ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus

[Lawrence Bryan]

It seems to me that time is irrevocably tied with change or motion.  
Any universe in which time did not exist would be a static universe.   
Motion implies a change in position over some time interval.

I'll have to look into Yourgrau's book.

Lawrence

On Apr 4, 2007, at 3:01 PM, David Casseres wrote:

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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