James Gleick:
“A pregnant moment in intellectual history occurs when H.G.
Wells’s Time Traveller (“for so it will be convenient to speak of him”) gathers
his friends around the drawing room fire to explain that everything they know
about time is wrong. This after-dinner conversation marked something of a
watershed, more telling than young Wells, who had never even published a book
before The Time Machine, imagined just before the turn of the twentieth
century.
What is time? Nothing but a fourth dimension, after length,
breadth, and thickness. “Through a natural infirmity of the flesh,” the
cheerful host explains, “we incline to overlook this fact.” The geometry taught
in school needs revision. “Now, it is very remarkable that this is so
extensively overlooked…. There is no difference between Time and any of the
three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.”
“The world remains, always, a bundle of processes evolving
in time,” says Smolin.
Logic and mathematics capture aspects of nature, but never
the whole of nature. There are aspects of the real universe that will never be
representable in mathematics. One of them is that in the real world it is
always some particular moment.
In a coda he ruminates briefly on the problem of
consciousness—“the really hard problem.” He doesn’t propose any answers, but
I’m glad to see physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists continuing
to wrestle with it, rather than leaving it to neurologists. Whatever
consciousness will turn out to be, it’s not a moving flashlight illuminating
successive slices of the four-dimensional spacetime continuum. It is a
dynamical system, occurring in time, evolving in time, able to absorb bits of
information from the past and process them, able also to create anticipation
for the future.”
Artist: Kim Warp, The New Yorker, 2018
