Videos from the Setting Time Aright conference are gradually filtering online, courtesy of the Foundational Questions Institute. Perhaps the very first question that should be asked, of course, is whether the subject of the conference actually exists.
Two well-known partisans were recruited on this issue to hash things out. Tim Maudlin is a philosopher of science who has argued forcefully that time is real – and furthermore that the arrow of time is an intrinsic part of reality, not just a byproduct of the low-entropy Big Bang.
Julian Barbour is a physicist who is well known for arguing that time doesn’t really exist, we can happily eliminate it from all of our equations of physics.
They were asked to debate the topic, but with a twist: here Maudlin defends the proposition that time doesn’t exist, while Barbour argues that it is real.
These guys were just as good at arguing their opposing view as the one they actually believed.
Filed under: Cosmology
