The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics

Less provocatively, I wonder if, at root, there is that much difference between the Heraclitan and Parmenidean schools, representing ‘verbs’ and ‘nouns’ respectively. If my definition of an instant of time is accepted, it becomes hard to say in what respect those two great Pre-Socratics might differ. The two best-known sayings attributed to Heraclitus are ‘Everything flows’ (Panta rei) and the very sentence which, entirely unconsciously, I used to clinch the argument that the cat Lucy who leapt to catch the swift was not the cat who landed with her prey: ‘One cannot step into the same river twice.’ There is always change from one instant to another – no two are alike. But that is just what I have tried to capture with the notion of Platonia as the collection of all distinct instants. Heraclitus argued that the appearance of permanence, of enduring substance, is an illusion created by the laws that govern change. Obviously, he and Parmenides could not be expected to have anticipated quantum mechanics, wave functions and the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, But I see Bell’s account of alpha-particle track formation as remarkable support for the Heraclitan standpoint that appearances are the outcome of the laws that bring them forth. Would it not be a wonderful reconciliation of opposites if the static wave function were to settle spontaneously on time capsules that are redolent of both flux (evidence of history) and stasis (evidence that things endured through it)?

But the loss of motion is still poignant, a premonition of mortality and a view of our life from outside it. There is a scene in George Eliot’s Middlemarch in which Ladislaw and a painter friend chance to see the heroine Dorothea in a particularly striking pose in Rome. The painter is keen to capture it on canvas, but Ladislaw taunts him:

Painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection. I feel that especially about representations of women. As if a woman were a mere coloured superficies! You must wait for movement and tone. There is a difference in their very breathing: they change from moment to moment.

Keats too, for all the beauty of his Grecian urn, addresses it with the words

Thou, silent form! Dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity. Cold Pastoral!

When Keats wrote these lines, he must have known that all too soon his home would be a grave. Is Platonia a graveyard? Of a kind it undoubtedly is, but it is a heavenly vault. For it is more like a miraculous store of paintings by artists representing the entire range of abilities. The best pictures are those that somehow reflect one another. These are the paintings we find there in profusion. There are very few of the mediocre, dull ones. Despite what Ladislaw says, the best paintings have a tremendous vibrancy. Turner does almost bind you to the mast of the Ariel. Indeed, Ladislaw’s own words immediately before the passage quoted above are: ‘After all, the true seeing is within.’ Frozen it may be, but Platonia is the demesne where ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ and the boughs cannot shed their leaves ‘nor ever bid the Spring adieu’. With that perfect ode, Keats did achieve the immortality for which he so desperately longed.

In a fine essay entitled ‘The timeless world of a play’, Tennessee Williams praises great sculpture because it

often follows the lines of the human body, yet the repose of great sculpture suddenly transmutes those human lines to something that has an absoluteness, a purity, a beauty, which would not be possible in a living mobile form.

He argues that a play can achieve the same effect, and so help us to escape the ravages of time. ‘Whether or not we admit it to ourselves, we are all haunted by a truly awful sense of impermanence.’ Again, this is very beautiful writing, but has Williams failed to see the truth all around us – the Platonic eternity we inhabit in each instant? Is it blindness that drives him to seek eternity? Some people can pass a cathedral without noticing it.

The desire for an afterlife is very understandable, but we may be looking for immortality in the wrong place. I mentioned Schrödinger’s curious failure to recognize in his own physics the philosophy of ancient India (especially the Upanishads) he so admired. There is a beautiful passage at the end of his epilogue to What is Life? that nevertheless strikes me as wishful thinking. He poses the question, ‘What is this “I”?’ Here is part of his answer: