|
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, Jeremy
Butterfield, *Craig Callender, Christoph
Hoerl, *Luciano Floridi, Rick
Grush, Nick Huggett, Jenann Ismael, James
Ladyman, Kristie Miller, *Wayne Myrvold,
*Oliver Pooley, Huw Price, Dean Rickles,
Don Ross.
Physicists: Julian Barbour, *Paul
Davies, Avshalom Elitzur, George Ellis,
Chris Fuchs, *Lee Smolin.
Psychologists & linguists: *Lera
Boroditsky, *Vyv Evans, Alex Holcombe,
*Teresa McCormack, Kia Nobre, Chris Sinha.
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.
|
