Smolin - Time Reborn PDF
Smolin - Time Reborn PDF
Smolin - Time Reborn PDF
Lee Smolin
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics,
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Planck CMB
PART II
Light:
Lee Smolin Time Reborn
Anaximander, On Nature
610 – 546 B.C. in Milet
Earth orbiting the Sun due to gravity
Preface: What isTime?
• All mysteries of physics come down to the nature of time.
• Time is the most pervasive aspect of everyday experience.
• Many (physicists and philosophers) believed that time is an illusion, which must
be transcended to perceive the real and the true (eternity and unchanging laws
of physics and nature)
Time must be a consequence of change governed by causality. Space and time are relational.
Galileo not only discovered how objects fall but also explained it.
Falling objects on Earth trace a parabola, a simple curve that is
the set of points equidistant from a point and a line.
Even if curves and numbers resemble objects in nature they are not the same as
natural objects, which exist for a limited time span. Mathematical objects seem
to exist in a separate timeless realm (of ideas after Plato). However, things and
humans live bounded in time and in contact with other things similarly bounded.
Newton:
The force that impels everything on Earth to fall
toward it is universal and acts also to pull the
planets toward the Sun and the Moon toward
the Earth: Gravity. All planetary motions are
consequences of a single law of motion.
Newtonian paradigm:
• What are the possible configurations of the system?
• What are the forces that the system is subject to?
The time-reversibility of the laws of physics removes time from the conception of nature!
6. Relativity and Timelessness I
Einstein assumed in 1905 that the speed of light is universal (nothing
can travel faster than light in vacuum and everybody measures that
same speed), and he utilized a strategy called operationalism: The
only meaningful way to define time is to stipulate how to measure it.
You must describe what a clock is and how it works.
The principle of relativity holds that speed (other than the speed of light) is a purely
relative quantity. There is no way to tell who moves and who is at rest.
The block universe describes the whole history of the universe as a mathematical
object which is timeless! It marries space and time in the 4-D Minkowski spacetime.
6. Relativity and Timelessness II
future time
Block-universe
or spacetime
Minkowski
diagram with
Region resting frame
causally (x,t), moving
disconnected frame (x′,t′),
from the space light cone, and
origin hyperbolas
marking out
time and space
with respect to
the origin,
t2-x2=1, for unit
tan φ= V/c past proper time.
6. Relativity and Timelessness III
H. Minkowski (mathematician, 1908):
„Henceforth space by itself, and time by
itself, are doomed to fade away into mere
shadows, and only a kind of union of the
photon two will preserve an independent reality.“
world 22. Jun 1864 in
line Kaunas, Litauen
H. Weyl (mathematician): „The objectice world simply is, it does not * 9. Nov 1885 in Elmshorn
happen. Only to the gaze of my conciousness, 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.“
J.R. Lucas (philospopher): „The block universe gives a deeply
inadequate view of time. It fails to account for the passage of
time, the pre-eminence of the present, the directedness of time
and the difference between the future and the past.“
Special relativity cannot be applied to the whole universe because it does not contain gravity!
6. Relativity and Timelessness IV
General relativity (Einstein, 1915) is based on the simplest of all scientific ideas, which is that
falling is a natural state.
All bodies fall with the same acceleration, regardless of their mass or any other properties!
Equivalence principle: When you fall freely you can not feel your motion!
Objects falling in
a gravitational
field move along
geodesics. gravity bends spacetime
In general relativity spacetime is not euclidic but gravity determines the metric of spacetime!
7. Quantum Cosmology and the
End of Time I
Many of us think the purpose of science is to describe how
nature really is – to give a picture of the world that we can
believe would be true, even were we not here to see it.
Previous arguments in the expulsion of time from the physicist‘s conception of nature:
There can be no fundamental symmetries in nature, as they arise from treating a subsystem
of the universe as if it were the only thing that existed. Symmetries are approximate, and
so are the laws of energy, momentum and angular momentum conservation!
The laws of nature are results of evolution, which implies that time is real!
11. The Evolution of Laws
The new cosmological theory: Should explain the choices of laws and initial conditions
and be testable by doable experiments and even vulnerable to falsification (Popper).
