Time Reborn - Lee Smolin

One of the world’s most sophisticated thinkers of time within physics is Lee Smolin. Time Reborn is his prolonged argument for physics no longer thinking within its safe boxes. The opening pages are the finest expression of Physics’s debt to Newtonian thinking but also how it has constrained further progress by imposing ‘a particular framework of explanation’ on how Physics is conducted.

Returning to Liebniz, Smolin revisits the path not taken in the seventeenth century. His argument is that Newton’s way of thinking simplifies time as a dimension in a block universe. Thus the passage of time has been treated as an illusion within the world of physics. Even Einstein, who pulled time into a feature of that block universe and relativized it, didn’t go far enough: for Einstein’s relativity theory, ‘Time is just another dimension of space’ (xxii).

Smolin wants to correct this by arguing that not only is everything relational — radically so — but that this relationality is not governed by a stable set of unchanging laws. The laws of physics themselves are evolving and therefore only ever in a relative state of completeness.

Rather the laws of nature emerge from inside the universe and evolve in time with the universe they describe. It is even possible that, just as in biology, novel laws of physics may arise as regularities of new phenomena that emerge during the universe’s history. (xxvii)

Time is fundamental to this radical relationality as is space, but not in the way that our ‘metaphysical baggage’ (xxvii) would have it. Time and space both emerge from relationality, which is the movement of change:

… there can be no absolute time that ticks on blindly whatever happens in the world. Time must be a consequence of change; without alteration in the world, there can be no time. Philosophers say that time is relational—it is an aspect of relations, such as causality, that governs change. Similarly, space must be relational; indeed, every property of an object in nature must be a reflection of dynamical relations between it and other things in the world. (xxviii)

This video is a public lecture at the Perimeter Institute on Time Reborn.

This video below is an excellent and accessible lecture on Smolin’s larger views on time and physics.