The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics

I explained in connection with Figure 40 how the density of the blue mist can be used to create a collection of configurations in a bag, a heap even, from which the most probable atomic configurations can be drawn at random. Configurations – which are structures – are created as more or less definite potentialities to the extent that the stationary Schrödinger equation tells us to put more or less into the heap. Like the individual structures within it, the heap is static. It is carefully laid up in a Platonic palace, which, since probabilities play such a mysterious role in quantum mechanics, is a kind of ‘antechamber of Being’.

Now I can start to make good my deeper claims about Schrödinger and creation. We have to forget all previous physics and approach things with an open mind. First, we look at what the Machian time-independent Schrödinger equation is and what it does. It is completely self-contained. For a system of three bodies it just works on triangles and masses, and nothing else. In a timeless fashion, it associates a probability with each triangle. This is tantamount to giving them a ranking. It is particularly suggestive that this ranking is determined by the triangles themselves – nothing else is involved. The probabilities for the triangles emerge from a comprehensive testing and comparison programme. The equation ‘looks’ at all possible wave functions that could exist on Platonia and throws out all those that do not ‘resonate’ properly. Those that are left have to be finely tuned, otherwise they will satisfy neither the equation nor the condition of being well behaved. And it is not just the wave function that resonates. We can say that the triangles that get the greatest probability are the ones that ‘resonate best with their peers’, since the triangles alone determine how the probability is distributed. This is what the rationality of best matching in classical dynamics translates into in quantum cosmology. There is a perfect, circle-closing, rational explanation for all the relative probabilities.

I do believe that what we have here are putative rules of creation, or perhaps we should say of being. Considered purely as an intellectual exercise, this quantum-mechanical determination of probabilities for relative configurations is no odder than the classical-dynamical determination of curves in configuration space. The aim of science is to find rational and economic explanations of observed phenomena, not to prejudge the issue. Each hypothetical scheme should be judged on its merits. There should be a clear statement of the phenomena that are to be explained, the conceptual entities that are to be employed and the mechanism that is to yield the explanation.

The first aim is to create a realist (non-solipsistic) cosmology in which there are sentient beings whose primary awareness is of structured instants of time as defined earlier in the book. These instants are like subjective snapshots, and may be called atoms of perceptual existence. Each snapshot holds together in an indissoluble unity everything that we would want to call the actual facts of which we are aware in an instant of time. These include not only the things we see, feel and hear, but also our awareness of them, our memories and our interpretation of everything. The fact that many different things are known at once is regarded (by me at least) as the most remarkable – and defining – property of instants of time. I do not believe that science (or religion) will ever explain why we experience instants, but perhaps it can explain the structure we find within them.

The scheme is realist because the structure of an external, objectively existing real thing is being proposed as the explanation of the structure experienced within a perceptual instant. What we experience in subjective instants reflects, through psychophysical parallelism, physical structure in external things: configurations of the universe. Their actual nature is a matter for ongoing research. The notion has been illustrated by configurations of mass points in Euclidean space, by island-type distributions of fields of Faraday-Maxwell type in Euclidean space, and by closed Riemannian 3-geometries (which may also have fields defined on them). It is at the last level that I believe satisfactory explanations can in principle be obtained for many of the known facts of physics and cosmology. However, some further development, very possibly associated with the notions of superstrings and supersymmetry, may well be needed to explain the actual cocktail of forces and particles that pervades the universe.

What is important about relative configurations is that they are intrinsically defined – they are self-contained things – and that the rule that defines one thing simultaneously defines many. Moreover, they can all be arranged systematically in a relative configuration space: Platonia, as I have called it.