Is time an illusion?

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19 January 2008

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From New Scientist Print Edition.Subscribeand get 4 free issues.

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Reposted from http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg19726391.500-is-time-an-illusion.htmlIT IS the invisible presence that governs your world. Trailing you like an unshakeable shadow,it ticks and tocks incessantly - you can sense it in your heartbeat, in the rising and setting of the sun, and in your daily rush to make meetings, trains and deadlines. It brings order to our lives through the categories of past, present and future.Time. There is nothing with which we are so familiar, and yet when you try to pin it down youfind only a relentless torrent of questions. Why does time appear to flow? What makes itdifferent from space? What exactly is it? It's enough to make your neurons misfire, then sizzleand smoke.You are not alone. Physicists have long struggled to understand what time really is. In fact,they are not even sure it exists at all. In their quest for deeper theories of the universe, someresearchers increasingly suspect that time is not a fundamental feature of nature, but rather an artefact of our perception. One group has recently found a way to do quantum physicswithout invoking time, which could help pave a path to a time-free "theory of everything". If correct, the approach suggests that time really is an illusion, and that we may need to rethinkhow the universe at large works.For decades, physicists have been searching for a quantum theory of gravity to reconcileEinstein's general relativity, which describes gravity at the largest scales, with quantummechanics, which describes the behaviour of particles at the tiniest scales. One reason it hasbeen so difficult to merge the two is that they are built on incompatible views of time. "I ammore and more convinced that the problem of time is key both to quantum gravity and toissues in cosmology," says Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics inWaterloo, Ontario, Canada.

According to general relativity, time is stitched together with space to form four-dimensionalspace-time. The passage of time is not absolute - no cosmic clock ticks away the hours of theuniverse. Instead, time differs from one frame of reference to the next, and what one observer experiences as time, another might experience as a mixture of time and space. For Einstein,time is a useful measure of things, but nothing special.Not so in quantum mechanics. Here time plays a key role, keeping track of the ever-changingprobabilities that define the microworld, which are encoded in the "wave function" of aquantum system. The clock by which the wave function evolves records not just the time inone particular frame of reference, but the absolute time that Einstein worked so hard totopple. So while relativity treats space and time as a whole, quantum mechanics splits theuniverse into two parts: the quantum system being observed and the classical world outside.In this fractured universe, a clock always remains outside the quantum system (see Diagrambelow).

Something has to give. The fact that the universe has no outside, by definition, suggests thatquantum mechanics will be the one to surrender - and to many, this suggests that time is notfundamental. In the 1990s, for instance, physicist Julian Barbour proposed that time must notexist in a quantum theory of the universe. All the same, physicists are loath to throw outquantum theory, as it has proven capable of extraordinarily accurate predictions. What they