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Look, I know it’s a work day, and you’re at the office, but just trust me. You’re gonna want to be stoned for this. So just hop into the bathroom, take a few tugs at the chillum (I know you brought it to work today) and meet me back here.
I’ll wait.
Good. Baked? Me too. Now, let me blow ya mind.
Past, present, future? They might not matter anymore. They might all be the same thing. Time, according to this new theory, does not fly like an arrow or flow like a river. No, a professor at MIT (which, lest you forget, is smart university dot com), thinks we might be thinking about time completely wrong.
Shit’s about to get confusing, but that’s why we got high. To better comprehend what the fuck we are talking about here. From the Daily Mail:
A new theory claims that time does not move forward, but rather, everything in time is ever-present.
According to the theory, if we were to ‘look down’ upon the universe, we would see time spread out in all directions, just as we see space at the moment.
It’s the work of Dr Bradford Skow, a philosophy professor, who I’m assuming has smoked a joint or two in his time.
[He] favours a theory known as the ‘block universe’, which states that the past, present and future already exist.
Dr Skow said that he does not think events sail past us and vanish forever – instead, they exist in different parts of space-time.
So sort of like you could send a probe to Jupiter, you could send a probe to your childhood. Or to your adulthood.
‘The block universe theory says you’re spread out in time, something like the way you’re spread out in space,’ Dr Skow said.
‘We’re not located at a single time.’
It gets a little less insane when you get into the gritty details of it, which Skow does in his new book, Objective Becoming. From MIT News:
In “Objective Becoming,” Skow aims to convince readers that things could hardly be otherwise. To do so, he spends much of the book considering competing ideas about time — the ones that assume time does pass, or move by us in some way. “I was interested in seeing what kind of view of the universe you would have if you took these metaphors about the passage of time very, very seriously,” Skow says.
In the end, Skow finds these alternatives lacking, including one fairly popular view known as “presentism,” which holds that only events and objects in the present can be said to exist — and that Skow thinks defies the physics of spacetime.
Basically, the past always exists. And the future already exists.
You just travel to it. Kinda makes sense, depending on how high you are. But don’t worry. This won’t change anything.
In one sense, the block universe theory seems unthreatening to our intuitions: When Skow says time does not pass, he does not believe that nothing ever happens. Events occur, people age, and so on. “Things change,” he agrees.
However, Skow believes that events do not sail past us and vanish forever; they just exist in different parts of spacetime.
Wild.