Article The past, present, & future co-exist (Page–Wootters remedy of QM GR conflict)

[C C]

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science...m-physics/

EXCERPTS (Vlatko Vedral): For starters—whether or not time is real—we never measure it directly. Instead, we use another physical system called a clock, whose positions actually indicate different moments in time. [...] scientists have since developed even more sophisticated methods, such as atomic clocks; these measure how many times an electron shifts its position within an atom. Typically, this occurs one hundred million billion times per second, providing a reliable tick of about 10 to the power of -16 seconds.

All of the above illustrate the point that we always use the change of state of one system and call this a time measurement. Because time is ultimately a measurement of changes in other systems, rather than a separate entity in its own right, we can eliminate it from all fundamental equations of change in physics.

[...] There is no time, nor is there any flow of it. Everything can be encapsulated by questions of the form...

[...] The same “trick” applies in quantum mechanics. ... we need to assign a correlated state between the system’s positions and the corresponding positions of the clock. In fact, this kind of correlation is called entanglement in quantum mechanics, and it says that once we look at the state of the clock, we immediately know the state of the system.

This approach is known as the Page–Wootters picture, named after Don Page and Bill Wootters, who authored a paper titled “Evolution without evolution” in 1983, proposing this entangled state. They aimed to describe how dynamics arises from the entangled state between the system and the clock, which itself (the entangled state) remains unchanged over time.

[...] The dynamics that emerges at the system level are described by the usual Schrödinger equation (the same Schrödinger of the cat fame, who suggested that, according to quantum mechanics, both dead and alive version of a cat should be able to exist), which is regarded as the most fundamental law of dynamics in physics.

This magical property of quantum timelessness is that different instances of time now become different universes! Time emerges out of entanglement in the same way that the dead and alive cat emerge through entanglement with the decaying atom and the poison in Schrödinger experiment. This is fascinating because the property of being in another universe (say, seeing a living cat instead of a dead one) now becomes equivalent to existing at another time (which, incidentally, we do routinely by just waiting a bit).

What are the main consequences of this extraordinary fact? First of all, it implies that the past and the future exist “at the same time” as the present. In fact, there is nothing special about the moment we call “now” since every instant is a now instant. Likewise, time does not flow; the river of time is not carrying us from the present to the future. Even more interestingly, entering another time just means that your conscious perception is now correlated with the universe’s new state. This means that the “now” could be randomly hopping between different worlds in the quantum entangled state of the universe and we would still perceive the same apparent Schrödinger dynamics as we normally do.

[...] Einstein’s view of the universe aligned with this, and he found great comfort in it. [...] However, an even more intriguing question for a physicist is: what new possibilities could we explore if the universe truly is timeless?

Being a physicist, the most fantastical possibility is this: by performing measurements on the universal clock in a suitable way, we might be able to alter the dynamics of the rest of the universe. Instead of the Schrödinger equation, we could derive a different law of dynamics... (MORE - missing details)

RELATED (use caution, NDE category on the site): Unraveling the Page-Wootters Mechanism

[Magical Realist]

Yet another surreptitious attempt to replace our messy and contingent reality with a map, which like all really good maps is static, timeless, geometrically-coherent, abstractive, and flawlessly predictive at scales exponentially smaller than reality. Hence that much maligned and troublesome phantom called Time is once again banished for good, while reality, where we all really live, keeps churning and morphing underneath it all as if it didn't even exist anymore. Physicists need to go back to concentrating on physics instead of metaphysics. It's just not their forte.

[Syne]

So like the very unparsimonious Many Worlds interpretation, this goes a step further and posits a whole universe for each moment of time... in an attempt to explain away time.

No idea why some physicists have such trouble accepting time. It is just a measure of change, but that doesn't mean that change has no flow or tense.

[C C]

Yet another surreptitious attempt to replace our messy and contingent reality with a map, which like all really good maps is static, timeless, geometrically-coherent, abstractive, and flawlessly predictive at scales exponentially smaller than reality. Hence that much maligned and troublesome phantom called Time is once again banished for good, while reality, where we all really live, keeps churning and morphing underneath it all as if it didn't even exist anymore. Physicists need to go back to concentrating on physics instead of metaphysics. It's just not their forte.

Change:

1. Undergo a change; become different in essence; losing one's or its original nature.
2. Make different; cause a transformation.
3. Become different in some particular way.

So in that context, there is just transformation of one configuration of the universe into another slightly altered version of itself (repeated over and over). The new obliterating the former. No "flow", which requires a substance moving from one co-existing location to another (a river is extended).

But even if time was treated as a malleable, flowing substance traveling through an extended 4D structure, each distinct segment or frame of the "mold" altering the substance accordingly, what's the rate of that passage? As something reified as objective, the "flow" would have to accommodate the incredible pace of subatomic events, not the turtle pace of human experience that revolves around the macroscopic world. (Or, can one imagine the radical unorthodoxy or anthropocentrism of physicists making human apprehension of difference the objective rate?)

Metaphysics? When we hypostatize certain affairs of memory-dependent cognition and phenomenal consciousness as being substantive aspects of a mind-independent environment, we've got nothing but "beyond physical" speculation. That's why the secondary properties were removed from the scientific conception of physical reality to begin with. And why they attempt to do the same with time. They can't turn it into a mobile pseudoscience substance, and again -- the idea of the universe globally replacing itself every Planck-time unit (to accommodate rival presentism and throw away GR) runs into our elephant-sized intervals of detecting differences obviously not fitting into that subatomic temporal measurement treated as a standard. The chunk sequence of neural processes devoted to accomplishing that feat would conflictingly be extended over countless particle level alterations.

