Sten Odenwald

And if you slice it...

That slice is now, but essentially everything in the future is already there as well.

It's just that we've decided to pick out a particular moment as now.

The only problem is you can't do that over the entire universe.

There is no such thing as now in the universe because of relativity.

Everybody, every particle carries their own clock and it's all synchronized to the Big Bang, but it's not synchronized into the future because everything is moving, everything is in flux.

And so you can never find a particular space which represents now.

So this whole idea of eternalism has fallen out of favor because it really doesn't make any sense.

sort of sneak up on one of the outstanding questions that we face in astronomy.

And the biggest one, of course, is why was there a Big Bang?

And so I would like to investigate anything that takes me closer to answering that particular question.

And I really don't want it to be that the Big Bang happened because we are here.

If we weren't here, if the Big Bang didn't happen, we wouldn't be here.

I mean, to me, that is an answer that has absolutely no content to it whatsoever.

Well, the one thing that is something that I learned long ago as an astrophysicist and understanding quantum mechanics and relativity is that there is no master clock in the universe.

There is no uniform time standard across all galaxies, stars, atoms, molecules, planets, and people.

That's not the way the universe seems to be put together according to relativity.

so any idea that that there is this master clock that ticks out the seconds in the universe you know i i don't i i don't think in those terms anymore i also don't think in terms of you know time travel you know i don't think of getting into a box you know pushing a button and going back to the fifth century because that isn't consistent with with virtually all of the ideas that we have today uh in physics about how time and space actually work

Well, it's not that there is no clock.

The thing is that you have to think in terms of everybody carrying their own clock.