Time is a metaphor, a human construct that we’ve devised to explain how the quantum entanglements affect us. It’s like how we use color as a way to describe how we sense a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum with our optical organs. Neither time nor color are “real” in the sense that you can find a physical atom of it, but still useful language to describe how we interact with the world around us.
Reminds me of Hawking’s quote, never read the book so might be out of context, but I remember hearing it and thinking
This might suggest that the so-called imaginary time is really the real time, and that what we call real time is just a figment of our imaginations. In real time, the universe has a beginning and an end at singularities that form a boundary to space-time and at which the laws of science break down. But in imaginary time, there are no singularities or boundaries. So maybe what we call imaginary time is really more basic, and what we call real is just an idea that we invent to help us describe what we think the universe is like. But according to the approach I described in Chapter 1, a scientific theory is just a mathematical model we make to describe our observations: it exists only in our minds. So it is meaningless to ask: which is real, “real” or “imaginary” time? It is simply a matter of which is the more useful description.
― Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
I got to that chapter in the book (Chapter 10) and had to set the book down for a while. Not because it blew my mind or “expanded my understanding of reality”, but because I though I might understand what he meant and knew that absolutely couldn’t be the case.
The first 6 - 8 chapters are genuinely a great read, do a great job explaining all of the ‘basics’ of black holes at a level that most people can understand.
inhales
Time is a metaphor, a human construct that we’ve devised to explain how the quantum entanglements affect us. It’s like how we use color as a way to describe how we sense a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum with our optical organs. Neither time nor color are “real” in the sense that you can find a physical atom of it, but still useful language to describe how we interact with the world around us.
Reminds me of Hawking’s quote, never read the book so might be out of context, but I remember hearing it and thinking
I got to that chapter in the book (Chapter 10) and had to set the book down for a while. Not because it blew my mind or “expanded my understanding of reality”, but because I though I might understand what he meant and knew that absolutely couldn’t be the case.
The first 6 - 8 chapters are genuinely a great read, do a great job explaining all of the ‘basics’ of black holes at a level that most people can understand.
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