Several physicists came to very ambiguous conclusions at once. In their opinion, time as such is not something real, it is just a human perception that helps us to distinguish between the present or the past, but at the same time it is very contradictory and does not agree with the so-called theory of states.
According to new ideas, the concept of time is just an illusion, consisting of human memories, and everything that ever was and will be happening right now. At the same time, most people do not even consider the concept of time, but there is nothing in the laws of physics to assert that it should move in the direction that we know.
The laws of physics are ultimately symmetrical, which means that time could easily move backwards as it moves forward. Some proponents of the 'big crisis' theory say that time will move in the opposite direction when the universe stops expanding and begins to contract.
The puzzle is that we interpret time in a forward direction. This made scientists ask the question – 'Why?'. Some of them have inevitably come to the conclusion that time is just human perception. They claim that there is a 'block universe' where time and space are linked and call it space-time.
The theory, which is supported by Einstein's theory of relativity, claims that space and time are part of a four-dimensional structure, where everything that happened has its own coordinates in space-time.
This would allow everything to be 'real' in the sense that the past and even the future still exist in space-time, making everything equally important and existing only in the moment. Here's what MIT physicist Max Tegmark reported for space.com:
'We can portray our reality as either a three-dimensional place where things happen over time, or as a four-dimensional place where nothing happens (blocking the universe) – and if this is indeed the second option, then change is indeed an illusion, because nothing changes. all in one – past, present, future. At any moment, we have the illusion that the past has already happened, and the future does not exist yet, and that everything is changing. '
'But all I have ever been aware of is the state of my brain right now. The only reason I feel like I have a past is because my brain contains memories. '
Julian Barbour, a British physicist and author of several books on the topic of time, also says that it doesn't matter when something happened or will be, everything happens 'now':
'As we live, we seem to be moving through a series of new times, but the question is, what are they? You can think of it as a landscape or a country. Every point in this country is' now ', and I call the country Platonia because it is timeless and created according to perfect mathematical rules.'
According to the scientist, what we perceive as the past is just an illusion formed in our brain.
'The only testimony you have about the past week is your memory. But memory now comes from the stable structure of neurons in your brain. The only evidence of the Earth's past is stones and fossils. But these are simply stable structures in the form of the arrangement of minerals that we are considering in the present. The point is, all we have are these records that exist at the moment. '
