Is Time Incompatible with Physics?

Watch Avshalom Elitzur and Tim Maudlin take on string theorist Michio Kaku over time.

This excerpt was pulled from the debate 'The trouble with time,' filmed at the HowTheLightGetsIn London festival in September 2023.

In our everyday experience, time is an inescapable backdrop against which events unfold, allowing us to sequence events and measure durations. Yet in the hundred years since Einstein's theory of general relativity, physics has had a radically different account. Time does not flow, there is no before and after. We are not born and we do not die. The entirety of spacetime is given at the outset of the universe. There is no cause and effect. Is this radical discrepancy with our everyday experience a threat to physics or a threat to our understanding of what it is to be alive?

Should we take seriously claims of physicists that everyday experience is an illusion? Or is it their model of the universe that is mistaken? Or are these two profoundly different accounts of time the product of frames of understanding that will always remain incompatible?

Avshalom Elitzur is a physicist and philosopher. In 2010, Elitzur won the Noetic Medal of Consciousness and Brain Research for his contributions to cosmology of mind and Quantum Theory.

Tim Maudlin is a philosopher of science who has done influential work on the metaphysical foundations of physics and logic

Michio Kaku is a theoretical physicist, activist, futurologist, and popular-science writer. He is a professor of theoretical physics in the City College of New York and CUNY Graduate Center.