This is a podcast all about time. It can be quite unnerving (or exciting?) depending on how you look at it.
Simon Saunders is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy of Physics at Oxford and an Emeritus Fellow of Merton College, and one of the people who took Everett’s “many worlds” from a fringe idea in a 1957 thesis into a position serious physicists and philosophers now argue about. His answer to a very old question (what is time?) turns out to be the key to his answer to a very strange one (are there many of you?).
We cover:
Why time may be the one idea in physics we still don’t truly understand, even though we use it flawlessly every day of our lives.
Stephen Hawking asked what “breathes fire into the equations.” The block universe, Saunders grants, has no answer, because nothing inside that block ever actually moves.
Why Saunders finds it “almost insane“ to believe that this exact moment, with all of “its craziness and insanity,” was somehow necessary, built into the universe from its ve…
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