Quotes About Time

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN NOTHING HAPPENS?

Time and space are real phenomena. But they are in no way absolute; they are not at all independent from what happens; they are not as different from the other substances of the world, as Newton had imagined them to be. We can think of a great Newtonian canvas on which the story of the world is drawn. But this canvas is made of the same stuff that everything else in the world is made of, the same substance that constitutes stone, light, and air: it is made of fields.

Our intuitive idea of the present, the ensemble of all events happening "now" in the universe, is an effect of our blindness: our inability to recognize small temporal intervals. An illegitimate extrapolation from our parochial experience.

Geçmi? ile gelecek aras?ndaki fark yaln?zca ?s? söz konusu oldu?u zaman vard?r. Gelece?i geçmi?ten ay?ran temel olay, ?s?n?n daha s?cak nesnelerden daha so?uk nesnelere geçmesidir.

We often say that causes precede effects and yet, in the elementary grammar of things, there is no distinction between "cause" and "effect."* There

The "present" does not exist in an objective sense any more than "here" exists objectively, but the microscopic interactions within the world prompt the emergence of temporal phenomena within a system (for instance, ourselves) that interacts only through the medium of a myriad of variables. Our

due to the limitations of our consciousness we perceive only a blurred vision of the world and live in time.

the world is made entirely from quantum fields. These fields do not live *in* spacetime; they live, so to speak, one on top of the other: fields on fields. The space and time that we perceiv in large scale are our blurred and approximage image of one of these quantum fields: the gravitational field (193).

Things are transformed one into another according to necessity, and render justice to one another according to the order of time. "According to the order of time" (???? ??? ??? ?????? ?????). From

Time sits at the center of the tangle of problems raised by the intersection of gravity, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics.

La fisica del XIX e XX secolo si è scontrata con queste domande ed è incappata in qualcosa di inaspettato e sconcertante, assai più del fatto, in fondo marginale, che il tempo passi a velocità diverse in luoghi diversi. La differenza fra passato e futuro - fra causa e effetto, fra memoria e speranza, fra rimorso e intenzione - nelle leggi elementari che descrivono i meccanismi del mondo non c'è.

The present is like the flatness of Earth: an illusion. We

I am this long ongoing novel. My life consists of it. It is memory that solders together the processes scattered across time of which we are made. In this sense, we exist in time. It is for this reason that I am the same person today as I was yesterday. To understand ourselves means to reflect on time. But to understand time, we need to reflect on ourselves.

The possibility of predicting something in the future obviously improves our chances of survival, and consequently, evolution has selected the neural structures that allow it. We are the result of this selection. This being between past and future events is central to our mental structure. This, for us, is the flow of time.

This is the flow of time familiar from our experience. It is inside there that it nestles. Inside of us. The utterly crucial presence of traces of the past in our neurons. Proust could not be more explicit on this matter. Writing in the first book, "Reality is formed only by memory" and memory in its turn is a collection of traces-an indirect product of the disordering of the world.

The difference between past and future, between cause and effect, between memory and hope, between regret and intention . . . in the elementary laws that describe the mechanisms of the world, there is no such difference.

Time is a strange thing. When we don't need it, it is nothing. Then suddenly, there is nothing else. It is everywhere around us. Also, within us. It seeps into our faces. It seeps into the mirror, runs through my temples. Between you and I it runs silently like an hourglass.

Only where there is heat is there a distinction between past and future.

Only where there is heat is there a distinction between past and future. Thoughts, for instance, unfold from the past to the future, not vice versa—and, in fact, thinking produces heat in our heads. . . .

The world described by the theory is thus further distanced from the one with which we are familiar. There is no longer space that "contains" the world, and there is no longer time "in which" events occur. There are only elementary processes wherein quanta of space and matter continually interact with one another.

We can go back to serenely immersing ourselves in time -in our finite time- to savoring the clear intensity of every fleeting and cherished moment of the brief circle of our existence.

The origin of time may be similar to that of heat: it comes from averages of many microscopic variables. Let's see this in detail.

first theory of relativity (known today as "special relativity"), the theory that elucidates how time does not pass identically for everyone:

A novel image of the world is taking shape: a world without space and without time. The space where the world "inhabits" and the time "along which" things evolve might soon disappear from our fundamental description of the physical world, in the same manner in which notions such as "the centre of the universe" have disappeared in the past.