Abstract
Here I summarize the foregoing arguments and discuss their implications for our overall conception of time and its passing. The idea that we “experience” global nows and their passing, I have argued, is simply unfounded. Time flow is a local phenomenon: it is the becoming of events out of those in their recent past, and not tied to an advancing global now.
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- 1.
Thus Smolin writes: “Unless we want to retreat to a kind of event or observer solipsism in which what is real is relative to observers or events, we need a real and global notion of the present” (Unger and Smolin 2015, 418). Both authors subscribe to a presentist conception according to which “all that is real is real in a present moment which is one of a series of moments” (Unger and Smolin 2015, 361 and 415) .
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According to Smolin, “we need an objective distinction among past, present, and future to be able to assert that there are no certain facts of the matter about the future” (Unger and Smolin 2015, 522) .
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Oliver Pooley advocates a similar perspectival view in (Pooley 2013), arguing that “it is simply not plausible to take as absolute those facts that correspond to the perspective of a space-time region that is both spatially as well as temporally local” (357). As a criticism of Smolin, the accusation of absolutism is of course highly ironic, given Smolin’s oft-stated commitment to a through-going relationalism (see, e.g., Unger and Smolin 2015, 355–356).
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As we have seen, all these contentions are made by Carlo Rovelli in his (2018). Although he grants that a unique quantity “time” in the equations of fundamental physics “does not imply a world that is frozen and immobile” (96), and talks freely of time passing locally at different speeds (194), he insists that rates of flow are purely relative (15–17, 117–120), that time’s passing asymmetrically from past to future is only trick of (human) perspective (194), that time is dispensable in the description of the world (117–18), and that “in the elementary grammar of the world there is neither space nor time” (195).
References
Pooley, Oliver. 2013. Relativity, the Open Future, and the Passage of Time. In Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. cxiii, Part 3.
Rovelli, Carlo. 2018. The Order of Time. New York: Riverhead Books.
Unger, Roberto Mangabeira, and Lee Smolin. 2015. The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Arthur, R.T.W. (2019). Conclusion. In: The Reality of Time Flow. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15948-1_9
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