The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics

EPILOGUE

Life Without Time

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things –

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him

It is a pity that Gerard Manley Hopkins’s finest line in this poem implies that creation is a male prerogative and is so inappropriate for the dawning millennium. But what beauty past change the wave function does manage to find in the nooks and crannies of Platonia! What are we to think of life if time and motion are nothing but very well-founded illusions? I have selected a few topics, trying to anticipate some of the questions that the reader, as a human being rather than a scientist, might ask. I also give some hints of how I think the divide between impersonal science and the world of the arts, emotions and religious aspirations might be bridged somewhere in Platonia. I love and respect the disciplines of both. Can they be shown to flow from a common view of the world?

Can We Really Believe in Many Worlds?

The evidence for them is strong. The history of science shows that physicists have tended to be wrong when they have not believed counterintuitive results of good theories. However, despite strong intellectual acceptance of many worlds, I live my life as if it were unique. You might call me a somewhat apologetic ‘many-worlder’! There are occasions when the real existence of other worlds, other outcomes, seems very hard to accept. Soon after I started writing this book, Princess Diana was killed, and Britain – like much of the world – was gripped by a most extraordinary mood. Watching the funeral service live, I did wonder how seriouslyone can take a theory which suggests that she survived the crash in other worlds. Death appears so final.

Such doubts may arise from the extraordinary creative power – whatever it is – that lies behind the world. What we experience in any instant always appears to be embedded in a rich and coherent story. That is what makes it seem unique. I would be reassured if the blue mist did indeed seek out only such stories. Shakespeare wrote many plays, nearly all masterpieces. But we do not even have a unique Hamlet: producers are always cutting different lines, and producing the play in novel ways. Variety is no bad thing: I have enjoyed many outstanding Hamlets. In the timeless many-instants interpretation, they were all other worlds, and that is what makes timeless quantum cosmology fascinating. Our past is just another world. This is the message that quantum mechanics and the deep timeless structure of general relativity seem to be telling us. If you accept that you experienced this morning, that commits you to other worlds. All the instants we have experienced are other worlds, for they are not the one we are in now. Can we then deny the existence of worlds on which ψ collects just as strongly as on our remembered experiences?

Does Free Will Exist?

Anyone committed to science has difficulty with free will. In The Selfish Gene (2nd edition, pp.270-71), Dawkins asks, ‘What on earth do you think you are, if not a robot, albeit a very complicated one?’ From personal introspection, I do not believe that my conscious self exercises free will. Certainly I ponder difficult decisions at length, but the decision itself invariably comes into consciousness from a different, unconscious realm. Brain research confirms that what we think are spontaneous decisions, acts of free will, are prepared in the unconscious mind before we become aware of them.

However, the many-instants interpretation puts an intriguingly different slant on causality, suggesting that it operates in nothing like the way we normally believe it to. In both classical physics and Everett’s original scheme, what happens now is the consequence of the past. But with many instants, each Now ‘competes’ with all other Nows in a timeless beauty contest to win the highest probability. The ability of each Now to ‘resonate’ with the other Nows is what counts. Its chance to exist is determined by what it is in itself. The structure of things is the determining power in a timeless world.

The same applies to us, for our conscious instants are embedded in the Nows. The probability of us experiencing ourselves doing something is just the sum of the probabilities for all the different Nows in which that experience is embedded. Everything we experience is brought into existence by being what it is. Our very nature determines whether we shall or shall not be. I find that consoling. We are because of what we are. Our existence is determined by the way we relate to (or resonate with) everything else that can be. Although Darwinism is a marvellous theory, and I greatly admire and respect Richard Dawkins’s writings, one day the theory of evolution will be subsumed in a greater scheme, just as Newtonian mechanics was subsumed in relativity without in any way ceasing to be great and valid science. For this reason, and for the remarks just made, I do not think that we are robots or that anything happens by chance. That view arises because we do not have a large enough perspective on things. We are the answers to the question of what can be maximally sensitive to the totality of what is possible. That is quite Darwinian. Species, ultimately genes, exist only if they fit in an environment. Platonia is the ultimate environment.