The theory in which laws evolve is called „cosmological natural selection“
(Smolin, 1992) and based on the theory of population biology. This requires:
• A space of parameters that vary among a population (genes in
biology, parameters and constants in physics);
• A mechanism of reproduction (quantum gravity does away with the
singularities where time begins and ends; black holes lead to the birth
of new universes) ;
• Variation, each time a new universe is created there is a small
random (mutation) change in the parameters (Λ, α, m) of the laws;
• Difference in fitness, which is a measure of how many black holes a
universe creates;
• Typicality, assuming that our universe is a typical member of the
population of universes.
Laws will change in time as the population evolves. The resulting parameter variations can
lead, e.g., to different carbon and oxygen abundances, different critical masses of neutron
stars, different numbers of black holes, or affect the rate of star formation!
12. Quantum Mechanics and the
Liberation of the Atom
Taking time as fundamental and real may help resolve the puzzle of making sense of
quantum theory, which is the most successful theory yet invented but is probabilistic
and seems incomplete, and it is a challenge to our attempts to comprehend the world.
Smolin believes that the strange features of quantum theory arise because it is a truncation
of an unknown cosmological theory, and reality of time makes a new formulation possible.
Could there be a deterministic cosmological theory that gives rise to quantum physics
whenever we isolate a subsystem and ignore the rest? One example is the hidden
variables theory by deBroglie (1927) and Bohm, which today is persued by few people.
In quantum mechanics a special status is assigned to time in the sense that it is treated
as a classical background parameter, external to the system itself. All measurements of
observables are made at certain instants of time and probabilities are only assigned to
such measurements. Special relativity has modified the notion of time. But from a fixed
Lorentz observer's viewpoint time remains a distinguished, external, global parameter. Bohm
If time is real, in the sense of a real present moment, there is a boundary all observers can
agree on between the real present and the not yet real future. This implies a physical
notion of simultaneity that includes distant events and, indeed, the whole universe! This
time can be called a preferred global time. Its choice is determined by how matter/energy
is distributed across the universe. The expansion rate can be taken for a universal clock.
15. The Emergence of Space I
Nothing is more commonplace than space, yet when we examine it closlely, nothing is
more mysterious. Space will likely turn out to be an illusion - of the sort that temperature
and pressure are - a usefull way to organize our impression of things on a large scale.
Relativity theory merged space with time, leading to the block-universe picture of a four-
dimensional reality. But the hypothesis of the reality of time frees time from this false
unification. Thus we can develope very different ideas of space (emergent) and time.
In past views, the universe is fated to end in a state of equilibrium called the heat death
of the universe, which would be without change and impulse toward organization. This
requires understanding the meaning of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics.
The simplest sign that our universe is not in thermal equilibrium is that there
is an arrow of time. The flow of time is marked by a strong asymmetry:
We feel and observe ourselves moving from the past into the future.
16. The Life and Death of the Universe III
• The universe is expanding and not contracting. We call this the cosmological
arrow of time.
• Small bits of the universe, left to themselves, tend to become more disordered in
time. We call this the thermodynamic arrow of time.
• People, animals, plants are born, grow up, and die. We call this the biological
arrow of time.
• We experience the time flowing from past to future. This is the experiential arrow
of time.
• Light that reaches our eyes gives us a view of the world in the past, not the
future. This is called the electromagnetic arrow of time.
• Our universe contains many black holes that formed late from the collapse of
massive stars. This irreversible accretion produced a lot of entropy. Why did the
universe not start of filled with them? There is a black-hole arrow of time.
• We call a universe that satisfies the principle of the indiscernables a Leibnizian universe.
• We call a universe in which structure and organization arise due to statistical fluctuation,
and then dissipate due to the tendency of entropy to increase, a Boltzmannian universe.
In a Leibnizian universe time is real, but in a Boltzmannian universe there are lots of
recurring moments, because all moments in near thermal equilibrium are roughly the
same. Our universe can not be of both type, so which is it? A Leibnizian universe will
be full of complexity that generates unique patterns and structures, from dust to life.
One component of our present Leibnizian universe is nearly in thermal equilibrium, the
cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is a 400000-years-old relic of the early universe.
17. Time Reborn from Heat and Light II
The most common objects in our universe are stars. A star is not in equilibrium with its
surroundings, and it is in a dynamical balance between the energy generated by nuclear
reactions in the core, which would blow it up, and gravity, which would collapse it.
The Sun is a system far from thermal equilibrium by a steady flow of energy through it. The
generated sunlight illuminates the surfaces of planets like Earth, driving them into a far-
from-equilibrium state of their own and supplying them with energy (light).
