Is Time Quantised? (Friday)
Academics have to be one of my favourite groups of people - they have the luxury of being mostly unconcerned with banalities and trivialities of life and hence can turn their minds to far more intriguing matters. My girlfriend and I were meeting her parents for dinner to celebrate her birthday the week before - a daunting prospect for many a Yesman, but couple in the fact that both are lecturers in Mathematics at Oxbridge* University and it takes on a whole new dimension.
We met at their local pub, where we were ushered to their table and after exchanging niceties and choosing our courses, John (the father) turned to me and asked "is time reversible?" Now, this isn't the first topic of conversation that springs to mind with most people I meet, but with John, this was merely an opening gambit. - Now this is a question most people have considered if they have watched any Red Dwarf**. So I waffled something about entropy and how in closed system disorder will always increase. Then he breaks into explaining how if you knew the exact position and momentum of every particle in the room at one moment, would it be possible to predict how the room would look ten minutes in the future or ten minutes in the past. It turns out that it would be easier to predict the future than the past. He used the example of his glass of wine, which he swirled and left to settle on the table. “Now if you were to take a snap shot of the wine glass in it current settled state, would it be possible to work out that the wine had been sloshing vigorously around its glass not more than a minute previously?” With that he dismissed all cosmology and predictions about the origin of the universe as bunkum.
Now I couldn't let him get away with this and having sunk a few of these liquid models of the universe myself, came back with, "but if you took into account your hand which caused the wine to swill in the first place, surely you could predict that the two had interacted in the past?" To which he replied, "Exactly - so when considering the wine glass or the universe it isn't possible to take the isolated system there is always an infinite system beyond what you take account of in your model. Now, let me ask you something else: Is time quantised?" At which point I sank deeper into my chair and let the madness consume me.
* wherever the hell that is
** Easily the greatest Sci-Fi comedy ever written
We met at their local pub, where we were ushered to their table and after exchanging niceties and choosing our courses, John (the father) turned to me and asked "is time reversible?" Now, this isn't the first topic of conversation that springs to mind with most people I meet, but with John, this was merely an opening gambit. - Now this is a question most people have considered if they have watched any Red Dwarf**. So I waffled something about entropy and how in closed system disorder will always increase. Then he breaks into explaining how if you knew the exact position and momentum of every particle in the room at one moment, would it be possible to predict how the room would look ten minutes in the future or ten minutes in the past. It turns out that it would be easier to predict the future than the past. He used the example of his glass of wine, which he swirled and left to settle on the table. “Now if you were to take a snap shot of the wine glass in it current settled state, would it be possible to work out that the wine had been sloshing vigorously around its glass not more than a minute previously?” With that he dismissed all cosmology and predictions about the origin of the universe as bunkum.
Now I couldn't let him get away with this and having sunk a few of these liquid models of the universe myself, came back with, "but if you took into account your hand which caused the wine to swill in the first place, surely you could predict that the two had interacted in the past?" To which he replied, "Exactly - so when considering the wine glass or the universe it isn't possible to take the isolated system there is always an infinite system beyond what you take account of in your model. Now, let me ask you something else: Is time quantised?" At which point I sank deeper into my chair and let the madness consume me.
* wherever the hell that is
** Easily the greatest Sci-Fi comedy ever written
posted by Yesman at 10:26 am
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