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The present moment is no longer of fundamental significance because, according to Einstein, the past and the future are as real as the present.
The time that actually passes for an object can’t depend on what coordinates we chose. And he showed that this invariant, internal time—proper time, as physicists call it—is the length of a curve in space-time.
in space-time, the longer the curve between two events, the less time passes on
The more you accelerate, the slower your proper time will pass. This effect is called time dilation.
This example shows that in special relativity the statement that two events happened at the same time is meaningless.
Once you agree that anything exists now elsewhere, even though you see it only later, you are forced to accept that everything in the universe exists now.
It sounds crazy, but the idea that the past and future exist in the same way as the present is compatible with all we currently know.
Because such creation stories can’t be falsified, we can’t tell if they are false, but being false is not their problem. The problem with these stories is that they are bad scientific explanations.
Scientific theories greatly simplify the stories we tell about the world, and that simplification embodies what we even mean by doing science.
the lack of progress in the foundations of physics. We both pointed the finger at physicists’ overreliance on reductionism, the idea that we gain deeper insights into nature by looking at shorter and shorter distances.
Is mathematics just a tool for describing the world, or is it the world?
The mathematics for his timeless structure of natural law is a fractal, a pattern of infinite variety in which the large scales resemble the smallest but never exactly repeat. On this fractal, our universe goes through eons that resemble one another but never quite repeat.
But the way I think about it is as a path in a state space, which means a space where each point is a configuration of the universe, so it’s a very high-dimensional space. And you plot the path of this multi-eon universe in this state space, and the theory tells you that the path is contained within a finite region of state space and it is a fractal. This is what you would expect if the universe as a whole is a chaotic dynamical system.
I personally find the second law of thermodynamics highly suspect and don’t think conclusions drawn from it today will remain valid when we understand better how gravity and quantum mechanics work.
Mica is soft for a mineral, and small particles passing through it—maybe from radioactive decays in surrounding rocks—can leave permanent tracks in it.
Memories in mica don’t fade like ours do. But, like us, mica has a memory of the past and not of the future. That means that at any particular moment, mica has information about what has happened but no information regarding what’s about to happen.
all known attempts to algorithmically reproduce natural laws are incompatible with the full symmetries of Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity.
It has the reputation of being a killjoy that constrains our hopes and dreams.
