Featured Scholar:
Dustin Hall
2003 - 2004 University Scholar
Mentor: Chuang Liu
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
“Time is the essence of all things,”
as the old adage goes, but according to University Scholar Dustin Hall,
our common notion of time may not truly exist in the universe. “I
tend to believe that time is symmetric, and there is no difference between
the past and the future,” he says.
An English major and philosophy minor, Dustin researched the philosophy
of time with mentor Chuang Liu, an associate professor of philosophy,
for his USP project. He spent months poring over complicated physics and
philosophy texts arguing for and against the existence of time, including
"The End of Time" by Julian Barbour, "The Unreality of
Time" by John Ellis McTaggart, and "Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’
Point" by Huw Price. He devoted two entire months just to reading
and re-reading The End of Time.
“My mentor and I used The End of Time as the foundation of my readings,”
Dustin says. “Written by a physicist in 1999, it argues that essentially
there is no time—it does not exist in the natural world. He argues
if you get rid of time, then all of these problems in quantum mechanics,
especially in making quantum mechanics and Einsteinian relativity commensurable,
disappear.”
In the book, Barbour argues that time does not exist and what is perceived
as time is simply a change in the arrangement of matter in the universe
taking place. “A movie strip is just a bunch of instances of a configuration
of people or action on screen that don’t change,” Dustin says.
“An individual cell is always going to look the same, but when you
string them together, we seem to have this idea of motion, though all
an actual film strip is, is a bunch of individual arrangements of matter.
Barbour says that is the exact case of the universe—there is a ton
of instances that don’t change unto themselves, but when we string
them together we get the perception of a flow, of a change, but all it
is, is instances like a movie strip.”
Other scientists argue that time does indeed exist in our universe and
point to the law of entropy as proof, which measures the disorder in a
system. “A kid’s room, if left to the kid alone, is going
to reach an equilibrium state of very high disorder,” Dustin says.
“Toys will be everywhere in a jumbled mess. A very unlikely situation
in that room is highly ordered, in which everything is picked up and in
its place. Entropy says that if a system is left to itself it is going
to reach a state of maximum disorder, which is constantly increasing.
Given the evolution of the universe, by a natural process, entropy has
increased and in the far future is going to reach a maximum disordered
state, which will lead to the heat death of the universe. So some scientists
say the arrow of entropy defines time and the amount of disorder defines
what we think of as time.”
Dustin admits exploring these two conflicting views left him perplexed
at times, especially since they involve very advanced mathematical equations,
the laws of physics and complex philosophical theses. He says one of the
troubling things about talking about time is discussing “when”
time began. “You can’t even make statements about ‘before’
the Big Bang because there was no time then. Time began for us at that
instant. It is weird to think of because we can’t get outside of
thinking about a string of time. You can’t wrap you mind around
‘nothing.’ You just kind of throw your hands in the air and
can’t really talk about it.” After much study, Dustin aligned
himself with Huw Price’s line of thinking—time, as we usually
describe it, does not exist in the universe. Humans created the asymmetries
we ascribe to the nature of time.
Following Price’s lead, Dustin believes the distinction between
past and future does not exist in nature—that time is symmetrical
and the past and the future are completely identical. “These distinctions
aren’t real in the universe,” he says. “We are creatures
that see things asymmetrically—it’s not like we have come
to this decision somehow in the history of our thought and we could change
our mind and realize that there is not a distinction. We are like a train
on a track that only goes in one direction.”
Since the past and future are symmetrical, time travel is logically possible.
“We are so biased about thinking there is actually a privileged
point in the universe that is ‘now’,” he says. “But
physics says there is not, it is all subjective. There is no reason that
I am here, my spatial position is not privileged. If I wanted to get up
and walk across the room I could. So if time is symmetrical in a similar
way to space, there is nothing stopping us from walking back in time,
or forward in time. There is the logical possibility. Just like I could
get up and walk five feet away, I could walk five years into the past.”
In Dustin’s past, he was a star pitcher on the Flanagan High School
baseball team in Miramar, Florida, near Ft. Lauderdale. An injury kept
him from playing baseball in college, and he started at New College before
transferring in to the University of Florida in spring 2002. Before graduating
from UF in spring 2004, he played intramural softball and was a member
of the Undergraduate Philosophical Society and the English Society. He
enjoys gourmet cooking and is an avid Yankees fan. Dustin is preparing
to apply for law school and hopes to be admitted to UF in the fall of
2005.
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