टाइम ट्रॅव्हलर जातो जिवानिशी, टी-रेक्सची बाळ म्हणतात वातड

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