It’s About TIME

NOTE: Event starts at 1:30pm

Intangible as it is there are many ways to describe Time’s properties: to sense it, to spend it, to curse it. There is the time it takes to sink 7 in the corner pocket, and the time even to imagine doing it. And while Kant insisted it is, along with space, a pure form of intuition, our will o’ the wisp grasp on time often doesn’t feel so very “intuitive,” certainly not in the everyday sense of that term. Everywhere, nowhere and always, we seem stuck, like Zeno and his impossibly immobile arrow, with an arrow of time that points but never moves.

Whence that arrow? A prevailing view among philosophers of physics is associated with David Albert. He provides an account as follows: the Universe is born in a state of freakishly low entropy; the Laws of Motion unfold from there, with Statistical Mechanics depicting how things move inexorably toward ever more probable states. The past is that direction where we find the artefacts of this evolution, the way dust settling in a room measures when it was last cleaned.  

Some take this view as incomplete, largely because it does not line up well with how we experience it, our “intuition” of time’s seamless passage. The division of time into units, even allowing for infinitesimal units, relies on a kind of mathematization of time; stepwise and discrete. Yet the flow of time feels continuous and unbroken. If anything, it is Time’s fluidity that captures our intuition. Writers, poets, and philosophers like Henri Bergson, express this “anti-scientistic” sentiment most strongly, including in Bergson’s famous encounter with Albert Einstein. Can anything meaningful still be gained by playing these two views off against each other? Can this lead to a synthesis that artists, psychologists, physicists, and philosophers can all agree with? Need they all agree?

These are the questions we hope to address, if Time allows (!), in this roundtable.