04-04-2010, 02:42 PM
It seems unlikely that we occupy a particularly privileged place in spacetime. If tiny particles can travel through time at the quantum level, and at the cosmic level, time is relative to the velocity of the observer, then it seems impossible to maintain the idea that there is a "present" that has any special status. I suspect the future exists in the same way up and down, left and right "exist," as fully formed dimensions.
Our evolution, however, has required only that we perceive time in a certain way, and thus, out concepts of existence carry a naive assumption about "the present" being the only real thing. There seems to be no reason this must be the case. We also all travel at approximately the same velocity, all the time, and are vastly larger than a subatomic particle, so we don't notice these time distorting effects. We just evolved assuming the present was fixed for everyone and everything.
However, the idea that one can use any of these effects to "prophecy" seems like complete nonsense to me. Nostradamus and the like are, for my money, nothing but poetic frauds. Their "hits" are a combination of rainbow statements, vague notions, lucky guesses and tautologies - and nobody is counting their misses.
Whether there is any useful way to predict the future, I really doubt. There are ways to make accurate localized predictions, or predictions about non-chaotic systems, within certain bounds of error. This is what physics is for. But the arrow of time follows the second law of thermodynamics (or is that the other way around?) and the future is less orderly than the present, confounding any rigorous attempt at prediction. To quote another of those poetic frauds, things fall apart; the center cannot hold.
-Jester
Our evolution, however, has required only that we perceive time in a certain way, and thus, out concepts of existence carry a naive assumption about "the present" being the only real thing. There seems to be no reason this must be the case. We also all travel at approximately the same velocity, all the time, and are vastly larger than a subatomic particle, so we don't notice these time distorting effects. We just evolved assuming the present was fixed for everyone and everything.
However, the idea that one can use any of these effects to "prophecy" seems like complete nonsense to me. Nostradamus and the like are, for my money, nothing but poetic frauds. Their "hits" are a combination of rainbow statements, vague notions, lucky guesses and tautologies - and nobody is counting their misses.
Whether there is any useful way to predict the future, I really doubt. There are ways to make accurate localized predictions, or predictions about non-chaotic systems, within certain bounds of error. This is what physics is for. But the arrow of time follows the second law of thermodynamics (or is that the other way around?) and the future is less orderly than the present, confounding any rigorous attempt at prediction. To quote another of those poetic frauds, things fall apart; the center cannot hold.
-Jester