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Do We Need a Physics of ‘Passage’?
10 — 14 December, 2012 :: Vineyard Hotel & Spa, Capetown, South Africa
Themes
Twentieth century physics is often thought to have established that
there is no distinction between past, present and future, no flow of
time, and no fundamental direction of time. This viewpoint — the Block
Universe, as it is sometimes called — is reflected in remarks such as
the following:
We physicists know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. (Einstein)
The objective world simply is, it does not
happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the
world-line of my body, does a section of the world come to life as a
fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time. (Weyl)
For the universe, the two directions of time are indistinguishable, just as in space there is no up and down. (Boltzmann)
However, the Block Universe view is under challenge from within
physics, from theorists such as George Ellis, Lee Smolin and Chris
Fuchs, who believe that in leaving out these elements, physics is
missing something essential.
Thus there is a disagreement within physics about the proper aims
of physics, in the case of the study of time. We believe that this is a
clear case in which in order the resolve the disagreement within
physics, we need to step back from physics and consider the question of
'what belongs where' in the study of time from a broader
interdisciplinary perspective—informed, among other things, by
expertise from the psychology of temporal perception and from the
metaphysics of time.
The human experience of time has long been held to provide the
strongest evidence that the passage of time is objectively real, and
therefore the kind of thing that should be studied by physics. Thus
Eddington (1927), for example, concluded that "consciousness, looking
out through a private door, can learn by direct insight an underlying
character of the world which physical measurements do not betray."
Similarly, resistance on the part of some philosophers to the Block
Universe model is often motivated by salient characteristics of
experience. It is argued that time seems to pass and the present feels
qualitatively very different from the past and the future.
However, phenomenology may not be a direct reflection of reality.
Diverse evidence indicates that experience arises from the workings of
the brain. As a biologically evolved product, the brain has adaptive
representations of reality, which are usually simplifications and often
profoundly distorted, as in the case of visual illusions. Illusions
provide clues to the underlying representations and mechanisms
involved. In the last few decades, psychological and neuroscientific
research has revealed more and more temporal illusions. These illusions
can do much to undermine otherwise-strong feelings about the
correspondence between subjective and objective time.
This conference aims bring this knowledge from psychology together with
philosophy and physics, in the form of experts from all sides. We will
focus on the question Do We Need a Physics of 'Passage'?,
aiming to clarify the arguments on both sides of the case, and to reach
as much agreement as possible on an agenda for settling the issue, one
way or the other.
We want to do as much as we can to answer questions, not merely to
raise and discuss them. We want to move the whole debate forward. What
that progress needs, we believe, is clarity about the issues, and
access to expertise from all the disciplines that turn out to be
relevant, in the light of that insight. Our goal is to assemble that
expertise, and give it the kind of agenda that makes progress possible.
Organisation & sponsorship
This conference is generously supported by the John Templeton Foundation, as part of the project New Agendas for the Study of Time. It is organised by Alex Holcombe, Kristie Miller, Huw Price and Dean Rickles of the Centre for Time, University of Sydney, in conjunction with Professor George Ellis, University of Capetown.
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