300 | Solo: Does Time Exist?

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

A new year, and a new centennial -- 300 (regularly-numbered) episodes of Mindscape! Our tradition is to have a solo episode, and what better topic than the nature of time? Physicists and philosophers have so frequently suggested that time is some kind of illusion that it's become almost passé to believe that it might be fundamental. This is an issue where, despite the form of the question, physics has important things to say that most philosophers haven't yet caught up to. I will talk about ideas from quantum mechanics and quantum gravity that bear on the question of whether time is emergent or fundamental, and the implications of each possibility.

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Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/01/06/300-solo-does-time-exist/

Some of the papers discussed herein:

• Carroll (2008), "What If Time Really Exists?"
• Dyson, Kleban, and Susskind (2002), "Disturbing Implications of a Cosmological Constant."
• Albrecht and Sorbo (2004), "Can the Universe Afford Inflation?"
• Boddy, Carroll, and Pollack (2014), "De Sitter Space Without Dynamical Quantum Fluctuations."
• Lloyd (2016), "Decoherent Histories Approach to the Cosmological Measure Problem."
• Page and Wootters (1983), "Evolution Without Evolution: Dynamics Described by Stationary Observables."
• Albrecht (1994), "The Theory of Everything vs the Theory of Anything."
• Albrecht and Iglesias (2007), "The Clock Ambiguity and the Emergence of Physical Laws."

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