Flows of energy through open
but bounded systems tend to
drive them to states of higher
organization and create
patterns and structures; the
principle of self-organization
Coronal
mass
ejection
17. Time Reborn from Heat and Light III
Highly complex systems cannot be in equilibrium, because order is not random, and so high
entropy and high complexity cannot coexist! Self-organizing systems are stabilized by feed-
back mechanisms. Feedback processes regulate and channel flows of energy and matter.
Our present universe is characterized by structure and complexity on a wide range of scales,
From the organization of molecules in living cells to the organization of galaxies into clusters.
What we see when we look back is a universe evolving from equilibrium to complexity!
Evolving complexity means time! There has never been a static complex system.
The increasing organization of the Earth‘s biosphere is driven by flow of energy from the Sun.
A false-color composite of global oceanic and terrestrial photoautotroph
(chlorophyll) abundance, from September 1997 to August 2000
Systems held together by gravity behave strangely. Stars, stellar systems, galaxies, and black holes
are all anti-thermodynamic. They cool down when you put energy into them, and heat up if you
take it out. Thus they are unstable, which leads to the formation of patterns in space and time.
Galaxies and supernova Solar magnetic loops
The reason that the universe is interesting (alive and not dead) is threefold:
• Driven self-organization (acting over a myriad of subsystems and scales)
• Anti-thermodynamic nature of gravity (leading to instability and accretion)
• Fine-tuning of the fundamental laws (in nuclear and atomic physics)
18. Infinite Space or Infinite Time
We have seen that by embracing the reality of time we can comprehend why the universe
is full of structure and complexity. But how long can ist stay like that? Can equilibrium be
held off forever? This brings us to the most speculative subjects in modern cosmology:
the very far away and the far future.
By various reasons, it seems plausible to hypothesize that the universe is finite in spatial
extent and has an overall topology of a closed surface, like a sphere or a torus. Which
topology is correct depends on the average curvature of space and energy distribution.
Smolin concludes that models of the universe must be spatially closed without boundary.
The literature of cosmologist is filled with anxiety about the future. Perhaps in the long
term not only we all will die but so will the universe. We can reliably deduce the following:
• Eventually the galaxies will stop making stars (spiral galaxy makes around a star a year).
• The stars will burn out (as they all have finite lifetimes).
• Once the last stars have died, the universe is filled with relic baryonic matter, dark
matter, radiation, and dark energy (cosmological constant Λ of empty space).
The cosmological constant could decay to zero. The universe might become eternal and
static. Λ might become negative and the universe collapses, followed by a bounce (cyclic
models) and re-expansion. The bounce could be due to quantum gravity.
19. The Future of Time I
To make further progress in cosmology and fundamental physics we need a new
conception of a law of nature, valid on the cosmological scale, which avoids fallacies
and answers the questions that the old framework cannot address. Moreover, it must
be a scientifc theory, i.e., make falsifiable predictions for new, but doable, experiments.
The idea of a global time means that our experience of the time is passing is shared across
the universe, but of course it conflicts directly with the relativity of simultaneity of SR and GR.
19. The Future of Time II
The reality of time has important implications for the role of mathematics in physics.
What mathematics corresponds to are not the actual physical processes but only
records of them once completed – which are also, by definition, timeless. Yet the world
remains, always, a bundle of processes evolving in time, and only small parts of it are
representable as mathematical objects.
Because the Newtonian paradigm cannot be scaled up to include the universe as a whole,
there need be no mathematical object corresponding to the history of the entire universe.
Logic and mathematics capture aspects of nature, but never the whole of it. There are aspects
that will never be representable by mathematics and need not be stated mathematically.
An example is the theory of natural selection. Mathematics is only one language of science.
The links between experiments and the real world must be stated in ordinary language.
19. The Future of Time III
To illustrate the choices before us, we list some contrary assertions that we encountered:
We are accustomed to seeing ourselves as part from nature and our technologies as
impositions on the natural world. We have to understand the roots of the distinction
between the artifial and the natural. These have a great deal to do with time. The false idea
we have to put behind us is the idea that what is bound in time is an illusion and what is
timeless is real.
Science is one of the great human adventures. The growth of knowledge is the spine of any
telling of the human story. While the future of science is unpredictable the only certainty is
that we will know more in the future. For on every scale, from an atom‘s quantum state to
the cosmos, and at every level of complexity, the key is time, and the future is open.