The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics

This does express the main ideas I have tried to get across in the final part of the book. Each experienced instant is a separate creation (birth), the ever inaugural act of existence, brought to life by the gathering of all times. The thrill that Janet Baker experiences in each Now is the assolutamente unico ma imprevedibile presente, that finding of ourselves in one of the instants that quantum mechanics makes resonate especially strongly with other instants.

As I began, so I end. Turner has taught us the way to look at the world, and even how to come to terms with many worlds. Once any painting of his had reached a certain stage of completion, all additions to it became simply variations on an existing masterpiece. All the stages through which his paintings then passed were perfect, and each was – is – a separate world. Nature is an even more consummate artist than Turner. For he too is part of Nature. Turner is also right in the way he places us humans in the great arena. In nearly all his pictures, human beings, though tiny on the cosmic scale, are integral parts of some huge picture, Keats’s urn painted large. We are simultaneously spectators and participants, subtly changing and constantly working on an inherited landscape. We are there in one place but bound up into something much larger. Gretchen Kubasiak gave me, besides the Tennessee Williams essay, some Aborigine philosophy that, but for the idea that we are visitors, chimes with this thought:

We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love... And then we return home.

No, this is home. Mach once commented that ‘In wishing to preserve our personal memories beyond death, we are behaving like the astute Eskimo, who refused with thanks the gift of immortality without his seals and walruses.’ I am not going without them, either. I cannot even if I wanted to: they are part of me. Like you, I am nothing and yet everything. I am nothing because there is no personal canvas on which I am painted. I am everything because I am the universe seen from the point, unforeseeable because it is unique, that is me now. C’est moi. I am bound to stay. We all watch—and participate in—the great spectacle. Immortality is here. Our task is to recognize it. Some Nows are thrilling and beautiful beyond description. Being in them is the supreme gift.

NOTES

PREFACE

(1) (p. 2) The article about Dirac appeared in the Süddeutsche Zeitung for Friday, 18 October 1963, and was based on an article by Dirac that appeared in Scientific American in May 1963.

(2) (p. 4) On hearing about my plans for this book, Michael Purser brought to my attention the following rebuke from Prince Hal to Falstaff:

Unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons, and clocks the tongues of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping-houses, and the blessed sun himself a fair hot wench in flame-colour’d taffeta, I see no reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to inquire the nature of time.

Henry IV, Part I (1. ii)

(I comment on this in the Epilogue.)

CHAPTER 1: THE MAIN PUZZLES

The Next Revolution in Physics (p. 14) The possible non-existence of time has just begun to be discussed in authoritative books for the general public. Both Paul Davies, in his About Time, and Kip Thorne, in his Black Holes and Time Warps, devote a few pages to the topic. In apocalyptic vein, Thorne likens the fate of space-time near a black hole singularity to

a piece of wood impregnated with water . . . the wood represents space, the water represents time, and the two (wood and water, space and time) are tightly interwoven, unified. The singularity and the laws of quantum gravity that rule it are like a fire into which the water-impregnated wood is thrown. The fire boils the water out of the wood, leaving the wood alone and vulnerable; in the singularity the laws of quantum gravity destroy time . . . (p. 477)

However, Thorne’s magnificent book is devoted to other topics, and nothing prepares the reader for this dramatic and singular end of time. Moreover, the evidence, as I read it, is that timelessness permeates the whole universe, not just the vicinity of singularities. Paul Davies, for his part, repeatedly expresses a deep mystification about time. His book is almost a compendium of conundrums, and he candidly consoles the reader with ‘you may well be even more confused about time after reading this book than you were before. That’s all right; I was more confused myself after writing it’ (p. 10). In fact, I think Paul’s subtitle, Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution, is the key to a lot of the puzzles. As we shall see in Part 3, there are aspects of physical time which Einstein did not address.