[Magical Realist]

So in that context, there is just transformation of one configuration of the universe into another slightly altered version of itself (repeated over and over). The new obliterating the former. No "flow", which requires a substance moving from one co-existing location to another (a river is extended).

That is at least what an abstractive analysis will see it as---as a succession of discrete still frames slightly altered from the previous one and inferring a totally abstract non-phenomenal ordering or causation passed along from one frame to the next. In reality, what we all experience everyday, is the motion of the still frames as one flowing movie, a single still frame in fact depicting one scene on the screen (the present now) that is morphing and shifting and varying smoothly in itself. The apodictic continuity of the before and after is thus restored, the changes between the still frames not merely apparent but ontically interwoven into the very happening of the movie. Science is totally restricted to quantifying reality--reducing everything into discrete coexistent quanta. It thus will never grasp the basic qualitative and phenomenally manifest flow of reality or consciousness itself. It has nothing to say about qualities (qualia). For that we must go to the poets and the artists and the philosophers.

As something reified as objective, the "flow" would have to accommodate the incredible pace of subatomic events, not the turtle pace of human experience that revolves around the macroscopic world.

Time then as scale variant--which when viewed at micro scales is relatively sped up but which at our scale is slowed down. What is always overlooked by the scientist watching micro events happen is he is always viewing the rate of happening there from his own relatively much slower macro scale. It's a question of povs and frames of reference, but has nothing to do with the absolute flow of Time itself. The rate of flow iow is relative depending on the scale but the flow itself is absolute.

As far as Time suggesting the idea of a moving substance, that is at least useful as a metaphor. The Tao and running water and gases and electricity and spirit and such. But real Time is paradoxical in this sense: it is the precise opposite of a substance that is moving since that assumes an isomorphic state existing timelessly and absolutely all at once. Rather it is the reverse: it is the flowing making possible any substance or self-sameness or identity. It is constantly changing in its very essence from past to future, merging as the present now in one constantly varying duration of what is staying the same and what is becoming different. The flow of Time, and indeed consciousness itself, is therefore ontologically fundamental and absolute, passing thru and penetrating the seemingly static present as what is enduring and what is changing concurrently. By banishing change, you also banish repetition and constancy, both of which have no meaning without the underlying flux of pure occurrence. Hence clouds may shape shift and flowers may blossom, but even rocks age whether we see them changing or not.

The Fixx:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHYIGy1dyd8

"Bergson’s fundamental insight was that the difference between concrete (or lived) time and abstract (or clock) time is real (i.e. the former is not just some subjective or psychological epiphenomenon, for example). In effect, he “rescued” time from the physicists – and also from his positivistically-inclined peers who, with their outlooks and methods, so aspired to mimic their scientific brethren. Bergson’s shorthand for the concept of lived-time is durée, which is usually translated as duration (F. C. T. Moore, however, prefers durance, because it suggests better the experiential aspect of time). Here are some of Bergson’s remarks about durée from the first chapter of his L’Evolution créatrice:

'Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances. . . . All our belief in objects, all our operations on the systems that science isolates, rest in fact on the idea that time does not bite into them. . . . [T]he abstract time t attributed by science to a material object or to an isolated system consists only in a certain number of simultaneities or more generally of correspondences, and… this number remains the same, whatever be the nature of the intervals between the correspondences. . . . Therefore the flow of time might assume an infinite rapidity, the entire past, present, and future of material objects or of isolated systems might be spread out all at once in space, without there being anything to change either in the formulae of the scientist or even in the language of common sense. . . . Though our reasoning on isolated systems may imply that their history, past, present, and future, might be instantaneously unfurled like a fan, this history, in point of fact, unfolds itself gradually, as if it occupied a duration like our own. If I want to mix a glass of sugar and water, I must, willy nilly, wait until the sugar melts. This little fact is big with meaning. For here the time I have to wait is not… mathematical time… It coincides with my impatience, that is to say, with a certain portion of my own duration, which I cannot protract or contract as I like. It is no longer something thought, it is something lived. It is no longer a relation, it is an absolute. . . . The universe endures. . . . [I]n the universe itself two opposite movements are to be distinguished, as we shall see later on, “descent” and “ascent.” The first only unwinds a roll ready prepared. In principle, it might be accomplished almost instantaneously, like releasing a spring. But the ascending movement, which corresponds to an inner work of ripening or creating, endures essentially, and imposes its rhythm on the first, which is inseparable from it. . . . Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed. . . . The evolution of the living being, like that of the embryo, implies a continual recording of duration, a persistence of the past in the present, and so an appearance, at least, of organic memory. . . . The systems science works with are, in fact, in an instantaneous present that is always being renewed; such systems are never in that real, concrete duration in which the past remains bound up with the present. . . . The more duration marks the living being with its imprint, the more obviously the organism differs from a mere mechanism, over which duration glides without penetrating. . . . Real duration is that duration which gnaws on things, and leaves on them the mark of its tooth. . . . We do not think real time. But we live it, because life transcends intellect.' "--Bergson