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Do We Need a Physics of
‘Passage’?
10 — 14 December, 2012 :: Vineyard
Hotel & Spa, Capetown, South
Africa
Current list of participants (*=provisional)
Philosophers: David Albert,
Christophe Bouton, David Braddon-Mitchell,
Jeremy Butterfield, Christoph Hoerl,
*Luciano Floridi, Rick Grush, Nick
Huggett, Kristie Miller,
Wayne Myrvold, Huw Price, Dean Rickles,
Don Ross, Jos Uffink.
Physicists: Edward Anderson, Fay
Dowker, Avshalom Elitzur, George Ellis,
Daniele Oriti, Carlo Rovelli,
Rafael Sorkin.
Psychologists & linguists: Alex Holcombe, Teresa
McCormack, Kia Nobre, Chris Sinha.
Program
The final program (now with abstracts) is available here.
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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