In Box 3, I said that Platonia is a ‘heavenly vault’ in which the music of the spheres is played. This formulation grew out of numerous discussions with the Celtic composer, musicologist and poet John Purser (brother of the mathematician and cryptographer Michael, who made the comment about my parents with which I ended the Preface, and brought to my attention the Shakespeare quotation). With the inimitable assurance of which only he is capable, John is adamant that the only theory of the universe that ever made sense was (is) the music of the spheres. My guts tell me that he and the artists quite generally are right. But harmony rests on mathematics, of course. Rather appropriately, given my extensive use of meteorological metaphor, John and his wife Bar live in the misty Isle of Skye, where at least one of the said discussions took place while the better part of a bottle of whisky was consumed, mostly by John.

You will naturally ask why we do not hear this music of the spheres. Keats provides a first answer: ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter’. But Leibniz may have given the true answer. In his monadology, he teaches that the quintessential you, everything you experience in consciousness and the unconscious, is precisely this music. You are the music of the spheres heard from the particular vantage point that is you. This is taking a little liberty with the letter but certainly not the spirit of his great philosophical scheme. On the subject of liberties, I have taken fewer with Leibniz than Michael did with Shakespeare. Hal does not actually ask Falstaff (‘fat-witted with drinking of old sack’) why he should be so superfluous ‘to inquire the nature of time’ but to ‘demand the time of day’. But, were it not for the blessed Sun and its diurnal rotation (our fortunate circumstances), the one question would be as profound as the other.

Now for something like the original Gretchenfrage.

Is There a Role for a Creator in Quantum Cosmology?

Perhaps, but it is a somewhat strange one. It seems to me that science can never do more than guess – theorize about – the structure of things and then test to see whether its conjectures are confirmed. This is an open-ended venture (with tremendous successes behind it) and always presupposes that there is some structure already out there waiting to be found. In the scheme I have advanced, much is presupposed: Platonia, its detailed structure (immensely important) and a wave function that ‘samples’ possibilities. It is the nature of theory to presuppose something, so that always leaves a potential role for a Creator. But does invoking something to explain what we cannot explain get us any further?

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.

This is magnificent poetry as a description of the mystical state in which mind comprehends all structure as unified. But the real wonder of unity is when it knits together rich variety. Bliss is comprehension of many things in harmony at once. I do not think that eternity is pure and endless light. Such light merely illuminates, for example, the millions of leaves of the forest of the American fall when we see them all at once.

Is Time Travel Possible?

Time travel of a sort is possible within general relativity as a classical theory, but is subject to strict limitations. You cannot travel back into the past and kill your parents before your conception. In quantum cosmology, you can travel back to a parallel universe, and there kill your parents before they conceive you. However, we have to be careful about the use of ‘you’. The person who ‘travels’ to these other worlds is not exactly you now. As the discussion of the haemoglobin molecule showed, the change within our bodies from one instant to another is stupendous. The fact that we have such an enduring sense of deep continuity of our personal identity is very remarkable. I see it as another manifestation of the creative power that brings everything into existence. Stephen Hawking long suspected that even if time travel is logically possible, it will have a very low probability in quantum cosmology. That is my feeling too. Platonia certainly contains Nows in which there are beings whose memories tell them they have travelled backwards in time. However, I think such Nows have a very low probability.

To tell the truth, I find the idea of time travel boring compared with the reality of our normal existence. Each time capsule that represents an experienced Now reflects innumerable other Nows all over Platonia, some of them vividly. In a very real sense, our memories make us present in what we call the past, and our anticipations give us a foretaste of what we call the future. Why do we need time machines if our very existence is a kind of being present everywhere in what can be? This is very Leibnizian. We are all part of one another, and we are each just the totality of things seen from our own viewpoint.

Doesn’t the Denial of Motion Take All Joy and Verve out of Life?

I do feel this issue keenly. The kingfisher parable should make that clear. In principle, there is no reason why we should not attempt to put our very direct sense of change directly into the foundations of physics. There is a long tradition, going back at least to Hamilton, that seeks to make process the most basic thing in the world. Roughly, the idea is that physics should be built up using verbs, not nouns. In 1929 the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead published an unreadable – in my experience – book called Process and Reality in which he advocated process. It all sounds very exciting, but I just do not think it can be done, despite a valiant attempt by Abner Shimony. Having translated seventy million words of Russian into English, I can say with some feeling that sentences do have a subject and generally an object. I could have written this book using the one verb ‘to be’, which hardly counts as a verb. For this reason it seldom appears in Russian; when it does, it is most often as a surrogate: ‘to appear’. But a book without nouns is nothing. Not even James Joyce could write it. For some reason, disembodied verbs exert a fascination not unlike the grin of the Cheshire cat. But when Owen Glendower claimed to be able to ‘call up spirits from the vasty deep’, Hotspur answered: ‘Aye, and so can I and any man, but will they come when you call them?’ I should like to see it done.

