Time

image from

Samuel Graydon, "Do you have the right time? How popular science can play 'Virgil and Beatrice to our bewildered Dante,'" The Times Literary Supplement (May 18 2018), section dealing with the book by Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time.

Excerpt:

The more we look at the world in its primal undress, the more we realize that the world we experience, day to day, is clothed by our ignorance. There is so much we do not see about how the universe works. Carlo Rovelli shows how foolish we really are in his new book The Order of Time. We have many misconceptions about time ... what Rovelli calls "The Loss of Unity". There is no single time, we all carry our grandfather clocks with us. ... Not only is there no unity, he explains that there is no present, there is no difference between the past and the future, there is no independent time variable and that beneath a certain minimum scale to talk of time is completely meaningless ...

Keeping a calendar is also pointless, and Rovelli reminds us that any notion of a simultaneous event is destroyed by relativity. This, he says -- that there is no present -- "is the most astounding conclusion arrived at in the whole of contemporary physics."...

If we could take into account all the details of the exact, microscopic state of the world, the familiar flow of time would disappear. "In a microscopic description, there can be no sense in which the past is different from the future." ...

***

To His Coy Mistress  BY ANDREW MARVELL [see also]

Had we but world enough and time,

This coyness, lady, were no crime.

We would sit down, and think which way

To walk, and pass our long love’s day.

Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side

Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide

Of Humber would complain. I would

Love you ten years before the flood,

And you should, if you please, refuse

Till the conversion of the Jews.

My vegetable love should grow

Vaster than empires and more slow;

An hundred years should go to praise

Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;

Two hundred to adore each breast,

But thirty thousand to the rest;

An age at least to every part,

And the last age should show your heart.

For, lady, you deserve this state,

Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear

Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

Thy beauty shall no more be found;

Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound

My echoing song; then worms shall try

That long-preserved virginity,

And your quaint honour turn to dust,

And into ashes all my lust;

The grave’s a fine and private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue

Sits on thy skin like morning dew,

And while thy willing soul transpires

At every pore with instant fires,

Now let us sport us while we may,

And now, like amorous birds of prey,

Rather at once our time devour

Than languish in his slow-chapped power.

Let us roll all our strength and all

Our sweetness up into one ball,

And tear our pleasures with rough strife

Through the iron gates of life:

Thus, though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run.

***

JB: So, if there is no time (as we "know" it) there is no death?

Maybe not:

Rovelli says "thermal agitation is like a continual shuffling of a pack of cards ... This is an irreversible process. Heat passes on way, from hot to cold, and cannot pass back. The fact that it is irreversible distinguishes a difference between before and after. And, as heat is nothing but a disordering, it is this mixing that distinguishes the past and future.

[T]he flowing of time that we experience is not an illusion -- while not existing on a fundamental level, it can still be said to exist. ...

[W]e live in a specialized sub-set of the universe in which entropy, on the macroscopic level, was, for some unknown reason, ... low in the past.