Michelle Thaller
speaker
1,835 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 28 May
Michelle Thaller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
All of time and space exists in a big whole thing.
There's only one now.
Einstein famously said, the past, present, and future are persistently annoying illusions.
Now, again, do we know this to be true?
At the moment, we don't have any better physics, and I doubt that physics will get any less weird than that.
But, yeah, I mean, that's sort of the way modern physics thinks the universe may be, is a big whole thing that started from beginning to end and is all now-ish.
That is exactly the question Albert Einstein asked.
That is a deep, excellent question.
And so that was the problem.
I mean, in a famous thought experiment, Einstein made a clock by setting up two mirrors and having light bounce between the two mirrors.
And that was the tick of the clock.
Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.
And the problem was that that's how he started thinking about the speed of light, is that if you had this thing in a spaceship that was going a huge fraction of the speed of light...
then a person standing watching it go by would actually watch the light kind of trace out a pattern like this.
Because it's actually ticking between the mirrors, but the mirrors are moving along.
And so you see the light make this sort of bouncing movement.
And that means it's actually traveled farther than the person on the ground who thinks that the mirrors are just sort of – the light is making just a straight up and down line from mirror to mirror.
That question that you asked is what completely –
I mean, it completely revolutionized physics.
Everything fell apart when people said, how do you even measure time?
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