A New Theory of Time – Lee Smolin (2013) [video] | Hacker News Reader

A New Theory of Time – Lee Smolin (2013) [video]

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36 pointstux196814 comments

Right off the bat the professor himself admits this is a philosophical work, it's not scientific. And in fact, the more he explains about it the clearer that notion becomes. This "theory" is intended to fix a perceived problem with philosophy and theology, not to achieve any kind of scientific progress. There are several points in this presentation where I feel our current scientific understanding of the universe is being grossly misrepresented.

At best you could view this as an effort to build a bridge between those two worlds, but I've yet to see an instance where such an intention resulted in something that remained scientifically valid. This gap is exactly as wide as the difference between the willingness to see nature as it is on the one hand, and the need to reserve a special corner for humans on the other hand.

I'd imagine philosophers object to the characterization, but my guess is very few scientists would argue that this work is intended to advance cosmology or indeed physics as a discipline.

> this is a philosophical work, it's not scientific

BTW, logically and historically all science is philosophy and vice versa. The special branches of science are philosophies limited to certain areas unified by the all-encompassing concept of rationality.

No. While historically this has been true during the pre-scientific era, the terms "philosophy" and "science" have diverged towards their specific modern meanings since the 17th century.

Both are grounded in rationality; that's not specific to just science. That's not how you define Science. Science is defined as a process of systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, leading to the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses --things that the more abstract field of Philosophy is not concerned with.

I think that's true if you're talking about a university class, and most of the people who are associated with philosophy are not scientists, but I also think it's important to acknowledge that science is only valid because of epistemological assumptions we arrived at through reasoning. I would be even be comfortable saying that science is an experimentally-focused branch of epistemology. Denying the relationship undermines the validity of the scientific method. Without the connection, scientific assumptions become just as valid as any arbitrary prophetic system of belief. Here's a helpful definition of philosophy from Wikipedia:

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with reality, existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language.[1][2] Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational argument.[3] In more casual speech, by extension, "philosophy" can refer to "the most basic beliefs, concepts, and attitudes of an individual or group"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy

He argues that time is constant, that natural laws vary within time and space, and that this leads to mean our existence cannot be calculated or precisely described by a set of mathematical expressions because the constants we would use to describe the future are not constant, but rather another set of variables.

I can't see how this makes the future any less knowable[1]. It just adds more state.

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[1] Obviously, we can't predict the future as we haven't the resources or the current state of everything. Naturalism just states that were we to have them, we could predict the future.

If laws change, there are causes to these changes that are tied to other laws. Indeed it add more states, and one more layer of laws as I understand it.

English is not my native language and I'm left wondering. Does he talk about the why he thinks the laws could change ? It sounded to me like a vague hypothesis but I'd love to understand better.

If I follow my own musing after watching this I would say time could be the path of least information in an isotropic adimensional space. The axis or path along which compression is the easiest. This would explain nicely why how our brain handles it in such a particular way. If Lee Smolin is wrong it would be the path along which energy cannot be absorbed and entropy can't increase as state relationships are static. Something like a visible effect of the strongest possible force. This could be a simple definition of time. Sadly I'm a layman and most probably completely off the mark.

Why is it neccessary that there would be causes to these changes?

What if the changes to the constants are random?

I try to be open-minded but I have a very hard time believing in acausal events. Saying change can happen from nothing is like saying that energy can appear from nothing.

If a law changes, predictions made prior to the change are invalidated. Any meta-laws describing how laws change would be susceptible to this as well.

I think the idea is that, were we to have the state of everything at a moment, the laws we would use to predict the state at the next moment would be embedded within the state we had captured initially and so the prediction for the next state would have to include the state-change for the laws, for which we would need meta-laws to describe that change, which themselves would need to be embedded in the initial state, ad infinitum.

I think the only interesting idea to draw from this is that if laws change over space and time, all predictions are, at best, only probabilistic if the changes are continuous over space/time.

So I watched the whole thing and only understand parts of it, but is his main theory that the laws of physics which were previously thought to be unchanging may indeed change over time and that itself is the proof that the universe is temporal?

That appears to be it. The talk struck me as a philosophical consideration on a traditionally young-earth-creationist viewpoint. The idea being that physical laws and constants, namely the speed of light, change over time.

While the scientific portion of the suggestion lacks merit, considering the hypotheticals is certainly interesting.

I thought time, at the bare iron of the universe, was the slow but sure thermodynamic change into a state of pure information. What's he talking about? Time as it relates to relativistic theories?

Is it just me or has HN become less rigorous and scientific and more into sensationalistic pablum in the last week or two?

Bollocks.

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