Though it’s from last fall, since the Oscars are coming up and it’s likely to win some, I’ll let Chad Orzel explain.
6 thoughts on “The Physics That Got Left Out Of “Arrival””
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Though it’s from last fall, since the Oscars are coming up and it’s likely to win some, I’ll let Chad Orzel explain.
Comments are closed.
It was an enjoyable movie but Oscar worthy? Meh.
Amy Adams is on a roll though. Nocturnal Animals was pretty good.
Questions of time and free will can quickly send you down the rabbit hole. It may take a long time before we get any real understanding.
Your link is to the second page of the article. Here’s the first page: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chadorzel/2016/11/21/the-physics-that-got-left-out-of-arrival/#76b9cef05a0a
Forbes blocks browsers with Ad Blockers, so I switched to a secondary browser without blocking. The web page was a mess with so many popups, auto-run videos, and other garbage ads that it caused the browser to lock up. Sorry, but whatever the article said, it isn’t worth putting up with all of the garbage that comes with it. I understand Forbes is trying to make money on their website but for me at least, they’ve gone way too far with the advertising. I won’t be going there again. They’ve made their site unusable.
It looked ok on Firefox and Chrome. I use uBlock.
Uh, yeah; History grad here with Humanities Guy kind of question.
I note the article specifically observes the causal relationship between the heptapods having a physics based on least-action and their perception of time is left vague. It doesn’t as explicitly address the similar vagueness in causal connection between the language and the perception of time, which is what the movie left me wondering about.
I realize I’m stuck in linear time, but I left the theatre considering that a human could crack this language by realizing that it is based on a holistic understanding of time, but wondering how this realization would actually lead to the human sharing that perception. We know that learning any skill or language can remap parts of the brain, and presumably learning a language and concepts this radical would have a large effect. Is that actually enough to take a human being outside the linear perception of time- to actually see past present and future as one, and to be able to sort and navigate that? Is it really only a matter of brain wiring and ‘perception’?
Does that mean that the heptapods at some point, whether or not due to some forward-thinking [heh] physicists, developed their language in its current form in order to jump-start their species into a non-linear-time culture by rewiring all their minds? Or did the species evolve biologically in some way that gives them this perception and then learn to communicate linguistically in the context of a perception of the world that already existed for them?
The latter would seem to make more sense. But then I’ve never read anything convincing that shows that Sapir-Whorf is definitive or that language really shapes understanding in a unidirectional way. It certainly seems that our species can conceive ideas and then invent words for them that didn’t exist before.