You're watching this video. Your brain cells are firing in anticipation. A story
is unfolding. Time is moving forward. Or is it? what if I told you that nothing is
happening? There's no story unfolding. The story has already been told. The video
has already been uploaded. You're just watching it one second at a time, so
there is a story unfolding for you only. What if your entire life was like this
video upload, like a DVD? The story of your life is already on that DVD. The
only difference is that you don't have a forward and reverse button. You are
forced to experience your DVD one moment at a time. There is some strong
scientific evidence that this may be the true nature of reality. If so, that would
mean that everything you think you know is utterly an illusion. Let's look at
what science has to say about this and its profound implications for existence
coming up right now
Einstein's theory of relativity supports something called the block universe,
which is really a four dimensional space-time structure. This means that
every event has its own coordinates not only in space, but in time. So for example,
wherever you are right now corresponds to a location in three dimensions, like
London, England, and a location in time 2:00 p.m.
February 2nd 2019. But just like the space 10 feet ahead of you is as real as
the space 10 feet behind you, so too is the moment 10 minutes into the future
and 10 minutes into the past. In other words, the past, present, and future exist
just as much as the present. MIT physicist Max Tegmark says, "we can view
the universe as a three-dimensional space where stuff happens or
four-dimensional block universe where nothing happens." If it is the latter he
says then change is really an illusion because nothing is changing. It's all
there - past, present, and future, like a DVD. A drama may be unfolding in the movie
recorded on the DVD but nothing about the DVD itself is changing in any way. We
may have the illusion at any given moment, that the past already happened
and that the future doesn't yet exist, and that things are changing,
but the only reason we may have a past is that our brain contains memories of
the past. If we did not have any memories, would we have any sense of the past or a
sense of time at all? Is it possible that time doesn't actually exist, except
through our perception of it. Physics doesn't help us when it comes to this
arrow of time. It is time agnostic. If time was running backwards, all the
equations would still be valid. So mathematically, physics does not say that
time goes forward or backward. It just says that time cannot be zero. But it can
run either forward or backward without violating any laws. Time is symmetric.
Julian Barbour, a British physicist describes time as a succession of
pictures, a succession of snapshots. To Barbour, change is real but time is not.
Time only exists because change is taking place he says. But this is
counterintuitive. Reality seems to be telling us the time does exist, and that
it's arrow points in only one direction - forward. Why doesn't the arrow of time
flow backward if the physics says that it is equally likely? It would have been
possible if it were not for one aspect of physics, and that is the law of
entropy. You see, entropy always increases. Entropy
is a measure of the disorderliness of the universe. Things always get more
disorderly. You can scramble an egg, but you can't unscramble it. This is entropy
increasing. Entropy appears to be the only reason the arrow of time is what it
is. But why is entropy always becoming higher? Why doesn't it become lower?There
doesn't appear to be any fundamental reason for that. Alan Guth, professor at
MIT, who pioneered the idea of cosmic inflation may have solved this riddle. He
argues that information and entropy are almost the same thing. In order to know
your past you have to form memories. Adding memories means adding information.
Adding information increases entropy. Therefore a conscious system can only be
conscious in one direction - when entropy increases, which allows information to
increase. This implies that we are conscious because we live in a universe
of increasing entropy. Consciousness cannot exist in a universe where entropy
decreases. This does not mean that there may not be other universes
where entropy flows backward, and time flows backward. It just means that
consciousness could not exist in such a universe. So if entropy has been
increasing since the beginning of time it means that the universe must have
started at the lowest possible state of entropy, at the beginning at the Big Bang.
Why then did the universe start off this way and sent us on this trajectory of
ever increasing entropy resulting in a forward direction of time? Again, Alan
Guth may have an answer to this question. He says that if the universe is
infinitely large, then the total potential entropy of the universe is
infinite. If that is the case, then any entropy you start with is low entropy,
because there's always the possibility of increasing. The entropy will increase
from any given starting point he says. This means that it doesn't matter what
the entropy of the Big Bang was. It would always be the lowest entropy, because
there will always be a larger entropy number that the universe can flow to.
Physics seems to tell us that time must exist in order for consciousness to
exist. It seems that we are here not despite time but because of time, because
of causality, because there was a beginning. And subsequent to that
beginning, a huge passage of time has allowed atoms to form complex molecules
that have resulted in life which has subsequently resulted in conscious
highly intelligent beings like us that have memories of the past. And seemingly,
we exist because time has flowed in a favorable direction for causality to
occur. Namely, it has flowed forward in our universe. There may be other
universes where time flows backward, but consciousness could not exist in them. We
are here because time flows forward in this universe. It doesn't have to. But
what about the block universe? Are we living inside a DVD? The block universe
is allowed in relativity but what does quantum mechanics have to say about it?
Quantum mechanics says that time and space are the background or canvas on
which existence takes place. So it does not preclude the idea of a block
universe. But just because it is allowed in relativity and quantum mechanics, it
doesn't mean that it's true. We need more evidence. If the universe is
a DVD and all of time exists like points in space,
then this implies that the future is as fixed as the past this would imply no
free will and super determinism. Do we have any additional evidence for this?
Well one solution to the mystery of entanglement is just such a universe
with no free will. See my video on entanglement. So now we have possibly
some evidence that seems to lead to the block universe scenario. This doesn't
make it true however, so the jury is still out on this. Physicists' opinions
are divided. To many physicists, while we experience time as psychologically real,
time is not fundamentally real. At the deepest foundations of nature, the flow
of time is not required to construct reality and if there really is no flow
then the block universe would reveal that all time and all space exists in
tandem, and that our fate is sealed inside the DVD of the universe. And we
are forced to view it without a remote control, one moment at a time.
We cannot fast forward or skip a single moment. We can't reverse it. We might not
even like the movie. it probably won't have a Hollywood ending. But it is our
movie. And it is the only movie. We better find a way to like this movie.
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