{"id":7603,"date":"2011-10-25T08:51:02","date_gmt":"2011-10-25T15:51:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/?p=7603"},"modified":"2011-10-25T08:51:02","modified_gmt":"2011-10-25T15:51:02","slug":"does-time-exist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2011\/10\/25\/does-time-exist\/","title":{"rendered":"Does Time Exist?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Videos from our Setting Time Aright conference<\/a> are gradually filtering online, courtesy of the Foundational Questions Institute<\/a>. Perhaps the very first question that should be asked, of course, is whether the subject of the conference actually exists. So we recruited two well-known partisans on this issue to hash things out. Tim Maudlin is a philosopher of science who has argued forcefully that time is real — and furthermore that the arrow of time is an intrinsic part of reality, not just a byproduct of the low-entropy Big Bang. (Crazy talk.) Julian Barbour is a physicist who is well known for arguing that time doesn’t really exist, we can happily eliminate it from all of our equations of physics. (Even crazier.)<\/p>\n

So we asked them to go at it, with a twist: here Tim defends the proposition that time doesn’t exist, while Julian argues that it is real. I was not the only one to conclude that these guys were just as good at arguing this side as the one they actually believed.<\/p>\n

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A Mock Debate on Time with JULIAN BARBOUR AND TIM MAUDLIN<\/div><\/div>
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