The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics

This proposal is not so very different from Boltzmann’s idea that the sense of motion is created from several qualitatively different patterns arranged along the ‘line of time’. Instead, I am suggesting that it is created by the brain from the juxtaposition of several subpatterns within one pattern. The arrow of time is not in the washing line, it is not in several pieces of washing, it is in each piece. If we could preserve one of these brain patterns in aspic, it would be perpetually conscious of seeing the gymnasts in motion. If you find this idea a bit startling, I am glad because I find it does bring home the ‘freezing of motion’ that I think we have to contemplate. In fact, since brain function and consciousness are fields in which I have no expertise, I would like you to regard this suggestion in the first place as a means of getting across an idea, the main application of which I see in physics.

To that end, I want to introduce the notion of special Nows, or time capsules, as I call them.

TIME CAPSULES

By a time capsule, I mean any fixed pattern that creates or encodes the appearance of motion, change or history. It is easiest to explain the idea by examples, for example the Ariel in the storm in Turner’s painting. Although they are all static in themselves, pictures often suggest that something has happened or is happening – with a vengeance in this painting. But in reality it simply is. I know no better example of something static that gives the impression of motion.

In pictures, the impression is deliberately created. Much more significant for my purposes are time capsules that arise naturally and have to be interpreted, by the examination of records they seem to contain. Records, or apparent records, play a vital role in my idea that time is an illusion. I use records primarily in the sense of, for example, fossils, which occur naturally and are interpreted by us as relics of things that actually existed. Less directly, all geological formations, rock strata in particular, are now invariably interpreted by geologists as constituting a record (to be interpreted) of past geological processes. Finally, there are records that people create deliberately: doctors’ notes, minutes of committee meetings, astronomical observations, photographs, descriptions of the initial and final conditions of controlled experiments, and so on. All such things, and many more, I call records. My position is that the things we call records are real enough, and so is their structure. They are the genuine cause of our belief in time. Our only mistake is the interpretation: time capsules have a cause, but time is no part of it.

Let me now attempt a more formal definition. Any static configuration that appears to contain mutually consistent records of processes that took place in a past in accordance with certain laws may be called a time capsule. From my point of view, it is unfortunate that the dictionary definition (in Webster’s) of a time capsule is ‘a container holding historical records or objects representative of current culture that is deposited (as in a cornerstone) for preservation until discovery by some future age’. I do not mean that. But we have all had the experience of walking into a house untouched by historical development for decades or centuries and declaring it to be a perfect time capsule. This, I believe, happens to us in each instant of time we experience. The only difference is that we experience our current time capsule, not someone else’s. And we are mistaken in the way we interpret the experience.

It is important for me that, as I point out in the next section, the phenomenon of time capsules is very widespread in the physical world, and is not restricted to our mental states and experiences. In addition to my caveat at the end of the previous section, I should emphasize that I am not claiming consciousness plays some remarkable novel or extraphysical role in the world. Unlike Roger Penrose in his best-seller The Emperor’s New Mind, I am not suggesting that there is any ‘new physics’ associated with mental states. There may be, but that is not part of my time-capsule idea. However, I do believe we have to think carefully about the role of consciousness in the picture that we form of the world.