The 53 min long Physics Video on “Illusion of Time” is now available on Youtube.
If you have not already seen it, you should not miss as a Vedantin.
Please watch it to know the latest developments in Physics on What is Time, Time travel etc. What does “Now” mean is covered from about 20th minute to 32nd minute. There is nothing like a ‘past’ that has given way to the ‘present’ in absolute one dimensional time.
As Dr. Albert Einstein said: “The distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however persistent. (In a letter to Michelangelo Besso, 21 March 1955).
One aspect not covered in the Video is this: It is easy to imagine for any one that the present “now” (at this moment) can develop into any number of different possible scenarios in the “future.” Each such possibility could happen in one or the other universe out of multiple universes (H. Everett’s hypothesis). Similarly then, because of time symmetry in physical laws, one can imagine that the present “now” (as an outcome) has multiple possibilities in the past. (One strange consequence is one can never be sure that one is definitely the child of only a specific couple!).
The Link: Click here.
It is mind-boggling. One should understand it with the mind, of course, but with a bit of imagination as well. There are so many complicated factors, like entropy, easy to get it at first try, but…
Someone commenting: “There’s one possibility that yeah, everything is predetermined. But then theory of randomness says that it’s not, you can’t decide the future.”
My clever mixed, haphazard, answer: “I don’t know… everything moves (but not at the same speed)… no randomness without order… I like the Buddhist doctrine of co-dependent origination.” That’s as far as I went.
Thanks, Martin, for the interesting comments.
“There are so many complicated factors, like entropy, easy to get it at first try, but…”
All these ‘complicated factors’ are simply mind’s imaginations. Otherwise, what-there-is is One undivided Whole !
“………… everything is predetermined.”
The word ‘pre-determined’ implies a process, a time-line and cause-effect operation. But the ‘Whole thing (whatever-that-is)’ as One exists from moment to moment historylessly – no memory, no time frame, no cause-effect relation.
“…..everything moves…”
Nothing of ‘whatever-that-is’ moves. What moves is the mind !
“….. Buddhist doctrine of co-dependent origination.”
Is not the ‘antecedent origination’ a concept introduced later by Madhyamika Buddhists? Did Buddha himself talk of it or was ‘silent’ on such questions?
regards,
ramesam
There is only ‘One undivided Whole’, you write, Ramesam. This is an insight or intuition (anubhava) that Plato, Hegel, William Blake– and many others, poets, sages (philosophers in the highest sense of the word), mystics, and a few scientists – as far as I know – had.
I believe the principle of ‘Dependent origination’ appears somewhere in the Upanishads… I don’t know where, certainly, and it would be nice to find out the place. We know that this principle refers exclusively to the world of phenomena, which occur in space and time, or in time only (as in the subtle world). But, as you, and the documentary, put it, time can be seen as frozen… nothing moves, as an arrow would do (this was the great insight of Parmenides). But if something in the mind moves (vrittis), the mind being ultimately nothing else than Atma-Brahman, can we not say – from vyavahara – that “movement is in Reality, but Reality is not movement”? (is this not a principle called tadatmya?). In this way, we could rescue the reputation of that other Greek sage, Heraclitus, famous for his ‘panta rei’ – ‘everything flows’. But, of course, nothing moves ‘in Reality’ (paramarthika), space is not physical space, and, accordingly… what to do with the space-time dimension? – all of it imaginations in the “mind” of God, or Shiva? (a fortiori, Shakti doesn’t move, either).