Tuesday, June 11, 2024

Catching Time in a Bottle

This gets at something I have long suspected intuitively — that things do not really come into being and pass away. On some staggeringly deep level that’s beyond ordinary human comprehension, they simply always are.

Karmela Padavic-Callaghan in New Scientist magazine: “Time may not be a fundamental element of our physical reality. New calculations add credence to the idea that it emerges from quantum entanglement, in which two objects are so inextricably linked that disturbing one disrupts the other, no matter how distant they are…

“At its core is the suggestion that when we see an object change over time, that is only because that object is entangled with a clock. That means a truly external observer standing outside the entangled system would see a completely static, unchanging universe. Within this framework time is not a given, but purely a consequence of entanglement…”

“…This may mean that if we perceive the passage of time, then there is some entanglement woven into the physical world. And an observer in a universe devoid of entanglement – as some theories suggest ours was at its very beginning – would have seen nothing change. Everything would be static." 

Nietzsche posited eternal recurrence — the idea that our lives will repeat infinitely and that in each life every detail will be exactly the same.

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