Sam Kuypers is a theoretical physicist who specialises in the physics of time. If you have the time, Sam can take up as much of it as you like telling you about how our ideas of time have changed…over time. As Sam will reveals: times, they are not a-changing. But there is change! Newtonian physics has a notion of time (or at least Newton himself did), Relativity as discovered by Einstein in the early 1900s radically transformed our notion of what time is and now, in the 21st Century, Sam Kuypers and others are beginning to develop a quantum theory of time. And this is why Sam joins me for this episode as we unpack time as a quantum concept: the very topic of Chapter 11 of “The Fabric of Reality” and go deep on Sam’s more recent contributions to our understanding of the reality of time. Appropriately, time stamps are below.

You may have to take your time with some of this.

00:00 - Introduction to this episode

05:04 - Introduction to Sam Kuypers

06:30 - The day-to-day of a theoretical physicist

10:30 - What led Sam to Oxford University

12:10 - What was Sam’s doctoral thesis about?

15:20 - The importance of Everett

16:30 - “Classical” Time and “universal time”.

27:00 - Julian Barbour and time as a series of instants

30:35 - Spacetime and the timeless view of physical reality.

33:35 - The clash of General Relativity and Quantum Theory I

37:20 - The clash of General Relativity and Quantum Theory II

40:40 - c-numbers and q-numbers

42:30 - The significance of (non) commutability (i.e the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle).

46:05 - The Page-Wooters Construction (Quantum Time I).

53:15 - Can there be change if nothing is ever changing? (Quantum Time II)

55:31 - The Heisenberg vs Schrödinger “Pictures” of Quantum Theory.

57:35 - What is “locality” in physics?

58:40 - Entanglement and: "Does Quantum Theory allows for faster than light communication?”

1:00:48 - Unitary Quantum Theory (vs: Everettian Quantum Theory)

1:05:33 - Philosophical Realism, Physics

1:06:40 - Does Time Exist?

1:07:58 - Is Time Travel Possible?

1:11:30 - How did Sam find his way into physics?

1:14:30 - The Dutch Enlightenment vs The British Enlightenment

1:20:50 - The Netherlands, international trade, tolerance and specialisation

1:23:08 - The Invention of Free Trade and misconceptions with long lifetimes.

1:16:30 - The peculiar rivalry between European Allies

1:28:40 - Prosperity and Pessimism: Are both on the ascendency?

1:32:19: Why are people special?

1:37:14: Liberalism, Authoritarianism and Climate Change

1:40:25: Science, Morality and (eg: Dutch) Innovation

1:43:30 - Concluding Remarks

Part 2: Time is in the instant. The instant is not in time. More on the quantum theory of time and how the "spacetime" view of time, and the flow of time are false. How time relates to the "block universe" model and how the multiverse fixes the paradoxes at the heart of our common sense (and classical physics) ideas about time - more readings from "The Fabric of Reality" chapter 11 and in addition:

A couple of acrostics about David Deutsch in terms of "Popper".

David's changing view of free will.

Readings on "free will" from "A Science of Can and Can't" by Chiara Marletto.

A summary of a paper by Marletto and Vedral on the "Page and Wooters" construction.

Brief remarks on Marietto's "Constructor Theory of Thermodynamics"

Kuyper's thesis "Developments in Unitary Quantum Theory"

The paradoxes involved in trying to picture time using diagrams.

Machian Dynamics (Ernst Mach's idea about absolute space and time being false and instead how the universe has dynamics of its own).

The Schrödinger vs Heisenberg Pictures

The Kuypers and Deutsch paper on "Everettian Relative States in the Heisenberg picture"

"And other topics" as Sam Harris says. Reference: Mentions of Sam Kuypers paper on "q number time" throughout: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspa.2021.0970

This is really "episode 0" but not quite because we do indeed get to some readings and unpackings of the chapter. But in the overall scheme, that forms a minor part of a longer introduction to the "common sense" understanding of time and then to some relativity (of simultaneity) and reflections on the work of other physicists and popularisers.

Note clips from "The Lord of the Rings" and "Spaceballs" movies are owned by their respective copyright holders.