ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus

[John BAILEY]

I was about the write the same thing! Time is change, right? Any place
where there was no change at all, even in a body, would be outside of
time.
 
I tend to think of this less in a physics-y way (since I'm not much chop
with the science stuff) and more from a social/historical stance - how
time was "invented" by humans in order to make sense of change. How even
the apparently intuitive sense of time is different in different
cultures/communities. 
 
The early chapters of David S. Landes "Revolution in Time: Clocks and
the Making of the Modern World" are pretty good in this regard, charting
(for instance) how "seconds" were only invented relatively recently. How
often do you use the second hand on your watch? Hell, even minutes are a
pretty new thing.

________________________________

From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
Behalf Of Lawrence Bryan
Sent: Thursday, 5 April 2007 11:46 AM
To: David Casseres
Cc: Pynchlist
Subject: Re: ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus



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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