The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics

Among the popular books that I know, the two that undoubtedly give most prominence to the problem of time in quantum gravity are Lee Smolin’s The Life of the Cosmos, which contains some discussion of my own ideas, and David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality. There is considerable overlap between my book and Deutsch’s chapter ‘Time: the first quantum concept’. One technical book, now going into a third edition, that from the start has taken timelessness very seriously is Dieter Zeh’s The Physical Basis of the Direction of Time.

It may be that the reason why a book like this one, devoted exclusively to the idea that time does not exist, has not hitherto been published by a physicist has a sociological explanation. For professionals working in institutes and dependent on the opinions of peers for research funding, such a book might damage their reputation and put further research in jeopardy. After all, at first it does seem outrageous to suggest that time does not exist. It may not be accidental that I, as an independent not reliant on conventional funding, have been prepared to ‘come out’.

In this connection, my experience at a big international conference in Spain in 1991 devoted to the arrow of time was very interesting. The following is quoted from my paper in the conference proceedings (available in paperback as Halliwell et al., 1994):

During the Workshop, I conducted a very informal straw-poll, putting the following question to each of the 42 participants:

Do you believe time is a truly basic concept that must appear in the foundations of any theory of the world, or is it an effective concept that can be derived from more primitive notions in the same way that a notion of temperature can be recovered in statistical mechanics?

The results were as follows: 20 said there was no time at a fundamental level, 12 declared themselves to be undecided or wished to abstain, and 10 believed time did exist at the most basic level. However, among the 12 in the undecided/abstain column, 5 were sympathetic to or inclined to the belief that time should not appear at the most basic level of theory.

Thus, a clear majority doubted the existence of time. When I took my straw-poll, I said that I intended to publish the names with their opinions, which was why two people abstained, to remain anonymous. As it happens the conference generated immense media interest in Spain, not least because of the presence of Stephen Hawking and Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann, and the reporter from El Pais got hold of a copy of my results. One of the participants (neither of the above), finding his own opinion quoted in a big article the day after the conference, was none too pleased and greeted me when we met six months later at a conference in Cincinnati with ‘You and your damned straw-poll!’ I then realized why the editors had meanwhile asked me to withhold the names in my paper, which I happily did.

It was at the later conference that I learned a bon mot of Mark Twain that somehow seems appropriate here: ‘If the end of the world is nigh, it is time to be in Cincinnati. Everything comes to Cincinnati twenty years late.’

The Ultimate Things (p. 15) I mentioned in the Preface the difficulty of writing without using temporal notions. The curious state of modern physics as outlined in Box 2 compounds the problem. Because quantum theories are obtained from classical theories by so-called quantization, and classical concepts are much closer to everyday experience, the language used by most physicists, myself included, often seems to imply that the classical theories are somehow deeper than the quantum theories obtained from them. But that is certainly only a reflection of our way to the truth. What is needed is a clear language in which to describe the quantum truth directly and an explanation, based on it, of why the world appears classical to us. I am proposing the notion of a Now as the basic quantum notion.