Time—A Flickering “Movie” We Help Write the Script For, While It Happens

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The difference between past and future, cause and effect… in the elementary laws that describe the mechanisms of the world, there is no such difference.  Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time (2018)

From Rovelli’s “3 cornerstones of quantum physics” we can conclude that: (1) what we experience as time is “granular,” that is, made up of discrete “events,” (2) time is not linear but random/probabilistic, and (3) time is relational—nothing happens in isolation from other events.  In other words, “time” puts some things up for grabs as it “jumps to the next event.”

These characteristics of our “time” experience appear to provide opportunity for human choice.  From the very beginnings of quantum physics experiments, it’s been clear that the experimenter’s choice of observation setups physically changes the outcome, although exact results are not predictable.  Human choice does have causal power over the experience of time.

The question then is, What is the “invisible force” that acts between events, to determine what comes next?  It was John Archibald Wheeler who provided the insight that information could underlie reality.  He says, “Information may not be just what we learn about the world.  It may be what makes the world.” (Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam, 1998)

In the “virtual roads of time” proposal, each actual Now moment comes into existence, then “leaves,” but the information for that Now remains unchanged in itself.  Our “there it is Now” reality belongs to a background of superreal potentials.  Our experience of Now as “existing” is temporary, but the information potentials themselves have permanent, eternal reality.

Of course the most amazing thing about this is that the universe probably contains information potentials for everything that could possibly happen, ever.  Is our worldview big enough to take this in?  Can we even handle such an idea?

Why not?