The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics

However, the many-instants interpretation puts an intriguingly different slant on causality, suggesting that it operates in nothing like the way we normally believe it to. In both classical physics and Everett’s original scheme, what happens now is the consequence of the past. But with many instants, each Now ‘competes’ with all other Nows in a timeless beauty contest to win the highest probability. The ability of each Now to ‘resonate’ with the other Nows is what counts. Its chance to exist is determined by what it is in itself. The structure of things is the determining power in a timeless world.

The same applies to us, for our conscious instants are embedded in the Nows. The probability of us experiencing ourselves doing something is just the sum of the probabilities for all the different Nows in which that experience is embedded. Everything we experience is brought into existence by being what it is. Our very nature determines whether we shall or shall not be. I find that consoling. We are because of what we are. Our existence is determined by the way we relate to (or resonate with) everything else that can be. Although Darwinism is a marvellous theory, and I greatly admire and respect Richard Dawkins’s writings, one day the theory of evolution will be subsumed in a greater scheme, just as Newtonian mechanics was subsumed in relativity without in any way ceasing to be great and valid science. For this reason, and for the remarks just made, I do not think that we are robots or that anything happens by chance. That view arises because we do not have a large enough perspective on things. We are the answers to the question of what can be maximally sensitive to the totality of what is possible. That is quite Darwinian. Species, ultimately genes, exist only if they fit in an environment. Platonia is the ultimate environment.

In Box 3, I said that Platonia is a ‘heavenly vault’ in which the music of the spheres is played. This formulation grew out of numerous discussions with the Celtic composer, musicologist and poet John Purser (brother of the mathematician and cryptographer Michael, who made the comment about my parents with which I ended the Preface, and brought to my attention the Shakespeare quotation). With the inimitable assurance of which only he is capable, John is adamant that the only theory of the universe that ever made sense was (is) the music of the spheres. My guts tell me that he and the artists quite generally are right. But harmony rests on mathematics, of course. Rather appropriately, given my extensive use of meteorological metaphor, John and his wife Bar live in the misty Isle of Skye, where at least one of the said discussions took place while the better part of a bottle of whisky was consumed, mostly by John.

You will naturally ask why we do not hear this music of the spheres. Keats provides a first answer: ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter’. But Leibniz may have given the true answer. In his monadology, he teaches that the quintessential you, everything you experience in consciousness and the unconscious, is precisely this music. You are the music of the spheres heard from the particular vantage point that is you. This is taking a little liberty with the letter but certainly not the spirit of his great philosophical scheme. On the subject of liberties, I have taken fewer with Leibniz than Michael did with Shakespeare. Hal does not actually ask Falstaff (‘fat-witted with drinking of old sack’) why he should be so superfluous ‘to inquire the nature of time’ but to ‘demand the time of day’. But, were it not for the blessed Sun and its diurnal rotation (our fortunate circumstances), the one question would be as profound as the other.

Now for something like the original Gretchenfrage.

Is There a Role for a Creator in Quantum Cosmology?

Perhaps, but it is a somewhat strange one. It seems to me that science can never do more than guess – theorize about – the structure of things and then test to see whether its conjectures are confirmed. This is an open-ended venture (with tremendous successes behind it) and always presupposes that there is some structure already out there waiting to be found. In the scheme I have advanced, much is presupposed: Platonia, its detailed structure (immensely important) and a wave function that ‘samples’ possibilities. It is the nature of theory to presuppose something, so that always leaves a potential role for a Creator. But does invoking something to explain what we cannot explain get us any further?