ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus

[David Casseres]

Time, as we experience it, has these essential properties:

1. At any one point in space, it is a sequence–events of the past occur in a
definite order, and the present is the latest element in the sequence.

2. The past is immutable.

3. The present changes incessantly and cannot be distinguished from the
latest instant of the past.

4. The future is unknowable, perhaps nonexistent.

Kurt Goedel, late in his life, wrote a chapter of a book dedicated to
Einstein on his 70th birthday, in which he demonstrated the possibility of
universes that conform to Einstein's relativity but in which physical time
doesn't exist.  Also universes in which time is cyclical.  As a consequence
of this line of thought, he also proved that "time as we experience it" does
not correspond to any physical reality: rather, it is ideal.  The physical
measurement that we also call "time" is something else.

I get all this from Palle Yourgrau's fascinating book, A World Without Time:
The Forgotten Legacy of Goedel and Einstein (Basic Books, 2005).

On 4/4/07, Monte Davis <monte.davis at bms.com> wrote:
>
> Dave Monroe wrote:
>
> >Morson, Gary Saul.  Narrative and Freedom:
> >   The Shadows of Time.  New Haven, CT.  Yale UP, 1994...
> >
> I liked the Morson book, but NB that even he had to use "sideways" --
> which leaves in place the the underlying flaw, the *spatialization* of
> time. I don't know what to replace it with -- but I do know that
>
> 1) we don't "move through" time
> 2) time doesn't "flow past" us
> 3) the past is not "another country" -- it  "isn't" anything beyond a
> set of boundary conditions
> 4) that we imagine "futures" does absolutely nothing for their
> ontological status
>
>
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