Insights into The Nature of Time in Physics, and implications for Computer Science

The concept of time is a well recognized enigma in physics. According to the great physicist John Archibald Wheeler: Beyond all day-to-day problems in physics, in the profound issues of principle that confront us today, no difficulties are more central than those associated with the concept of time. In computer science, we tend to sweep these issues under the rug, and rely on an overly-simplistic concept of linear time that implicitly includes notions such as simultaneity and irreversibility, which are known to be incorrect in our two most successful physical theories: Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Part One of this lecture reviews the current state of our understanding of time from physics. Part Two highlights the implicit assumptions we so often use in computer science, and their possible implications on the correctness, reliability and performance of our systems. Part Three introduces a recently published conjecture on the relationship between information, entanglement and time, as a vehicle to both challenge the way we think about time when we design our algorithms and develop our models of computations. We hope to stimulate new ways of thinking that advance computer science down richer and perhaps more innovative paths.

Speaker: Paul Borrill, EARTH Computing