(Guest Post) FQXi
I’m happy to post the following message from Brendan Foster of the Foundational Questions Institute in order to help advertise their Large Grants Program. I should make clear that I have no formal connection with this Institute so if you have any questions about the program please contact them as advised in the post. And if you wish to apply, good luck!
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I’d like to announce the 2010 round of the Foundational Questions
Institute (FQXi) Large Grants Program. Initial applications are due
in under two weeks, so get started now!
FQXi is an independent, philanthropically funded non-profit organization. Our mission is to catalyze, support, and disseminate research on questions at the foundations of physics and cosmology. We want to bring special focus to new frontiers and innovative ideas integral to a deep understanding of reality, but unlikely to be supported by conventional funding sources.
As part of our mission, we now invite proposals for research on foundational questions in physics and cosmology. The focus for this grant round is “Time and Foundations”. We wish to especially encourage projects targeted on the Nature of Time. To quote from the Request for Proposals, “The topic of Time is of both deep and broad interest for research in foundational questions in physics and cosmology. Science, and particularly physics, has produced dramatic insights into the nature of time…Careful consideration of time has
likewise caused revolutions in physics, and may again do so.”
We will also consider more general proposals of exceptional quality, including suitable outreach projects. All proposed projects should qualify as foundational and unconventional. You can get a sense of the range of supported work by checking out the funded projects from the previous grant rounds, at
http://www.fqxi.org/grants/large/awardees/list
The application consists of a two-step, online process, with review by an external panel of experts. The Initial Proposal is short and simple, consisting of little more than a page of summary and a rough budget. You should have more than enough time to get ready by the Initial Proposal deadline: June 14, 2010 (midnight, EST).
We will then invite selected proposals to be expanded into Full Proposals based on the selections of the Review Panel. Funds for approved Full Proposals will be available (via a Donor Advised Fund) soon after January 1, 2011.
To view full instructions and the application form, go to
http://www.fqxi.org/grants/large/initial.
The deadline again is Monday, June 14.
While you’re at it, visit our blog and online forums, at
You’ll find articles, essays, and discussions on foundational physics questions, including the Nature of Time. Send any questions to us at mail@fqxi.org.
In the Dark 
June 4, 2010 at 1:00 pm
Why can we decide where we go in space, but have no such choice in time? The greatest leap forward in our understanding of time was Einstein’s linking of it to space, but it remains the most independent of variables and a total enigma.
At this level of investigation, the philosophical preconceptions of researchers start to count. One idea – subsequent to Einstein – is that all of spacetime ‘exists’ at once so that time is an illusion. But unless you can in principle test such claims experimentally against alternatives then physics simply should not pronounce on the issue; what counts is whether the idea is a good motivator of research aiming to generate testable predictions. It would of course be necessary to explain why we nevertheless perceive time as passing. After reading ET Jaynes I don’t believe it’s anything to do with the thermodynamic arrow of time and increasing entropy. Special intitial conditions (themselves needing explanation), time asymmetry as a joint consequence of CP-violation and CPT-symmetry, and black hole dynamics (you can get in but you can’t get out) are all time-asymmetric and could play a part.
There is also a confusion of epistemology with ontology today, sometimes by scientists who should know better. The suggestion is that the universe is actually constructed out of mathematics, ie out of numbers. This is a grotesque reversion of the greatest advance ever made in quantitative science, by the ancient Greeks who introduced the idea of abstraction – ie one, two, three as pure numbers, not as one or two or three sheep in a field, or stars in the sky, etc. No good will come out of this fashionable reversion.
Peter Rowlands, a physicist at U Liverpool, draws an interesting distinction betwen space, which he says is infinitely divisible, and time, which he says is indivisible. In other words, although both are continuums, you can take a knife and slice up space as finely as you want, but if you try the same with time the knife refuses to cut. It’s more than just a glib statement and there is some mathematical physics associated with the idea, but I haven’t got enough of a handle on it to comment any more intelligently at this stage.
I’m very glad to see funding of this sort in science and I hope the committee chooses wisely.
Anton