I just finished reading Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, and was intrigued by the theory of the way time works. Time, the book suggests, does not really flow - it just is. Past and future are just as real as the present, and our perception of before-and-after are only a product of biological limitations.
Are there cosmological, ontological, or other-ogical grounds to make this theory plausible? And if so, how can causality work if the passage of time is an illusion?
Well, if all time exists at once, and you picture the continuum as graphing as the inside surface of a sphere, your corporeal self can (unlike Billy Pilgrim) only occupy one coordinate at a time, and must remain on that surface to travel to any other point on that surface. The fact that you must travel across this time surface implies that you must accept what events you must span from point to point, and thus causality is preserved because there are only unbroken sequences of events that take you from one point in time to another.
So, all time can exist at once, but you can only travel the surface from coordinate to adjacent coordinate.
Seems simple enough.
I see that I wrote too quickly. Billy Pilgrim, as with you, can only occupy one coordinate at a time; his trick is that he can leave the surface to bounce around inside the sphere.
The idea is that our three dimensional universe is a cross-section of a four-dimensional solid universe, and the only thing that moves is the cross-section itself, givng an illusion of change
something similar to the way slices of a body tomograph change as you scan up the body.
This is an old idea, I think it predates Einstein- anyone know who first came up with it?
But of course the fact that Pilgrim and the Tralfamadorians can move outside of the system implies even higher dimensions and degrees of freedom- which Vonnegut ignores, thank god.
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
Thanks, folks.
I guess another good and important question would be: what evidence is there - if any exists - that this model of time doesn’t represent reality?
this is a very old idea called ‘determinism’ and it it was a popular idea among scientists after Newton formulated his deterministic laws. However in the age quantum mechanics we find that the fundamental laws of physics appear to be probablistic and therefore non-determinstic. (I know someone will say that quatum mechanics is detirministic but it’s not, only the probabilties in quantum mechanics are deterministic).