The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics

There is a saying about time, apparently first expressed in a piece of graffiti and much loved by John Wheeler, that seems apt here: ‘Time is nature’s way of preventing everything from happening all at once.’ In a timeless world, verbs of becoming like ‘happen’ have no place. But if Nows are both concrete and distinct, it is a logical contradiction to suppose that they could ‘happen at once’, i.e. be superimposed on one another. I believe that the aphorism expresses a profound truth.

Developing the ‘Platonic’ theme, I conjecture that the actual universe in which we find ourselves corresponds to some Platonia. We have not yet fully grasped the structure of its points, its Nows. Perhaps we never shall, but I assume that in any instant what we experience, including the appearance of motion, is a transmuted representation of a part of one such Now. This is not far removed from Plato’s original idea that we mortals are like beings confined from birth to a cave, and that all we ever comprehend of the outside world and the real beings in it are the shadows they cast on the wall of our cave as they pass its entrance. I also think that Plato was right when he said that Being (one of his forms, one of my instants of time) is real, but that Becoming is an illusion. However, I go further than Plato in attributing the illusion of Becoming to something that is real – a special time-capsule structure of Nows. The illusion of Becoming has its basis in real structure in special Being.

Platonia is the arena that I think must replace space and time. Why this should be so, how it can be done, and what physics in Platonia is like is the meat of the book. But it is already possible to see how differently creation and a supposed beginning of time appear in Platonia. Most people are baffled that time could begin. How many times do we hear the question, ‘But what happened before the Big Bang?’ The question reveals the depth to which the notion of an eternally flowing time is ingrained in the psyche. This is why I call the instants of time ‘things’, so as to break the spell, and why I have chosen the name Platonia for our home. It is also why I use paths as the image of history. In itself, there are no paths in Platonia, just as there were no paths on Earth before animals made them. The points of Platonia – the Nows – are worlds unto themselves. No thread of time joins them up. We must think of Newtonian-type dynamics as something that ‘paints a path’ onto the timeless landscape of Platonia.

Once the instinctive notion of time is expunged, it is easy to see that history, as a path in Platonia, can certainly start or end. The path to Land’s End does terminate there: only the sea lies beyond. Triangle Land has a point like Land’s End: it is the apex of the pyramid, which in Figure 4 I called Alpha. Beyond it is nothing, not even sea. Looking for time before the Big Bang is like looking for Cornwall in the Irish Sea. If we think that time exists and increases or decreases along a path in Triangle Land that terminates at that apex, then we can see that time will certainly begin or end at that point. I think this is how we should think about the Big Bang. It is not in the past, it is at a kind of Land’s End.

All Platonias seem by necessity to possess a distinguished point like the apex of Triangle Land. This is why I call it Alpha. It is suggestive that Platonia has an Alpha but no Omega: there is no limit to the size or complexity of things that can exist. Triangle Land opens out from Alpha to infinity, as do all Platonias. To underline this fact, Figure 5 is my own attempt to give a somewhat more artistic and simultaneously realistic representation of the actual Platonia of our universe, which of necessity is vastly more richly structured than Triangle Land.

Now we must begin to consider how the notion of Platonia will change the way we think about such seemingly simple things as motion. How can it emerge from a scheme without a vestige of time? Is motion really a pure illusion? If we were in London yesterday and New York today, we must have moved. Motion must exist. Let me persuade you that it does not.

IS MOTION REAL?

We had a cat called Lucy, who was a phenomenal hunter. She could catch swifts in flight, leaping two metres into the air. She was seen in the act twice, and must have caught other victims since several times we found just the outermost wing feathers of swifts by the back door. Faced with facts like this, isn’t it ridiculous to claim there is no motion?