2023-10-15 19:00:00
Francis Wolff, who has just published a work on time, reacts to Thomas Hertog’s book, resulting from his collaboration with Stephen Hawking. The philosopher regrets that this “treatise on general cosmology” does not define “time” more clearly.
Francis Wolff is a philosopher and professor emeritus at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. Below, he reacts to Thomas Hertog’s book. An article taken from the monthly Sciences et Avenir – La Recherche n°920, dated October 2023.
“Thomas Hertog titled his work “The Origin of Time”with reference to “The Origin of Species” of Charles Darwin, but of “time” itself, there is ultimately little question. The work is similar to a treatise on general cosmology explaining fine adjustments (fine-tuning) of the different parameters of our universe which allowed the existence of galaxies and ultimately life. Time emerges as a consequence of the theory of “top-down cosmology” developed by Stephen Hawking and the author.
We follow with pleasure the intellectual journey of Hawking, who successively renounces the search for a theory of Everything, the “anthropic” principle (according to which the Universe was configured for us, editor’s note) and finally to the multiverses, to develop this new vision of the cosmos which testifies to its inexhaustible conceptual inventiveness.
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But I notice once I close the book that we don’t know what time is. And even less its “origin”, since the idea of origin presupposes that of time! So, a little naively, I want to ask the author what time he is talking regarding. Is it that of general relativity where, inseparable from space, it appears as a specific constituent of the Universe, in the same way as matter and energy? Or is it the parameter time, that of quantum physics, represented by the variable “t” in the Schrödinger equation describing the evolution of a particle, and which is neither more nor less than absolute time , Newtonian?
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It appears all the more necessary to define the concept of time as certain attempts to merge general relativity and quantum physics into a global theory envisage its pure disappearance.[…]
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