What is time? Part 1
What is time - I don’t know. But it’s time to start to know.
Until one is committed, there is always hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and endless plans: That the moment one commits oneself, then providence moves, too.I’ll begin this blog with an analysis of the paper by Alain Connes and Carlo Rovelli: Von Neumann Algebra Automorphisms and Time-Thermodynamics Relation in General Covariant Quantum Theories, published in Class.Quant.Grav. 11 (1994) 2899-2918. The paper is available on the web in PDF form from arxiv.org. The title may suggest that the paper is rather technical and incomprehensible for a general public. Yet I am going to make my comments on the paper as comprehensible as possible. Here is the claim made by the authors:All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one?s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would come his way.
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it! Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it and the work will be completed.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
[…]a basic open problem is to understand how the physical time flow that characterizes the world in which we live may emerge from the fundamental “timeless” general covariant quantum field theory [9]. In this paper, we consider a radical solution to this problem. […]I will analyse the paper in some details pointing out its weaknesses, those that I see and that I consider important. The reason for my criticism is twofold. First of all the subject is important - therefore to get to the truth of the subject is important. Second, the authors are famous (especially Alain Connes) and there is a double standard in the community of professional scientists: those who just begin their adventure with science are criticised for every mistake they make, while those who are “famous” are being forgiven for any nonsens or even stupidity they can write or say. A typical example is Albert Einstein. You can find statements by serious physicists that his years devoted to his Unified Field Theory consisted either of plagiarizing other physicists’ work, or making errors after errors, neglecting achievements of quantum theory, and trying to stop the progess of physics. And yet this information and these opinions are not as easily available to the general public as apologetic and uncritical stories are. [Note: For a good and deep overview see On the History of Unified Field Theories by Hubert Goenner ]
