The memories of time

I got a weird Idea the other day....I think I'm procrastinating way too much...But still, here it is.

What is time? Does it flow? From the future to the past? What is change? How do we perceive change?

Has the past ever existed? or just our memory of it? I mean, what if the past never actually changed, continuously until it transformed into the present ? A typical answer would be,: ''well, I was there, I remember those days, and I also remember how I got here, how the time flowed transforming those days into today.''...sure you do. But the only thing left, the only thing you can actually proof is ''your memory'' of it. What you really have is the memory of once being there, the memory of time flowing, the memory of transforming, the memory of change.

And If you thing about it, your memories of changes, even if they are in agreement with a collective memory of change, even if a mob of people say the were somewhere yesterday, and then the time flowed until the night past, and then the day, and now they are here; Even if the events in the past have some consequences that you can see today, that would only prove that some of the events happened in a previous time so causality holds. But you can't prove that time actually passed, and that the events transformed to be the consequences we perceive today.

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Putting that aside, and for the sake of this blog, I would like to express my deep admiration for Quantum Theory,         I would like to flatter it's accomplishments: Like the super-accurate predictions it makes, and the fact that it is the best model we have of our world. This being said, I would also like to express my unconformity with the lack of a deterministic subatomic model... It just bothers me. 

I believe (believe, have faith in, a personal wish...) that a deterministic model can, will and must be created. Apart from weather God intended Nature to be, I bet we can come up with a deterministic model of the subatomic world. Is not here yet, that's true, but after all when we look back at the past, we see only one outcome from measurements, somehow, one and only one of the many possibilities got chosen. This gives me the feeling that with a lot, a lot  a lot of effort, in a couple of centuries perhaps, we will encounter limits to our current theories and we could consider aiming our efforts to a deterministic theory of the microscopic phenomena.

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Having this little reference to my personal expectations, I will assume that such Super-duper Deterministic Theory, or STD by it's initials in Spanish (Super-duper Teoria Deterministica...lol) exists. This will mean that given that the Universe exists at some point in it's phase space (PhS), our STD automatically, and unequivocally, will draw a line in the PhS, both in the direction of growing total entropy, and decreasing total entropy. i.e. future and past respectively.

Now, I'm not saying we will be able to calculate this line, and predict with infinite accuracy the future or stuff, although, with this STD such ''dream'' might become a real possibility again, is not in my interest to address such problem here. now. I just want to emphasize the fact that we only inhabit a universe in where the past is a straight line, and the future according to our STD will also be one and only one line.

(I might be brave/stupid enough to argue that: what we see as our future, with many possible paths in the PhS, will turn out to be a unique line if seen from further ahead in time, ahead enough so will consider it part of the past.)

Given that such line exists, its easy to see how all the phenomena are linked by the laws of physics. I mean, one event at some time can be tracked back to it's cause (or towards the future to see it's consequences), and the path that unites both events is full of physical interactions that continuously join them.

Once you get this picture, once you see how everything exists in this line, and once you comprehend that this is possible since our STD exists (As simple as that), I can start talking about the cool stuff.

So far I just stated that the existence of this STD, directly implies a unique line that extends from the past to the future containing all the events in the history of the Universe regardless of weather time flows or nor (Notice that I haven't talked yet about weather we need time to move from one point on this line to another, just that such line exists.)

Now, the cool (a little biased when affirming so...I know...) stuff I was referring to is this: We are not flowing in this line from the past to the future, we are not perceiving time flowing nor anything changes in time; Instead:

We are confined to a 3D cross section of our 4D universe, we are stuck here, and our perception of change is nothing but our memories of the past. A memory that exists simply because an STD exists. Our idea of time arises as a necessary explanation of the continuous evolution of events. My point is that, if the outcomes of all our actions are described by this STD, if the line in the PhS extends unequivocally to the future, that future is a reality, an unavoidable path, and no matter how slow or fast time flows, it will eventually come. This can be putted in another way: The existence of the future does not depend on time, or time flow, it exists because our STD says so, it exists because according to the physical interactions described by our STD can not not exist, can not exists differently.

I guess what I'm saying is that if you look back at the past, you only have memories about it, and you assume (that's right! you assume!) time passed, and now you are where you are. As an example, you might remember turning on your PC, opening your browser, typing in google: Most boring Blog Ever, clicking on this one, start reading a bunch of mumbo-jumbo about time, and then reaching the end of the blog. And finally, you jump to the conclusion that time flowed, things changed, stuff moved, and then you got to the present. If you really think it trough, you can't prove that you were in some past time, and then, after time passed by, you got to the present, since all you have is the memories of being there. And even if, like I said before, a whole crowd of people can give faith of such thing, all they rely on is their memories too. 

We are stuck in a single point in the PhS-trajectory of our universe and our memories, those chemical bounds in our brains whose presence can also be tracked back (or forward) using the STD, are there only because there is no way there wound't be there. And at a certain point in this trajectory, as you would expect, only some of all the chemical bounds have been created, certainly not those ahead, only those in the past, which is nothing but the impossibility of foreseeing the future.

If you are getting serious about anything in science, you get to the point where you take a deep breath, gather some courage, and ask: what about it's falsifiability? can I attempt to prove my idea wrong, and fail? can I attempt to prove it at all?

Furthermore: what about the implications of this idea, what would be different if this idea was to be correct, and the old notion of time change wouldn't? What will be different? Is there any way of proving one right and one wrong?. 

Put in words of Ben Goldacre, the idea is just bad science. In words of Kuhn, outside the body of science. However, if you look at the normally accepted concept of time flow, you will see that it underlies every scientific concept, is well embedded into our scientific paradigm, just like absolute time and absolute space once did. And those were also bad science at the time, those were also not falsifiable concepts at the time. And even then, the lied inside every conjecture made in classical mechanics. All physical theories together, were not enough to offer any insight into this question; It was not until somebody carefully looked at the latest advances in Electrodynamics, which pointed directly to Einstein's well renowned conclusions, that these underling ideas became part of the arena, we were finally able to discern about the falsehood of an absolute time or space. 

So it took technological advances together with alternative explanations to clean that corner of our knowledge. These two are not here, not now. But who knows. Probably somebody trapped in a distant point in the PhS will remember learning about 21st century people struggling with stupid questions instead of planing a trip to Paris....they will also remember to have laughed at us. 

Cheers. I'm off to bed. It's 4 am....