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:

If you analyse it closely you will, I think, find that it is just a little bit more than a collection of single data (experiences and memories), namely the canvas upon which they are collected. And you will, on close introspection, find that what you really mean by ‘I’ is that ground-stuff upon which they are collected. You may come to a distant country, lose sight of all your friends, may all but forget them; you acquire new friends, you share life with them as intensely as you ever did with your old ones … Yet there has been no intermediate break, no death.

Thus, he argues that our personal ‘ground-stuff is imperishable, holding us together through all the changes of life. He ends with this affirmation of faith: ‘In no case is there a loss of personal existence to deplore. Nor will there ever be.’ But earlier he had praised the great Upanishads for their recognition that ATHMAN = BRAHMAN (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self). He seems to want to have his cake and eat it, to be dissolved in the all-comprehending eternal self yet still retain a personal identity. He is not finding a canvas, he is clutching for a straw.

Tennessee Williams faced up to things more squarely: ‘About their lives people ought to remember that when they are finished, everything in them will be contained in a marvelous state of repose which is the same as that which they unconsciously admired in drama.’ Exactly: this is the truth and beauty of Keat’s Grecian urn. Williams goes on: ‘Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.’ Yes, though it’s not a magic trick but simply the opening of our eyes.

Some years ago, I heard Dame Janet Baker interviewed on radio. She was asked if she ever listened to her recordings and, if so, what were her favourites. She said she almost never listened to them. For her, every Now was so exciting and new, it was a great mistake to try to repeat one. In her singing she made no attempt at all to recreate earlier performances and do the high points the same way as the night before. Again and again she spoke with the deepest reverence of the Now and how it should be new and happen spontaneously. ‘The Now is what is real’, she said.

I thought it was the perfect artistic expression of how I see timeless quantum cosmology. By definition, every Now in Platonia is new, for all the Nows are different. But some are vastly more interesting and exciting than others. Miraculously, these are the Nows that the wave function of the universe seems to find with unerring skill.

What a gift too is the specious present. Appreciation of poetry and music would be impossible without it. I can live without motion if I can sense it as the line that runs through a story all bound up in one Now. Janet Baker is right. Watching motion, listening to Beethoven, looking at a painting by Turner – all are given to us in the Now, which we experience as the specious present. Einstein seems to have regretted that modern science – and his own relativity in particular – had taken the Now, the vibrant present, out of the world. On the contrary, I think the Now may well constitute the very essence of the physical world, the first quantum concept (as David Deutsch refers to time). The artists always knew it was there, and worshipped at its altar. It was Dirac’s rediscovery of the Now at the heart of general relativity that started my quest.

I do also feel that novelty is a genuine element of quantum mechanics, especially in the many-worlds form, not present in classical mechanics. In the main text I spoke of lying down to sleep and knowing ‘not what we should wake to’. I see no fundamental line of time and causal evolution along which we march as robots; each experienced Now is new and distinct. I think that the many-worlds hypothesis is the scientific counterpart of the thrill of artistic creation that Janet Baker feels so strongly. It is something essentially new for which there is no adequate explanation in any supposed past from which we have tumbled via a computer algorithm. There is no explanation of any one triangle in terms of any others, and the same is true of all Nows.

The Italian painter Claudio Olivieri, a friend of Bruno Bertotti, creates paintings in which he evokes a sense of timelessness. He expresses his aim through this poem:

È con la pittura che le apparenze si mutano in apparizioni:

Ciò che è mostrato non è la verosimiglianza ma la nascita.

È così che ci viene restituto il nostro presente,

L’assolutamente unico ma imprevedibile presente,

Somma di tutti tempi, raduno degli attimi che ci fanno

Viventi, atto sempre inaugurale dell’esistere.

A free translation is as follows:

The painting transfigures semblance in sudden apparition,

showing not likeness but birth.

That is how we are given back our present,

The absolutely unique but unforeseeable present,

sum of all times, gathering of the moments that make us alive,

the ever inaugural act of existence.

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.