This year's FQXi conference, incorporating a cruise from Bergen, Norway, around the Scandinavian coastline to Copenhagen, Denmark, is now firmly underway. (At about 2am last night, I began to contemplate the irony of setting a conference aimed at "Setting Time ARIGHT" on a ship--the National Geographic Explorer--that was tipping, rolling and pitching and knocking physicists over.)
The meeting has ambitious goals. Under the umbrella of finding the truth about the Nature of Time (no small feat as those that followed FQXi's essay contest on time, a couple of years ago, and the latest grant rounds know), there are related sessions aiming to uncover the truth about the Origin of Life, Existence, Memory, Universe, Choice, the Multiverse, Quantization, Complexity, oh... and finally, the truth about Truth itself.
Unlikeprevious FQXi conferences , this meeting brings together evolutionary biologists, cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists, as well as the usual physics and philosophy suspects. The opening panel, led by co-organizer Sean Carroll (who has had a thing or two to say about the reality of time ("[fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/318 ]it's real and underappreciated" and it's arrow in the past) set out some of the questions to be answered at the meeting, including:
1) Is time real?
2) Why does time have a direction?
3) How does complexity evolve?
Your own answers to those questions are, of course, welcome below.
From the physicists' point of view, time's arrow is related to an increase in entropy in the universe, though Carroll noted that the matter open for debate is whether that is _all_ that time's arrow is, and also begs the question: Why did the universe start off in such an unlikely low entropy state in the first place? (Read more about Carroll's answers, which brings the idea of the multiverse and the possibility that time could run in different directions in other universes, in Miriam Frankel's article, "Time and the Multiverse.")
Setting the tone of the rest meeting, these opening questions were themselves immediately questioned. Philosopher of physics, David Albert asked what gives anyone the right to say that the world started out in a highly improbable state. "If you put it that way, there's a puzzle about where you get your ideas of what is likely and what is unlikely." You can't have got the idea that the state of the world is unlikely by looking at the world. Probability, he argued must come from what the world is like, not just from logical considerations.
Is time real? Julian Barbour is famous (winning the FQXi essay contest) for saying that time doesn't exist (quoting Mach's view that it is "utterly impossible" to measure the change of things with time because time is an abstraction defined by looking at the change of things). He describes time as a series of instants or snapshots, noting that people don't experience the flow between these instants.
Yet, even if Barbour is correct, and time does not exist on the fundamental physical level, humans still _feel_ that time flows. Why? As a taster of things to come Kathleen McDermott talked about how as a cognitive psychologist she has been looking for different neural patterns using fMRI associated with the mind projecting to the past (remembering) versus projecting to the future (imagining what might happen) and found a surprising result: Although, McDermott note, it feels different when we carry out the two thought processes, and we rarely confuse our memories and our thoughts of the future when we are thinking, her team have not found little difference, seen in fMRI, between remembering the past and imaging the future.
I'll blog about the Memory session in more detail later on (along with the some of the other talks from various sessions)and powerpoints of the talks and video will follow soon. Also stay tuned for live stream from the public event on the Nature of Time, from Copenhagen. But for now, this looks to be an exciting meeting (and not because it gives us the opportunity to admire Slartibartfast's handiwork for ourselves).
(All photos courtesy of Olaf Dreyer.)