Is time an illusion?

This is my real first post in my blog and I am rather happy for it. At the beginning, I didn't know whether I want to start writing. I don't like writing anyways that much, it's too inaccurate. As my dear friend Thanassis said a couple of days ago, our thoughts, the essence of our very being, lies in a space of practically infinite dimensionality. Words are just another form of dimensionality reduction, a lossy compression, and a bad one in general. Let alone, that a new person has to unfold the reduced dimensions to his/her own infinite brain space.

Anyways, my first post will be related to time and whether it exists or not. I owe it to myself, as this topic was a hot one back in the days. I used to tease my friends(yes indeed, a very geeky kind of teasing) and tell them that there is no time. We used to discuss about these things with Mpampis, Manos, Jimmy -he was getting furious- and many others. Amongst others, there was one of the best professors that I had the pleasure to meet, Dr. Anastasios Delopoulos. The discussions were usually taking place under the infuence of the proper amount of alcohol, together with some delicacies that "Doksa"(Δόξα) and "Prigkipos"(Πρίγκηπος) had to offer in those cold evenings(well, now I am exaggerating a bit :P). Anyways, I owe it to myself, to my pals back in Greece and to the amazing time that we had discussing such geeky things.

I was intrigued to write about time as an illusion by an article that appears in the last issue (June 2010) of the "Scientific American". In this post, I will describe a bit my "theories", at least the ones that I had back then and were a mix of a little bit of everything. Without having study properly quantum-physics or quantum-mechanics, I am only using logic to analyze this topic. Therefore, I don't claim any scientific validity in what I am about to tell, for all that matters. Of course, at the end of the day, it might come that my argumentation and line of thοught is faulty. But then, what's wrong about being wrong? Let me be wrong. For all these reasons, this article is also labeled as pseudo-philosophy, or "ampelo-filosofia" as we call it in Greek (=wine-philosophy literally). Nonetheless, there will be a follow-up post after I read the article from Scientific American and I will comment on what I am writing here.

It has been proven that there is a quantum of time, the so called Planck time. Beyond this barrier, there is no point in measuring time. This made me think, what is time. We all consider time as a continuous variable. We can always say "Stop", and no matter what, the "time" we say stop makes sense. It's not a negative, it's not an imaginary number, it's always there, as if there is a universal clock ticking at all possible moments. Yet, there is a time quantum, there is a limit, so it's a discrete variable. What is it then?

One could say, that we consider time as continuous, but this is just due to our earthy, imperfect,  human sensors. It might be as well discrete, we just feel it continuous because the sampling ratio is just too frequent. Perhaps. Or perhaps, there is actually no time. Perhaps, what we feel as time is just change of static states. Note that this still feels like time, however it's one thing to say that we as matter live in this "time" jell and another to say that we artificially create that jell. What is true then?

I believe - it's not really a belief, merely a provocative and amusing statement that I like to discuss - that we are merely living in a space-continuum that has an energy value characterizing the current state. The spatial configuration as well as the matter distribution define that energy(in some manner). What we consider now as "time" is connected to the second law of thermodynamics. According to that law, entropy, which is proportional to the energy of the system, tends to increase in a system, no matter what. This second law forces the change of state. Time is just the second law of thermodynamics applied on universal scale, nothing more nothing less. Each new state is something like a frame in an MPEG video, only that this new frame has inherently bigger energy and thus entropy. To make it easier to understand what I mean, I include a figure showing that.

At this point, one might wonder if there is just only one new possible state - or "frame" - that deterministically and unavoidably emerges. Personally I believe not and I think this is the beauty of the whole approach. Apparently, there are infinite number of new options- just consider all the atoms of the universe, 1.5 × 10^82. Now imagine how many possible motions are there. So, given infinite number of new possible universe states of bigger entropy, there are infinite number of new outcomes. Which one should the universe "choose"? Probably this is nicely connected with the theory of the infinite universes. Each one of these new states "creates" a new universe. Most of these universes are rather short-living, they cannot survive for more than a few Planck time quanta. Also, most of the new states do not nicely succeed from the previous state, only a few ones that are still many can practically take place. It is a scientific fact that nature favors smoothness, therefore only these few states can practically occur (at least I haven't grew any third arm so far) or at least the improbable states can occur only very rarely. So, now that I am writing this post, it's highly probable to type the word "gargantuan", it's also very likely to go get some water, but is very unlikely to grow this third arm I was talking about and teleport to Mars. Our new diagram would look something like that:

All in all, this is what I think about time. I think time is just an illusion of changes of state. There are infinitely many possibilities, something which would explain the existence of infinite many universes.

I do not hope that anyone will read this post, but in that case, you deserve some congratulations for your patience. Also, a comment would be very welcome. Anyways, I will answer to this post with new data and ideas, after I read the article from the Scientific American.