Page 137 - Matter: The Other Name for Illusion

The Views Of Scientists On The Idea
That Time Is A Perception

Today it has been scientifically accepted that time is a concept that arises
from our making a definite sequential arrangement among movements and
changes. We will try to make this clearer by giving examples from those
thinkers and scientists who have established this view.
The physicist Julian Barbour caused a great stir in the scientific world with
his book entitled The End of Time in which he examined the ideas of
timelessness and eternity. He pointed out that the idea that time was a
perception was very difficult for many people to accept. In an interview with
Barbour reported in Discover magazine, these comments are made about time
being a perception:

"I still have trouble accepting it" he (Barbour) says. But then, common
sense has never been a reliable guide to understanding the universe –
physicists have been confounding our perceptions since Copernicus first
suggested that the sun does not revolve around Earth. After all, we don't
feel the slightest movement as the spinning Earth hurtles through the void
at some 67,000 miles per hour. Our sense of the passage of time, Barbour
argues, is just as wrongheaded as the credo of the Flat Earth Society. 40
As we can see above, this renowned physicist pointed out that any idea we
have of time being absolute is false, and that research done in modern physics
has confirmed this. Time is not absolute; it is a variously perceived,
subjective concept depending on events.
François Jacob, thinker, Nobel laureate and famous professor of genetics,
in his book entitled Le Jeu des Possibles (The Possible and the Actual) says this
about the possibility that time can move backwards:
Films played backwards make it possible for us to imagine a world in
which time flows backwards. A world in which milk separates itself from
the coffee and jumps out of the cup to reach the milk-pan; a world in
which light rays are emitted from the walls to be collected in a trap
(gravity center) instead of gushing out from a light source; a world in
which a stone slopes to the palm of a man by the astonishing cooperation
of innumerable drops of water which enable the stone to jump out of
water. Yet, in such a world in which time has such opposite features, the
processes of our brain and the way our memory compiles information,
would similarly be functioning backwards. The same is true for the past
and future and the world will appear to us exactly as it currently appears. 41

Time is a Perception Too 135