Article Time is an illusion, and these physicists say they know how it works

[C C]

In the context of everyday beliefs, one might suggest that it would be better to say that presentism is an illusion, since that's probably what most people mean by time flowing or passing. Although that's actually inconsistent with its belief of only "now" existing, since there would no future moment (for whatever) to transit to, nor a past moment to transit from. And since it entertains a universal now (no relativistic associations and no fuzzy Bergson duration), each whole universe is thereby constantly annihilated and replaced by another slightly altered version. There's no "flow" in presentism -- its single unit, cosmic state, or increment can't constitute a stream, either.
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SABINE HOSSENFELDER
https://youtu.be/uYOF-YggWAg

EXCERPTS: . . . A good example is the solidity of matter. This desk certainly seems solid. But if we were to look closer at it, it’d be mostly empty space. Again though, that the solidity is an illusion doesn’t mean I don’t have the experience of it. The experience is totally real.

Here’s another example: Free will. Many people have the feeling of using something they call free will. That feeling is totally real. Yet if you look closer at it, there’s nothing free being willed in the human brain, it’s just particles following the laws of nature. Free will is an illusion.

And it’s the same when they talk about time. It’s that while we certainly have this feeling of time passing, if you look closer at how physics works, there might be no time. It’s an illusion.

[...] For a physicist a clock is anything that recurs in regular intervals, pendulum swings, heart beats, headlines proclaiming that the Nobel Prize is outdated and so on.

Doing this for General Relativity is straight-forward, you just need to calculate the proper time. For quantum mechanics, not so much. Because how do you define a “clock” in quantum mechanics and how do you get a “time” from that? The task is basically that you need to use one set of particles as the “clock” and from that you need to extract a variable that you can call “time” for another system.

And this finally brings me to the new paper, because that’s what they have done. They have used a clock system in quantum mechanics, a simple type of oscillator, and have shown that one can use that to define time for another system that’s entangled with the oscillator.

So the link between the two comes from entanglement. The new thing about this paper is that they have shown that this also continues to work if the other system is large. It’s not something that’s confined to the microscopic range, and that builds a bridge between quantum mechanics and general relativity.

Assuming that this is right, and this is how time in quantum mechanics comes about, does that mean that time is an illusion?

Well, in a sense yes, because it means that fundamentally, at the physical basis, there’s no time, there are just relations between different things in the universe. Like it’s not that time passes as you watch this video, it’s just that the progress bar is correlated with the number of unread emails in your inbox that you really really wanted to get to today. Then again, we all know that that was an illusion.

Time is an Illusion, and these physicists say they know how it works

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/uYOF-YggWAg

[Magical Realist]

I just watched a "Closer To Truth" video of Paul Davies making the point that causation itself is due to the unidirectional arrow of time. That this asymmetry in all happening makes possible the transmission of action from one event to another. So if Sabine is right and all this is just illusion, it seems to me it will be a major revolution in our notion of causality and ultimately the laws of physics that events fundamentally only appear to cause each other and are really timelessly entangled together at the quantum level. The logic of sequence itself, assumed in both mathematics and language and reason itself, will have to be superceded, but what could replace it? Perhaps some kind of emergent principle or higher dimensional order underlying the happening of all events. Bohm's implicate order maybe?

"Bohm argues that causality is in fact incompatible with determinism: if determinism holds, it is not possible for us to actually change anything. If determinism holds, then rather than an event having a specific cause, it is determined by the entire earlier state of the universe."

"At the end of the nineteenth century, Ernst Mach expressed hope “that the science of the future will discard the idea of cause and effect, as being formally obscure” (Mach 2012, p. 254), and in 1912, Bertrand Russell famously argued that “the word ‘cause’ is so inextricably bound up with misleading associations as to make its complete extrusion from the philosophical vocabulary desirable”, and that “the reason why physics has ceased to look for causes is that, in fact, there are no such things” (Russell 1919, p. 180)."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxHpj6OTa84&t=370s