that there exists a sixtieth of a
second too, but that’s just much too small - it does not exist.”
This odd pronouncement puzzled me endlessly, and the manifold
questions arising from trying to make sense of it just wouldn’t leave me
alone. We were also then learning about distance and I recall thinking that
if I ran as fast as I could across the schoolyard, then a sixtieth of a second
or perhaps even less would be the time it would take to maybe move by an
inch or less. I also remember thinking that if we kept adding up enough
however small fractions of an inch, then we would inescapably end up
with the yard’s full measure - and then some, and that in order to run the
length of the yard I had to run those small distances first, in whatever time
it took to do so - much certainly less than a sixtieth of a second each. The
more I thought about it, the less this pronouncement seemed to make any
sense at all.
Then time passed and I learnt about calculus - i.e., adding an infinitely
large number of infinitely small things - and then even about languages:
whereas there is no formal word in English for a sixtieth of a second exactly
- a number of words, such as a jiffy, have been proposed but somehow
never jelled - a number of other languages, such as both German and
French, do have a definite word for it. Thus, my old teacher’s
pronouncement appeared doubly wrong - a sixtieth of a second did exist
after all, it wasn’t too tiny, and adding up very many vanishingly small
things did yield up measurable, ordinary, tangible outcomes.
And yet - because time is almost certainly discontinuous in our
universe, the old teacher’s pronouncement was, in its essence, not so wide
off the mark - albeit wrong by many orders of magnitude as to the actual
measurement value of a time quantum. My kind old teacher, who set me