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NewYeaarsEdition200912_june_july_2009.qxd 16/12/2009 2:32 PM Page 5 5 The Nature of Time 5 The Nature of Time The Nature of Time directions. front to back, top to bottom, and side through innumerable forests, bewildered and The Nature of Time Continued from Page 4 to side, so it also stretches back through the baffled, because the magic,beast he is looking Continued from Page 4 fourth dimension to the time when it was built, for is the horse he is riding.” [] and forward to its future destruction. Neither of the two observers would give In th mind of Einstein, time appeared to the “right” or “wrong” date for the explosion - become a static, if pliable, part of geometry. If both points of view would be valid. time is a fourth dimension, added on to the three Now, suppose two supernovas explode dimensions of space, then it may be wrong to and the flashes of both can be seen by our two say that time flows or passes. In this case “the astronomers. Can we tell if the two explosions passage of time” is an illusion created by the happened at exactly the same time? It appears human mind - in the same way a landscape that we cannot. Depending on their positions appears to move past us when we watch it from relative to the two stars, the two observers a car window. In reality, it i sour consciousness might even disagree over which exploded first. that moves along the dimension of time. On Zig it may seem that supernova A exploded before supernova B, while on Zag the explosion Radical Concepts of Time of B was seen years earlier than A. Thus, depending on the point of view, With the emergence of quantum physics one person’s future might be considered another and the detailed study of the behavior of minute person’s past. If no two events can ever be said subatomic particles, radical concepts of time to have happened at precisely the same time, it looked even more appealing. According to some makes no sense at all to talk of the present. As interpretations of quantum theory, there is no Einstein wrote: “The distinction between past, place for linear time in it at all. Some subatomic present, and future is an illusion.” particles regularly move from the future into the past instead of from the past into the future. Yet Time Stood Still? quantum physics and relativity are not the whole story. In many areas, “time’s arrow” still As soon as people cease being stationary points clearly from the past into the future along and start to move through Einstein’s universe, the one-way street. the consequences become very strange indeed. According to relativity theory - and it has been Long Road To Chaos confirmed by practical experiments - when you accelerate, for example when taking off in an In the familiar nursery rhyme “Humpty airplane, you watch goes slightly slower than Dumpty” the egg man fell off a wall and broke. the clock in the airport lounge you have just “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men” left. This effect is so small as to be almost could not reassemble him.This illustrates the undetectable at normal airspeeds, but it can be second law of thermodynamics: disorder, or measured at extreme speeds involved in space entropy, as ti is called, will always increase travel. through time. In the long run, all eggs are To cope with this warping of time in the broken. Time runs in one direction, from order universe, Einstein devised the notion of to disorder. “spacetime.” In spacetime, Einstein suggested, The difficulty in grasping the nature of time was a dimension like height, breadth, or time is perhaps that we are so totally immersed length. Every event or object could be situated in it. A fish in the ocean might have a similar at a point defined by the three dimensions of problem grasping the nature of water. As writer space and the “fourth dimension” of time. Just J.B. Priestly put it: “Pursuing Time, we are like as a house, for instance, spreads out in three a knight on a quest, condemned to wander