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Well, another year has passed.
And a new one is appearing on the horizon. It will be heralded in with the usual fanfare and resolutions and rejoicing. Though there appears to be less and less to rejoice about.
But what really changes? In what way will the dawn of 1st January 2012 be different from that of 31st December 2011 in any meaningful fundamental way? For me, it will mean another year has passed, and I am that much older. But I don’t need hilarity and celebration to mark the passage of time right on the dot of 1st of January! Well, if you want to, go right ahead! But it happens every day anyway. It happens because of something called TIME.
I was leafing through the most recent issue of the Scientific American Magazine recently. I noticed that the whole of this issue has been dedicated to TIME, starting from its history, to the latest scientific and philosophic thought about it. Time seems to be the ultimate paradox facing mankind. Does it have a beginning? Will it have an end? Is it real? Or is it just an illusion?
For most people the greatest mystery of time is that there is never enough of it! It has been likened to an arrow in the olden days, or a flowing river. Albert Einstein called it Space-Time and explained it on the basis of his illustrious theory. More recent scientists called Time the Fourth Dimension.
And yet, that was not enough it seems.
Newer discoveries of Quantum Mechanics has turned everything on its head.
The Laws of Physics have finally run into problems. The Time factor ‘t’ seems to have disappeared from their equations! At the very basic fundamental scientific level, it is impossible to make a distinction between the Past and the Future! This can mean, in the final analysis, only one thing. Time does not exist! It is just an illusion. A figment of our imagination. A perception of what our brains tell us.
Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Physics studying the sub atomic world is beginning to reveal a startling world. The ‘atom’, once considered the building blocks of Matter, is mostly empty space. The electrons that it contains rotating around a nucleus of protons and neutrons, are all whirling masses of energy with virtually no mass.
So, its all perception. Our brain just tells us what is out there.
Time and matter is all an illusion. Nothing really ‘exists’.
Is there any point in saying Happy New Year? I suppose there is. We still have to lead our lives as we have learned. There is no other way.

That's a bit heavy for me Zonker I'm afraid I didn't understand a word of it.

What I did find, fairly interesting, is that Samoa cancelled Friday. They have decided to jump over the dateline.

The tiny South Pacific island is moving west over the international dateline, and its citizens will lose a day of their lives as they jump 24 hours ahead.

When the clock struck midnight on Thursday, the calendar flipped over to Saturday, switching from the same time zone as the U.S. to that of Asia, New Zealand and Australia

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... ds-newsxml

So from never being enough of it, the poor Samoans have even less. What happens if Friday 30 December was your birthday? What a bummer!

That's a very postmodernistic way for looking at time. It is depressing. Time tells us who we are (were we came from and were we want to go) and gives us an identity. Saying there is no past and no future, is in line with the carpe diem adagium, but gives us nothing but an empty self (no identity). Its a trade off.

There's a bit of a sufi'istic philosophy in your post Zonker - everything around is just an illusion.

It reminded me of this episode (probably apocryphal..):

A Sufi leader was summoned to the court of a king to hold a debate with some of the outstanding scholars of his time. But to the amazement and chagrin of all, the outcome of the debate turned out to be exactly the opposite of what they had expected. Within a few exchanges of arguments and counter-arguments the great academics were driven out of their depth, gasping for their breath and groping for words. None could succeed in matching the intricacies of the Sufi's ethereal logic. At this point, the king was struck with a brilliant idea and ordered the warden of the elephants' house to have the most ferocious of his elephants brought to the palace grounds. This particular elephant happened to be stricken with a madness no less than that of the Sufi. The only difference perhaps was that in the Sufi's mind the outer reality did not exist. But the elephant wanted to destroy all outward reality himself. From the one end the Sufi was pushed into the open and from the other the elephant was let loose. The Sufi without losing his breath, ran for his life forthwith.

Observing this, the king shouted from the balcony of his palace, 'Don't run away O Sufi, from this phantom elephant. He is only a figment of your imagination!'

'Who is running away?' shouted back the Sufi. 'It is only a figment of your imagination.'

Thus ended the predicament of the Sufi but not the debate itself. It still rages on.

(I also am fascinated by how at the atomic level, it is mostly space and that matter is not 'solid' at that level - and also intrigued by time, quantum mechanics and have just about sort of understood what string theory and M theory is vaguely about.. and like the theory that we could go back in time if there was a worm hole that connected space-time where it bent over itself...)

Myself, I will still believe that time does flow like an arrow, matter is solid etc - because I don't live at a quantum scale but in a form where solids are solids and where tomorrow is another year! I am looking forward to Quantum computers though.

Cheers,

Shafique

BM

I noticed that each of the three responders to this post have looked at what I have said from a different angle. Their own. Thats what is so fascinating about humans. Its our brains that does it for us. Or the mind. Or 'conciousness'. You have been trained, another way of saying that you have learned, to deal with hard facts in a particular way. You dont like uncertainty !

FD, The article that I have referenced here said that baffled by their own findings the Physicists were turning to Philosophers for some insight! One of the Scientists was quoted as saying that, basically, philosophers were rubbish because nothing that they said ever made any sense! Imagine going to someone for help and thinking that way about them . As for me, its good to know what is happening on the frontiers of Science, where science and philosophy seem to overlap, but whether I will make any changes to my own life because of my new found knowledge, is uncertain. As I said to BM, I will only respond to whats happening around me with what I have learned.

Shaf, you might remember a little discussion we had on this forum when I mentioned The Simulation Hypothesis by Nick Bostrom. Somehow, everything that I have read so far seems to point me in that direction! Everything ties in with a Simulation! As I have mentioned, we cannot escape our learned behaviour. Otherwise, from what we know of quantum science, we could walk through a wall. But for that, one would have to "unlearn" millenia of behaviour instilled into us by our ancestors. For a Simulator, a human lifetime maybe measured in minutes of "human time". So it makes no difference anyway .
You are right about the Sufi philosophy, and before them what Plato said, as well as some of the greek philosophers of antiquity! They all seemed to be saying what science is only just uncovering

Zonker,

In what way will the dawn of 1st January 2012 be different from that of 31st December 2011 in any meaningful fundamental way?

Well time to prepare for the end of the world right, why not we all make a spaceship and enter a blackhole and find out what really happens when we get there