The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics

The real problem, then, is in the representation of motion. We seem to have exhausted all the resources of static quantum cosmology simply to put everything into place on the riverbank. Quantum mechanics does permit us to gain total information about position, but only at the expense of total loss of information about motion. We seem to have nothing left over to enable the kingfisher to fly. This is the crux of the matter. Classical physics presupposes both positions and motions, matching our experience that we see both at once. But quantum mechanics – in its present standard form – has this curious halving of the accessible data.

So how can we let the kingfisher fly? As few things delight me more than a kingfisher in flight, this is a matter of some interest to me. The answer that suddenly came to me in the summer of 1991 (which, of course, is a place in Platonia, not a time) was that the flight of the kingfisher is ultimately an illusion, though it rests on something that is very special and just as real as we take flight to be. It is flight without flight. Let me return to the imagery of the blue mist that shimmers over Platonia. It is easy to locate the instant of my death – I see the point in that great configuration space in which I stand on the bank of the stream. Now let me make an assumption in the hallowed tradition of Boltzmann: only the probable is experienced. The blue mist measures probability. Therefore, in accordance with the tradition, the blue mist must shine brightly at the point in Platonia in which I see the kingfisher frozen in flight above the water. I experienced the scene, so it must have a high probability. But there is still no motion.

I do not think there can be any. But there can be something else. As I mentioned in Part 1, nobody really knows what it is in our brains that corresponds to conscious experience. I make no pretence to any expertise here, but it is well known that much processing goes on in the brain and, employing normal temporal language, we can confidently assert that what we seem to experience in one instant is the product of the processing of data coming from a finite span of time.

This is all I need. It enables me to make the working conjecture that I outline in Part 1 – that when we think we see motion at some instant, the underlying reality is that our brain at that instant contains data corresponding to several different positions of the object perceived to be in motion. My brain contains, at any one instant, several ‘snapshots’ at once. The brain, through the way in which it presents data to consciousness, somehow ‘plays the movie’ for me.

Down in Plato’s cave, thanks to the perfect representation of everything that is, I can look more closely at the point in the model of Platonia that contains me at the point of death. I can look into my brain and see the state of all its neurones. And what do I see? I see, coded in the neuronal patterns, six or seven snapshots of the kingfisher just as they occurred in the flight I thought I saw. This brain configuration, with its simultaneous coding of several snapshots, nevertheless belongs to just one point of Platonia. Near it are other points representing configurations in which the correct sequence of snapshots that give a kingfisher in flight is not present. Either some of the snapshots are not there, or they are jumbled up in the wrong order. There are infinitely many possiblilities, and they are all there. They must be, since there is a place in Platonia for everything that is logically possible.

Now, at all the corresponding points the blue mist will have a certain intensity, for in principle the laws of quantum mechanics allow the mist to seep into all the nooks and crannies of Platonia. Indeed, the first quantum commandment is that all possibilities must be explored. But the laws that mandate exploration also say that the blue mist will be very unevenly distributed. In some places it will be so faint as to be almost invisible, even with the acuity of vision we acquire in Plato’s cave for things mathematical. There will also be points where it shines with the steely blue brilliance of Sirius – or the kingfisher’s wings. And again my conjecture is this: the blue mist is concentrated and particularly intense at the precise point in Platonia in which my brain does contain those perfectly coordinated ‘snapshots’ of the kingfisher and I am conscious of seeing the bird in flight.

As I explained in Chapter 2, a time capsule, as I define it, is in itself perfectly static – it is, after all, one of Plato’s forms. However, it is so highly structured that it creates the impression of motion. In the chapters that follow, we shall see if there is any hope that static quantum cosmology will concentrate the wave function of the universe on time capsules. As logical possibilities, they are certainly out there in Platonia. But will ψ find them?

CHAPTER 19