SwanSong

Silent Conspiracy On Time

The Conspiracy of Silence: Einstein, Gödel, and the Nature of Time

“What is time then? If nobody asks me, I know; but if I were desirous to explain it to one that should ask me, plainly I do not know.” ― St. Augustine

“Time crumbles things; everything grows old under the power of Time and is forgotten through the lapse of Time.” ― Aristotle

Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) has been called the greatest logician since Aristotle.

“I went to the office just to have the privilege of walking home with Kurt Gödel.” ― Einstein

"Gödel was the only one of our colleagues who walked and talked on equal terms with Einstein." ― Freeman Dyson

Of course, what they talked in private is never authoritatively known but it is widespread assumption that they had long deep conversations on Physics and also the philosophical implications of it, or what Palle Yourgrau calls as “a conspiracy of silence” to kill, literally, “time”.

The Four-Dimensional Universe: Not Just a Relativistic Concept

Many people think Einstein's special theory of relativity introduced the idea of a four-dimensional universe. However, this is not correct. Einstein himself clarified this misconception in 1979:

"It is a widespread error that the special theory of relativity is supposed to have... first discovered or, at any rate, newly introduced the four-dimensionality of the physical continuum. This, of course, is not the case. Classical mechanics too, is based on the four-dimensional continuum of space and time."

In fact, this view existed over a century before Einstein. Lagrange wrote in his work Mécanique analytique in 1797:

"Mechanics may be regarded as a four-dimensional geometry, and mechanical analysis [i.e., analytical mechanics] as an extension of geometrical analysis."

How We Experience Time vs. How Time Actually Works

The only way most of us understand time is through our personal, individualistic (local) experience of it—our sense of moving through the universe moment by moment. Physics, however, has formalized this personal subjective experience into something objective called "proper time"—the time measured along a specific path through space-time (time-like world line).

One of Einstein's key insights was that there's no such thing as universal "now." As he put it: "Es gibt keine Gleichzeitigkeit distanter Ereignisse" (There is no such thing as simultaneity of distant events).

This is deeply counter-intuitive. It means that what counts as "now" depends on where you are and how you're moving. Two events that appear simultaneous to one observer may occur at different times for another observer. This contradicts our everyday experience of time completely.

Gödel's Strange Claim: Time Isn't Real

Kurt Gödel, the famous logician, went even further. He argued for the "unreality of change" based on the idea that "change only becomes possible through lapse of time." In his view, reality might consist of an infinity of layers of 'now' which come into existence one after another.

Two Ways to Think About Objects in Time

To understand Gödel's position, consider two different ways to think about how things exist through time:

    1. Endurance: Things exist whole and complete at different moments in time. You at age 5 and you now are the same complete object existing at different times.

    2. Perdurance: Things are spread out through time with different temporal parts, like a long, four-dimensional worm. You at age 5 is just an earlier time-slice of the whole four-dimensional you.

The perdurance view suggests that what we call "change" is just us observing different parts of a four-dimensional object. It's like looking at different slices of a loaf of bread and thinking the bread is "changing" when really we're just seeing different parts of the same whole object.

Gödel didn't like this relative view of time. He argued (1949a):

"A lapse of time, however, which is not a lapse in some definite way seems to me as absurd as a colored object which has no definite color."

But this analogy actually works against Gödel's point. Color perception depends on lighting conditions, surroundings, and the observer's visual system. A color-blind person and someone with normal vision will perceive colors differently. Similarly, time can be relative without being unreal.

Gödel's First Argument: Special Relativity Changes Time

Gödel claimed that special relativity discovered "a new and very astonishing property of time, namely the relativity of simultaneity, which to a large extent implies that of succession."

But special relativity didn't add a new feature to time—it removed an old one: the idea of absolute simultaneity. Before Einstein, physicists thought everyone in the universe could agree on what events happened at the same time. Einstein showed this was impossible.

The truly shocking discovery about time from relativity is this: the amount of time that passes between two events depends on the path you take between them. This is completely opposite to our intuition about time.

Here's where it gets weird: In space, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But in space-time, the longest time between two events is along the straightest path (called a geodesic). This is why in the famous twin paradox, the twin who travels away and comes back ages less than the twin who stays home.

This path-dependent proper time is absolute—all observers will agree on the time shown by a clock that travels a specific path along world lines (time-like fibrations of Minkowski space-time), regardless of how they measure it. But there's no way for moving observers to synchronize their clocks so that their proper (local) times coincide with a supposed universal (global) time.

In relativity, a local process is absolute and comes first while its division over space, and its evolution over time is relative and secondary to our chosen frame of reference.

In other words, space-time comes first, and how we slice it into space and time depends on our motion. This completely reverses our intuitive sense that time flows the same for everyone everywhere.

From Special to General Relativity: Time Gets Even Stranger

Special relativity changed our understanding of space and time from Galilei-Newtonian space-time to Minkowski space-time, but it still worked with a fixed background (space-time). General relativity took things further: space-time itself becomes dynamic, bending and warping in response to matter and energy. It is a background-independent theory.

Einstein realized some universes allowed by general relativity would make it impossible to define a global time for topological reasons. Even more strangely, some universes could contain closed time-like curves—paths through space-time that return to their starting point in time.

This is like how in a spherical world, you can walk straight ahead and eventually return to where you started. Except now it's happening with time, not just space. This means in some possible universes, you could travel into your own past.

Gödel's Second Argument: General Relativity Kills Time

Gödel's second argument against the reality of time comes from these strange possibilities in general relativity. He found solutions to Einstein's equations that allow closed time-like curves—paths where you could travel into your own past.

In such a universe, Gödel argued, time cannot be objectively real—that time, or more generally change, is an illusion arising from our special mode of perception:

"To assume an objective lapse of time would lose every justification in these worlds. For, in whatever way one may assume time to be lapsing, there will always exist possible observers to whose experienced lapse of time no objective lapse corresponds... But if the experience of the lapse of time can exist without an objective lapse of time, no reason can be given why an objective lapse of time should be assumed at all."

While our universe appears different from Gödel's model, he suggested there might be universes with time travel that look identical to ours from our perspective. If that's true, our universe might already be one where time is just an illusion.

Isn't it bizarre that whether time objectively exists or not could depend on how matter is distributed in the universe?

The Mind-Bending Paradoxes of Time Travel

Gödel's model allows for "closed causal loops"—chains of events that circle back on themselves. This creates the famous "Grandfather Paradox": if you travel back in time and prevent your grandparents from meeting, you would never be born, so you couldn't travel back to prevent their meeting.

For time travel to the past to be possible, there can only be three possibilities:

    1. Time travel is simply impossible (the universe prevents it somehow).

    2. Time travel is possible, but you cannot change anything in the past.

    3. Time travel creates new branching universes (the Many-Worlds Interpretation, MWI).

In David Deutsch's Many-Worlds theory, you would travel from the present of one branch of the universe into the past of a different branch.

But Gödel's puzzle deals with time travel within a single universe. In this case, we still don't have a convincing explanation for "temporal interdicts" and so, the temporal paradoxes remain unsolved.

Well, at least for now, whatever that “now” means…

More Science Posts

Take me Home