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0e20bf5 "You are telling me that I did something because I was going to do something." "Well, didn't you? You were there." "No, I didn't--no... well, maybe I did, but it didn't feel like it." "Why should you expect it to? It was something totally new to your experience." "But... but--" Wilson took a deep breath and got control of himself. Then he reached back into his academic philosophical concepts and produced the notion he had been struggling to express. "It denies all reasonable theories of causation. You would have me believe that causation can be completely circular. I went through because I came back from going through to persuade myself to go through. That's silly." "Well, didn't you?" ~ By His Bootstraps / Robert A. Heinlein" spacetime time-travel John W. Campbell Jr.
ff0c5c7 Everything dreams. The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams, and the earth changes.... reality science spacetime rocks geology Ursula K. Le Guin
c5a1fc0 " is a physicist and philosopher at Williams College in Massachusetts with a lifelong interest in a time which he too thinks doesn't pass. For Park, the passage of time is not so much an illusion as a myth, "because it involves no deception of the senses.... One cannot perform any experiment to tell unambiguously whether time passes or not." This is certainly a telling argument. After all, what reality can be attached to a phenomenon that can never be demonstrated experimentally? In fact, it is not even clear how to demonstrating the flow of time experimentally. As the apparatus, laboratory, experimenter, technicians, humanity generally and the universe as a whole are apparently caught up in the same inescapable flow, how can any bit of the universe be "stopped in time" in order to register the flow going on in the rest of it? It is analogous to claiming that the whole universe is moving through space at the same speed--or, to make the analogy closer, that is moving through space. How can such a claim ever be tested?" time reality scientific-method spacetime time-passing Paul Davies