Matthew,
Suppose you and I are sitting at Starbucks one rainy day, sipping some green tea, doing our favorite thing in life, debating each other on Cosmology...
After listening patiently to your oration on famous statements about well known scientists I say,
"Mat, I just had a Deja Vu, and I don't mean figuratively, as in 'we are running into circles here.' I mean I literally just saw this scene repeating itself!...
Now Mat, matey, I don't have any high hopes on a checkmate on this; because you are too stubborn to be convinced, even if Newton, Einstein, Hawking, and Aristotle himself, woke up from their graves, and we both saw them walking in through the Starbucks door, just for the sheer purpose.
I have already asked you that if time was a physical dimension, that you could travel forwards and backwards; if the present was not the only thing that existed even if only for an infinitesimally fraction of an attosecond; if the past was not just the memory, and the future the anticipation in our brains; then what shape would you give it? Had it been the shape of an infinitely branching bush (future), with a barely visible trunk (present), and infinitely branching roots (past); what then fractions of an attosecond would determine which holographs within the future branches we would fill, based on the fact that they will also be affected by all the other existences and arbitrary happenings through out the Universe, throughout the Infinite? In order for all the possibilities to be covered, we would be talking about infinite Universes, a replicated Infinite. Would the latter make sense to you mathematically?
But you like to refer to famous statements by famous Scientists/Physicists. Well then mate, let me try that venue, once again; prior to getting completely tired about stating the obvious and trying to prove the self- evident.
Assuming that light does travel (deriving everlasting energy who knows from where); assuming that light is not instead passed along by particles; or the transfer of energy from the light source causing instead one particle after the other tog each generate a photon - causing a particle within the bigger particle to move and therefore generate a further photon); then,
1) During Planck's minimum movement of the photon theory, there is no time during that movement (or infinitely small for as to be able or to care to measure).
2) According to Hawking, there is no time in the depths of a black hole.
3) According to Einstein, time is a relative matter (precisely because it is a matter of personal experience and gravitational influence in space and change/deteriorating rate - after all we all spin on Earth at the vertiginous speed (if the "merry go around was smaller") of 1500 km/h.
4) Hawking also stated that subatomic particles appear out of nowhere. So time does not exist till they appear, form a singularity and a Universe. But what is this "nowhere" Hawking referred to? The Infinite.
About the Deja Vu, if the arrow of time points towards one linear direction(tsk. if anything while things due deteriorate along the revolution and movement of anything within the Universe, the Universe in itself is more ordered than before, society better organized and people less ignorant), then how come both of us supposedly sitting face to face at Starbucks had a different experience of that same moment? You experienced the moment during my Deja vu linearly only once; and I experienced it twice, as if on my path their was a bump or a pothole? How come time goes fast when you are hoping from forum to forum commenting and criticizing other people's writings (have you written something of your own, I asked you this in the past, still waiting for an answer on that one too), whereas my time is stalled when I am bored out of my brains trying to explain the self-evident?
5) People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion, Einstein.
