Time is eternal, time is an illusion
Alan Moore, Carlo Rovelli, and John Higgs on the strangeness of time.
This is part of an ongoing series on the philosophy and ideas of Alan Moore. To see the rest of it, click here.
At the beginning of
’ delightful history of the 20th century, Stranger Than We Can Imagine, he talks about the moment in the early 1900s when scientists believed that they’d basically learned everything worth learning. He quotes Lord Kelvin, who in 1900 allegedly said1:There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.
This was, of course, right on the eve of Albert Einstein’s publication of the theory of relativity, which would turn the field of physics upside down and create a whole new host of questions that have not, to this day, been answered. Moreover, relativity and, shortly after it, quantum physics, made the universe appear not only far more bizarre than we’d ever imagined it, but possibly inconceivable to the human mind. Higgs’ book title comes from a (possibly apocryphal) quote by astrophysicist Arthur Eddington:
Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.
The thesis of Higgs’ book is that the 20th century can be viewed as a series of similar up-endings of longstanding institutions: Art, which had long been realistic or at least impressionistic, suddenly took wild turns toward surrealism and Dada. Nature, which had long sat beneath mankind in the Great Chain of Being, a vast and endless well to be exploited for our aims, suddenly started collapsing under the weight of capitalism. Politics took terrifying totalitarian turns, philosophy veered into godlessness and nihilism, sexual activities that had been taboo and transgressive became common and even mainstream. And so on.
It’s a fabulous book and is the first non-Moore work I would recommend to anyone who is enjoying this course. But for today, we’re just going to discuss one revolution: our understanding of time.
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