What Is Time? One Researcher Shares His Exploration

Physicist Sean Carroll has built up a bit of a name for himself by tackling one of the age old questions that no one has been able to fully explain: What is time? Earlier this month he gave an interview with Wired where he tried to explain his theories in layman's terms. "I’m trying to understand how time works. And that’s a huge question that has lots of different aspects to it. A lot of them go back to Einstein and spacetime and how we measure time using clocks. But the particular aspect of time that I’m interested in is the arrow of time: the fact that the past is different from the future. We remember the past but we don’t remember the future. There are irreversible processes. There are things that happen, like you turn an egg into an omelet, but you can’t turn an omelet into an egg."

Comments

What Is Time?

[Monkey_Genius]

Time is an artificial construct of the Human mind that allows us to mark our pitiful existence in an uncaring universe.

Pidgeon dance

[TapeCutter]

"it's just something that comes to your mind and because of the noise ratio you only notice it later"

The human brain is very good at creating non-existant patterns in random noise. There is a classic phycological experiment (IIRC by Skinner), showing that pigeons do exactly same thing (ie: engage in superstisious behaviour).

In the experiment a feeder was set up so that it would drop a pellet of food randomly with a mean time between pellet drops of a few minutes. The feeder was placed in the pigeon cage for an hour or two at normal feeding times.

The hungry pigeon would just happen to make some random movement just before the pellet happened to drop. It then mentally connected that movement with food and would repeat it a few times in the hope another pellet would appear.

Occasionally it would make a different movement just before the pellet appaeared. It would then mentally connect this new movement with food and join the two movements together in the hope of getting more food. After a while the pigeon(s) had all created their own unique an complex dance that they would start endlessly performing whenever the dispenser was introduced to their cage.

The really interesting part is that the time it took to perform a fully developed pigeon dance was always equal to the mean time between random pellet drops, meaning the pidgeon was virtually garenteed to recieve the reward after one or two performances of it's dance. Connecting random dreams to future events after the fact is just one of the many human forms of the pigeon dance.