The time evolution appears to humans as a flow, subject to our free-will. The past appears to be frozen forever, and the future seems open to various possibilities. This post compares this view, of Evolving Block Universe, due to Professor George Ellis, with the registry approach of Smooth Quantum Mechanics.
Registry and Evolving Block Universe
The block view and the time evolution view are not as incompatible as they may look at a first sight. We can recover the time evolution by watching the entropy distribution between the events of the block world, and the causal co-relations between them. I would like to compare the registry time evolution with the Evolving Block Universe of George Ellis. Professor Ellis proposes an evolving block universe, perhaps the most credible proposed so far. He explains that the quantum phenomena (in the standard indeterministic interpretation of QM) should have gravitational effects. Consequently, they must change the spacetime. I agree with this argument. Further, he details a theory in which the time flows, evolves, in a sort of presentist way, and the past, which already happened, is “archived” in a block universe. The block universe increases with time, as new “presents” adds to it. The future is not decided yet, and as it happens, it becomes present, and then it is archived. This view is well elaborated, and reflects well our feelings of time flow, free-will, carved in stone past, and open future. On the other hand, I do not agree with Professor Ellis that QM proves the indeterminism. Even so, assuming the indeterminism valid, this doesn’t eliminate the possibility of the standard block view.
Perhaps the most important difficulty of such an Evolving Block Universe is the possibility, offered by QM, of deciding the past events chronologically after they took place. This implies that we have to wait to archive the passed times. Moreover, it is possible to never be able to determine the past completely. Consider Wheeler’s delayed choice experiment, with the photon emitted by a distant star. The observer watching the star will decide whether to measure the “both ways”, or the “which way”. Her decision affects the past history of the observed photon, hence of the observed star. Of course, it is unlikely that she affected the star’s state in a significant way, but she affected it at least in a small way. Until the observation, the photon, hence the star (by entanglement), was in an undefined state. Assume now that the photon is never observed, and escapes far from any planet and any possible observer. The Universe will remain in an undetermined state. So, we cannot say that the past block will be ever created. On the other hand, my proposal of a “registry” of incomplete initial data which increases with each observation, relying on Smooth Quantum Mechanics, allows the possibility that the state of the Universe remains undetermined. Professor’s Ellis idea of foliating the spacetime so that the spacelike surfaces contains the wavefunction collapses may be unreachable, because the entanglement makes the collapses impossible to be ordered temporally. I am afraid that the entanglement can be complicated enough. The measurements of the spins of the two electrons in the EPR-B experiment can be in any spacetime relation. We cannot consider that the wavefunction collapse takes place necessarily along such preferred spacelike surfaces, which are compatible with a spacetime foliation. It is easy to see that, if we associate spacelike surfaces to the collapse, it is possible that these intersect in complicated ways. Moreover, collapse can take place also between events that cannot belong to the same spacelike surface, being for example one in the other’s future.
The standard BU attempts to express the temporal structures in terms of timeless structures. We can consider it, in a way, as a research program of explaining the time itself in terms of timeless structures. But, by adhering to a presentist view, and by reducing the BU functionality to a purely archiving role, there is the danger of explaining the time by appealing to time in a circular way: the EBU includes the passed time in the archived BU, but the evolution happens in a metatime. Another interesting feature the BU has is that it contains all the physical fields in its description. By giving a special role to the present, we introduce a feature which has no correspondent in the matter fields. The BU accounts for the physical fields, but it cannot include an intrinsic present, and maybe doesn’t even need. Yet, if it would need to mark the present, a “BU with a bookmark” would solve the problem.
The registry view is compatible with both time evolution, and with the standard block universe view. And it shares with the EBU picture the compatibility with our feelings of time flow, free-will, open future, but not the carved in stone past.
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