My basic idea is that time as such does not exist. There is no invisible river of time. But there are things that you could call instants of time, or 'Nows'. As we live, we seem to move through a succession of Nows, and the question is, what are they? They are arrangements of everything in the universe relative to each other in any moment, for example, now.
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I do think we are discovering the world, not inventing it. But John Wheeler sometimes seems to suggest that we create the universe. He thinks
that by insisting on finding a consistent description of it we conjure it up by a kind of conspiracy. He illustrates the idea by a variation of the game of twenty questions in which there is no object at the start of the questioning. Instead, each answer that is given must be consistent with all those already given. Eventually, there emerges some object that matches the answers.
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What I feel for myself is that by concentrating on the things that we know are in the world, it makes one think about the actual world more, and I would say cherish it and value it more, and perhaps take a more relaxed attitude toward life and sit back and enjoy it more. This is actually happening to me personally — maybe it's just because I'm getting older and don't want to miss things, but certainly I'm aware of savoring the moment more than I when I was young. And it's partly influenced by my idea that really the universe is static, and the only things that are real are Nows, in one of which we now are.
Some years ago, I heard Dame Janet Baker interviewed on radio. She was asked if she ever listened to her recordings and, if so, what were her favourites. She said she hardly ever listened to them. For her, every Now was so exciting and new, it was a great mistake to try to repeat one. In her singing, she made no attempt at all to recreate earlier performances and do the high points in the same way as the night before. Again and again she spoke with the deepest reverence of the Now and how it should be new and happen spontaneously. "The Now is what is real", she said. I thought it was the perfect artistic expression of how I see timeless quantum cosmology.
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I would love to show that the universe is as rich as it appears to us through our senses and not rather drab as it appears in science. For me one of the great miracles is colors, and different sounds and sensations.
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge60.html
On the Wheeler-DeWitt Equation: "The past is theory," he once wrote. "It has no existence except in the records of the present. We are participators, at the microscopic level, in making that past, as well as the present and the future." In effect, Dr. Wheeler's answer to Augustine is that we are collectively God and that we are always creating the universe.
http://www.tomcoyner.com/before_the_big_bang_there_was__.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Time
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Barbour
