Quotes About Time

Equações são mais importantes para mim, pois a política existe para o presente, ao passo que uma equação existe para a eternidade.

In other words, the theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time!

We must accept that time is not completely separate from and independent of space, but is combined with it to form an object called space-time.

If one believed that the universe had a beginning, the obvious question was what happened before the beginning? What was God doing before He made the world? Was He preparing Hell for people who asked such questions?

If time travel were possible we'd be inundated with tourist from the future.

Given the state of a system at some time, the laws of nature determine the probabilities of various futures and pasts rather than determining the future and past with certainty.

What most of these authors don't seem to have realized is that if you can travel faster than light, the theory of relativity implies you can also travel back in time, as the following limerick says: There was a young lady of Wight Who travelled much faster than light. She departed one day, In a relative way, And arrived on the previous night.

So some might imagine that I am an expert on time, although of course these days an expert is not necessarily a good thing to be.

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.

to explain how the early universe

Our very existence imposes rules determining from where and at what time it is possible for us to observe the universe. That is, the fact of our being restricts the characteristics of the kind of environment in which we find ourselves. That principle is called the weak anthropic principle.

To do research on the fundamental laws that govern the universe would require a commitment of time that most people don't have; the

Thus the possibility of time travel remains open.

why we should be in the expanding phase rather than the contracting phase? One can answer this on the basis of the weak anthropic principle. Conditions in the contracting phase would not be suitable for the existence of intelligent beings who could ask the question: why is disorder increasing in the same direction of time as that in which the universe is expanding?

events before the big bang can have no consequences, so they should not form part of a scientific model of the universe.

In Britain, people don't seem too worried about a possible end twenty billion years in the future. You can do quite a lot of eating, drinking and being merry before that.

Segunda ley de la termodinámica]. Según esta ley, el desorden o la entropía aumenta siempre con el tiempo. En otras palabras, se trata de una forma de la ley de Murphy: las cosas van a peor.

time and space are intertwined. It is something like adding a fourth direction of future/past to the usual left/right, forward/backward, and up/down. Physicists call this marriage of space and time "space-time," and because space-time includes a fourth direction, they call it the fourth dimension.

if you take a positivist position, as I do, questions about reality don't have any meaning. All one can ask is whether imaginary time is useful in formulating mathematical models that describe what we observe.

This is known as the twins paradox, but it is a paradox only if one has the idea of absolute time at the back of one's mind. In the theory of relativity there is no unique absolute time, but instead each individual has his own personal measure of time that depends on where he is and how he is moving.

Thus the possibility of time travel remains open. But I'm not going to bet on it. My opponent might have the unfair advantage of knowing the future.

time is not completely separate from and independent of space, but is combined with it to form an object called space-time.

It would be a poor sort of immortality, however, because any personal concept of time for the astronaut would almost certainly come to an end as he was torn apart inside the black hole!

I think this is an important subject for research, but one has to be careful not to be labelled a crank. If one made a research grant application to work on time travel it would be dismissed immediately. No government agency could afford to be seen to be spending public money on anything as way out as time travel. Instead one has to use technical terms like closed time-like curves, which are code for time travel.