The illusion of time : past, present and future all exist together

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• published: 29 Aug 2013
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This video is from the documentary "The Fabric of The Cosmos - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/fabric-of-cosmos.html " for nonprofit educational purposes. ---- Please don't be misled by some comments below. This video does not say we can see future. It says Einstein's mathematical theory -which we later tested by clock experiment- also tells us that future and past always exist like the present! However, this does not necessitate pre-destination. "Now" is not deterministic as we know from Quantum Mechanics, so neither future nor past! Click https://youtu.be/CBrsWPCp_rs?t=199 to understand Quantum Mechanics. Wave functions evolve as time goes by. However, time does not collapse wave functions; observation collapses wave functions. Your wave function (which represents you) corresponding to your future has not collapsed yet. It will collapse in the future. As things in your life are probabilistic right now, they are probabilistic in the future too. Your past wave function has collapsed though. But your future one exists as a probability cloud in a sense. Here is a discussion I had with Avicenna10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrqmMoI0wks&lc;=z120wtri3qaccx5yr04cctj4fs3mwfwanyo0k&feature;=em-comments ---- Accuracy of atomic clocks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFyAQkIOkio ---- A comment from my exchange with axypolyas on why illusion of time does not require predestination: +axypolyas Not sure why you are bothered by all these; perhaps it is because of your choices in life. Let me tell you something which will bother you more. You might know already, however, anyone who is reading this exchange will highly likely not. The "scientific" description of you, me and everything is "energy". We don't know what energy is. We can quantify it, however, in essence what is it? we have no idea. And energy takes different forms, like elementary particles, which in turn become atoms, molecules and part of the end result is "us". We know energy is governed by laws and constants which naturally takes us to the inevitable conclusion: we are governed by those constants and laws. Before discovery of quantum physics, this would mean we are completely deterministic objects. Quantum physics showed us that we are not 100% deterministic. We are limited by laws but still we are unpredictable (we can calculate probabilities of what we might do next, but we don't know what we will do next until we do it). What do all these mean for us? Who are we? or what are we? Why do atoms and molecules pile up and "make" us? to live longer? All the atoms in our bodies are almost 15 billions of years old. What we call life is just another state in which they continue existing; nothing more; nothing special about it. How can we make sense of all these? Can we make sense of all these? If we are only, and only, condensed energy, there is no such a thing as making sense of things. There is only energy going through one state to another state "mindlessly". Pretty scary and dark explanation of our existence, is the pure scientific one. Science is only a tool; only a methodology we use to "make sense" of the universe. It does not tell us why things are the way they are. It tells us how we can construct theories and how we can use methods to test them, so that, we can do all these in an objective way. Science is an extremely limited way of looking into existence. Are my feelings objective? No. Are they scientific? No. Or, should I greet my neighbour every morning? Should I have an extra spoon of ice cream today? Or why do we do science? Do we have to do science? Say for our survival? Our survival has no meaning given particles making up our physical bodies existed for billions of years and they will continue to exist, perhaps longer. I will jump to my personal understanding, rather than "destroying ourselves" using science. To me, existence of The Creator makes more sense than anything else, including my own existence. The Creator, who logically must (and interestingly described as such in Islam which I have chosen as a path to follow) be All-Knowing, All-Powerful, capable of creating a free agent (my soul for example) with life, creating a universe in which those free agents can grow up, examine, study, learn, make sense of it... freely... is the only logical answer I can think of. We don't see the Creator, or souls, or anything which would "force" us to believe and accept. Creator made us free and as part of making that choice freely, we will always be bothered by our existence, but we will never find an answer. That will remain as a matter of choice and it has always been like that. "The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence." -- Albert Einstein