The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics

What does intrigue me is the power of structures in a timeless scheme. They determine where the wave function collects. If one wanted to see ψ as spirit pondering what shall be brought into existence, it has no power in the matter. Leibniz always said that not even God could escape the dictates of reason. He must always act rationally. Perhaps that is more reassuring than a capricious deity is. However, a rational universe is quite alarming too. If you are about to perish in a concentration camp, is it any consolation to know that what must be will be?

In The Life of the Cosmos, my friend Lee Smolin espouses a self-creating universe, likening its growth to the often largely unplanned development of cities. I find his epilogue especially eloquent. In fact, timeless quantum cosmology does give almost god-like power to structures, ourselves included, to bring themselves into being. We shall be if that fits the great scheme of things. The ideas of both Lee and myself tend to pantheism. The whole universe – Platonia and the wave function – is the closest we can get to a God.

Where Is Heaven?

I have long thought that, if only we had the wit to see it, we are already in heaven. It is Platonia. I say this with some trepidation, though I believe it is true. If so, Platonia must be hell and purgatory as well. What I mean by this is really quite simple: some places in Platonia are very admirable, pleasant and beautiful, many are boring in the extreme, and others are horrendously nasty. The same contrasts exist within the individual Nows. What we do not know is where the wave function collects.

I certainly find it difficult to believe that there is a material world in which we currently find ourselves, and some other, quite different, immaterial world we enter after death. Apart from anything else, modern physics suggests very strongly that so-called gross matter – the clay from which we are made – is anything but that. It is almost positively immaterial. Platonic forms have exact mathematical properties, and those are all that physicists need to model the world and to attribute to matter.

I also feel strongly that this created world is something to be marvelled at and cherished, not dismissed as some second-best version of what is yet to come. Disrespect for this world is disrespect for whatever creates it. I shall not attempt to argue about these things in detail here, but the total elimination of time, if accepted and supported by mathematics and observation, must force theologians to reconsider their notions. If there is a happier and more perfect world, in which the lion lies down with the lamb and the sword is made into a ploughshare, I think it will simply be somewhere else in Platonia. I am sure that there are locations where experience is much deeper and richer than here. Such experience may be perfectly timeless – consciousness just sees what is. Perhaps we are somehow included in that awareness. Perhaps too the world is redeemed, and its inner conflicts resolved and understood somewhere in Platonia’s distant reaches, farther from Alpha than we are.

It is not for nothing that I emphasized in the early part of the book that Platonia has an Alpha but no Omega. The idea of a Point Omega was introduced by the Jesuit biologist Teilhard de Chardin, who conceived of it as some kind of consummation of evolution in the ultimate future, ‘on the boundary of all future time’. I have quoted these last words from Frank Tipler’s book The Physics of Immortality, in which he argues that Point Omega is where our material universe recontracts to the Big Crunch. By then, he argues, intelligences will have become so adept and computerized that we shall all be recreated as virtual computer programs, run so fast that we have an effective eternity of existence in which we are resurrected before the universe ends in the Crunch.

I can only say that is not how I see things. I search in vain for Omega in Platonia and find only Alpha. But Platonia is a vast land. Let us cherish everything around us wherever we happen to find ourselves in the Platonic palace.

Of one thing I feel very sure. Many poets and theologians give a misleading image of heaven and eternity. Consider the opening lines of Vaughan’s famous poem The World’:

I saw Eternity the other night

Like a great Ring of pure and endless light,

All calm as it was bright;

And round beneath it, Time, in hours, days, years,

Driven by the spheres,

Like a vast shadow moved, in which the world

And all her train were hurled.