The Trouble With Time - Michio Kaku, Avshalom Elitzur, Jimena

IAI Weekly

In our everyday experience, time is an inescapable backdrop against which events unfold, allowing us to sequence events and measure durations. Yet in the hundred years since Einstein's theory of general relativity, physics has had a radically different account. Time does not flow, there is no before and after. We are not born and we do not die. The entirety of spacetime is given at the outset of the universe. There is no cause and effect. Is this radical discrepancy with our everyday experience a threat to physics or a threat to our understanding of what it is to be alive?

Should we take seriously claims of physicists that everyday experience is an illusion? Or is it their model of the universe that is mistaken? Or are these two profoundly different accounts of time the product of frames of understanding that will always remain incompatible? Click on the link below to watch this debate for free.