Mind your time
This Hacker News thread on the nature of time got its share of people declaiming the article.
The article in question theorizes that time is a product of the observer's biology. Briefly, time was invented because the brain needs a before and after.
While I'm a layperson who cannot sensibly question any of the criticisms of the article, I may have a thought exercise for you to consider.
Take money. Think of it as your economic energy.
Money can take a lot of forms. It starts off as an accounting entry in some HR software. In fact, before that, money started off as the effort you made to reach your workplace and do your job.
Later, that accounting entry moves to you. You convert that economic energy into coins and bills. You may convert it into a car or shares.
All through these changed, money is still money. To you, it went from a number or a screen to bills in your pocket to a car in your driveway.
In between, you invented a myriad rules to describe its behavior. For instance, you had a rule which said that standing at an ATM and entering special PIN would convert dematerialized money into currency.
To a sufficient credulous observer trying to decipher the laws of economic energy, the ATM law becomes immutable.
Are we any different? Are we interpreting adjacent but completely innocuous events as laws of physics? You would agree that the ATM+PIN rule has nothing to do with our ability to convert money in our account into bills in our hand.
Let's tie this back to the original HN thread.
Particles decohere i.e., increase their probability density in a specific region because someone observed them there.
Recall that a particle is literally energy in a specific region so what I have said above is circular.
Anyway, the presence of energy in a region because an observer is standing there observing it does not change energy itself. Just because I pulled ₹100 from an ATM, it's not like I have less money. My economic energy is unchanged. So, when energies travel together - a cricket ball rolling along the ground is lots of energy density functions packed together - i can invent a lot of rules describing how that proceeds. I could, for instance, describe friction which slows the ball down or a bump on the ground which raises its potential energy only to drop it back down, but in reality, each energy density function just happened to do something predictable.
To understand this further, take your ₹100 bill. It represents 100 units of economic energy moving together. You could create a rule that ₹100 as a unit buys a kilo of rice but that rule means nothing to each ₹ making up the ₹100. (I'm not smart enough to explain this any further. I'm sorry :().
This being the case, all our inventions and discoveries of physics are an outcome of us being the observer. If we weren't there, those energy density functions would never have decohered at all.
This is all very confusing and probably all wrong. Forgive me if that's the case but this being my blog, I guess I'll just post whatever I want. Just make sure you read up more on this on your own.