Centre for Time

The Centre for Time was established in 2002, supported by the Australian Research Council and the University of Sydney, alongside a Federation Fellowship awarded to Professor Huw Price. Since 2010, the Centre has been part of the Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science.

In 2012, the Centre’s directors were awarded a John Templeton grant, which facilitated the Centre’s work for several years. Since 2015, we have been funded by a series of Australian Research Council grants, with continued support from the University of Sydney.

In 2013, the Centre for Time, in collaboration with the Philosophy of Time Society and the Centre for the Philosophy of Time, co-founded the International Association for the Philosophy of Time (IAPT). The IAPT brings together researchers from Australasia, Europe, and the US to investigate the nature of time and temporal experience.

The centre has strengths in three main areas:

• the philosophy and foundations of physics, through which we collaborate with researchers in the University's School of History and Philosophy of Science and the School of Physics within the University of Sydney, and with national and international partners including the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada and the Neils Bohr Institute in Denmark
• metaphysics and the philosophy of time, where we collaborate with international partners at Cambridge University and the University of California
• the psychology and philosophy of temporal phenomenology, where we collaborate with researchers in the University's School of Psychology and international partners at the University of California and City College of New York.

We welcome visitors interested in any of these topics, and can in some cases offer funding for travel and other expenses.

Some of time's deepest puzzles arise because it isn’t clear from which discipline, across a wide range of intellectual enquiry, it is best investigated. Some aspects belong to physics, but even within physics, there is disagreement about which aspects of the ordinary view of time we should expect to find in physical theory. The Centre for Time has four core aims:

• to provide the global research community with new clarity about what belongs where, across the academic disciplines, in the study of time
• to identify specific topics needing cross-disciplinary work – the frontiers in the study of time where specialists in one field need insights from other fields, in order to make progress
• to seed and advance the needed cross-disciplinary interactions, by bringing together leading specialists in the project of setting the agenda for future research
• to apply this methodology to make progress on topics which are presently impeded by lack of access to cross-disciplinary perspectives.
  

The centre's overriding objective is to give researchers from a range of disciplines a deeper understanding of what aspects of the study of time belong to their discipline, and how those aspects both relate to, and are distinct from, the issues that belong to other disciplines. We hope to bring a new clarity to the study of time in its most global sense, and set the agenda for the subject's future.

For more information about our research, our members, our visitors, and our events and conferences please visit www.centrefortime.org

Temporal experience may be unified and continuous, but the information processing underpinning it is not. Researchers at the centre (Alex Holcombe) are studying the relation between the dynamics of perception, attention and cognition. As one's eyes move over the words in a sentence like this one, we know that at the brain's first stages two words are processed in parallel, but find evidence that at later stages processing proceeds from left to right over the pre-processed words, contributing to the sequencing important for comprehending text. The intermittent, serial sampling involved seems to be driven by brain oscillations, which are also being investigated for moving stimuli, where the experiential facade of continuous motion conceals the critical role played by an intermittent sampling process. International collaborations include work with stroke patients whose parietal lobe damage perturbs their processing dynamics.

Within the philosophy of time there has emerged a debate about whether our temporal phenomenology is such that it seems to us as though time passes. Some think it does. If so, then either that seeming is veridical, because there is temporal passage, or it is a systematic and pervasive illusion. According to other philosophers, it does not even seem as though time passes; instead, individuals mistakenly believe that it seems this way. Researchers at the Centre (Kristie Miller and Alex Holcombe) are pursuing a research project which aims to use psychological experimental methodologies to investigate whether it really does seem to people as though time passes, or, instead, if they simply mistakenly believe that it seems this way.

A plethora of psychological research shows that people think about and respond to events differently, depending on their relative temporal location. For instance, it is usual to find that individuals prefer to have positive experiences located in their future, but negative experiences in their past, and that individuals prefer to have positive experiences in the near future, rather than the far future. This work has recently been funded by an ARC grant awarded to Kristie Miller, Eugene Caruso (UCLA) and Tom Dougherty (UNC Chapel Hill). Jointly, they along with collaborators Preston Greene, James Norton and Andrew Latham, investigate these phenomena, which collectively are known as time biases. As part of this project we are running a bunch of experiments that probe the nature of people’s time biased preferences including how strong they are, the conditions under which they are displayed, whether people judge them to be rational, and how they connect with the ways that people think about and feel about their selves over time.

The story of our lives is one that unfolds through time; ever changing and updating as we add to the store of memories through which we understand our past selves, and our store of intentions, through which we shape our future selves. Or so it seems. Yet there is disagreement about the nature of time: about what time is and whether, in fact, it really exists at all. Researchers at the Centre (Kristie Miller) explore the connection between theories of time and timelessness in metaphysics and physics, and our lived experience as agents. This project aims to determine what structure the temporal dimension must have if it is to support agents like us, and whether, if there is no temporal dimension, as some physicists suggest, we can make any sense of our lived experience.

Our lives seem to be lived in an asymmetric temporal dimension in which past and future seem to us very different. Yet our everyday experience of the world conflicts with many (if not all) of the theories of time presented to us by contemporary physics. In this project, researchers at the Centre (Kristie Miller, David Braddon-Mitchell, Sam Baron Craig Callender, Helen Beebee, Alastair Wilson, Jonathan Tallant) will consider three very different physical theories, each of which reconciles quantum mechanics and general and special relativity in a different way. It will explore the tension between these physical theories and provide a range of ways of bridging them with our lived experience, with a view to determining where we can, and should, transform scientific theory, and where we should transform our understanding of ourself and our experiences.

The question of why there is something rather than nothing? is apt to strike most people as rather outmoded. Centre for Time researchers (Dean Rickles) aim to restore the question back to its rightful position as the most fundamental of all, and one of central importance for understanding both our place in the universe and the nature of the universe. This project will modernise the question and remodel its landscape, considering the state of the art in terms of both formulations and responses, and offering up the best possible solutions on the basis of present knowledge. The project will bring together philosophy, physics, cosmology, mathematics, neuroscience, logic, and more. Expected outcomes of this project include new insights into the nature of existence, including the relationship between time and existence.

This project, undertaken by researchers in the Centre (Dean Rickles) aims to integrate models of time, decision making, and personal identity, with application to a range of pressing contemporary world problems (including climate, population, finance, and health inequalities). The work straddles many disciplines, including philosophy, physics, linguistics, psychology, economics, and neuroscience. Despite the multidisciplinarity of the problems, it all boils down to one basic feature: how we view ourselves as situated in time profoundly affects relations with self, others and the world. By better understanding this, we anticipate a new understanding of the causes of global problems and the development of new methods of tackling them, offering wide-ranging benefits for many sectors of society.

We are investigating the nature of mental time travel in humans (children and adult) and in chimpanzees. This project is funded by an ARC Discovery grant awarded to Kristie Miller, Gema Martin-Ordas (Stirling), Kourken Michaelian (Université Grenoble Alpes) and David Braddon-Mitchell (Sydney). Mental time travel is the ability to remember from a first person perspective, past events, and to project oneself into the future to imagine ways the future might go. It has been shown to be connected to a range of important abilities, including deliberation and planning, as well as agency and identity. Crucially, it involves representing time, in the sense that it requires being able to represent that events occur at various past and future times. In this project we develop novel cross-species methods to test for the capacity to mentally time travel.