Time Beyond the Big Bang?

Every so often a new hypothesis comes along that has more than just great descriptive powers but the capacity to expand the human imagination as well. A cyclical universe based on string theory is an especially intriguing example because it postulates time extending beyond the fiery Big Bang event, typically considered the beginning of time, space and everything else. This idea emerges from the need to explain the cosmological constant found today that is much smaller than calculations predict. 06.05.06

"Ever since the 1960s, people assumed that the big bang was the beginning of time, because the laws of physics seem to break down there," says Turok. But the equations of string theory tell a different story, allowing time to exist before the big bang, he says.

According to Steinhardt and Turok, today's universe is part of an endless cycle of big bangs and big crunches, with each cycle lasting about a trillion years. At every big bang, the amount of matter and radiation in the universe is reset, but the cosmological constant is not. Instead, the cosmological constant gradually diminishes over many cycles to the small value observed today.

... "This is an ingenious solution," says cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, US. But he points out that there are other cosmic coincidences that the cyclic model cannot explain, like why the size of the cosmological constant is so similar to the density of matter in the universe today.

Turok says that he and Steinhardt will be looking at that problem next. "This is an initial attempt to go beyond Einstein's theory of gravity," says Turok. "It would be surprising if we solved everything first time."
'Cyclic universe' can explain cosmological constant, New Scientist, May 4, 2006.

Thoughts on Time Travel

Our traditional conceptions of time travel are deeply flawed and thus when examined closely reveal only contradictions and paradoxes if put into practice. For instance if someone goes back in time, would they then be creating their own time machine? Or what if they kill their grandparents, or, well… you know the stories.

Reverse time travel would definitely do strange things but not the paradoxes that clichéd science-fiction often use as plot-devices. In the process of going back in time it would reverse causality too, so instead of flipping a switch to turn on a light you would flip the switch after the light is on. This is one of many reasons why time travel backwards is simply not possible, the structure of time is a connected and limited by the structure of space. Further the flow of time is connected to the expansions of the universe, and also if that expansion were to reverse so would our arrow of time.

Small fluctuations, random vibrations even down to the quantum level are inherently unpredictable and lead to a vibrant and dynamic flow of time and events, thus even going back in time and restarting would not see the same course of events, nothing is pre-determined, although at a macro-scale certain events are more likely than others, obviously. But this is not the same as lack of free-will or predestination. Randomness is created by heat because it is the heat that causes molecules and atoms to move around, so literally the chaotic nature of our reality is a product of some mere three degrees Kelvin that our universe is currently warmed to. Freezing a set of atoms down to absolute aero, meaning no heat at all, creates a strange form of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate. The atoms merge into one solid block that is indistinguishable – without heat all matter turns into a single solid atom of … stuff.

So we have to think of time like space, the two are inter-related dimensions. Change time, change space or change space and change time too. If the universe expands, time expands, if the universe is contracting so does time. And it would be very intriguing if a separate region inside our universe were found to be contracting instead of expanding but this is fairly unlikely and even if it occurred there’s no guarantee that travel would be possible between regions.

Reverse causality would be a profoundly bizarre thing to experience from our perspective but in practice it may seem just as normal for your cup of water to get hot before you push the start button on the microwave oven instead of after as we’re used to the reverse. Even thought and action would be reversed, so during backwards time travel your thoughts would come after your action connected to it. Given this strange state it would seem to me that even if backwards time travel could be done it would probably erase memories and maybe other things as well but whatever happened it would not be as neat and painless as stepping into a booth and setting a clock, at least not while still being able to remain attached to your own space-timeline. Otherwise, if possible at all, you could go back in time but you’d be completely separated in space as well from your original universe so again no information would ever be transferred in a way that it could be used – and the laws of physics win again.

Forward time travel is much easier, just speed up! Anything traveling near light speed will continue at normal time but everyone else will seem to you to be going much slower and will age millions of years when you come back from your relativistic travels. So even at the much slower than light speed travels, those speedy astronauts in their space craft zipping around Earth right now are maybe a few seconds younger than the Earthbound rest of us. But the value of this sort of ‘time travel’, if it can be called that, is fairly limited. In fact the radiation exposure from space travel negates any life-span extensions! Amazingly enough, travel faster than light (FTL) is possible but it cannot ever convey any useful information at that rate. An interesting book all about this is titled Faster Than Light – superluminal loopholes in physics by Nick Herbert PhD. 1989.

So as far as we are concerned when it comes to time its safe to state that the magnitude can change but not the direction. The only way to change the direction of time would be to change the characteristics of space. If matter could be removed from the universe, black holes perhaps, then the gravity could be reduced and the universe might shrink. But even if possible, that’s one incredibly inefficient (and probably suicidal) way to try and reverse time. 03.12.03

Things That Keep Me Awake At Night

You may have read a recent news article on CERN's accumulation of enough anti-hydrogen to conduct some basic experiments concerning the properties of anti-matter. Even though many people thought that anti-matter was a new creation it is not, but rather the news is the quantity of it.

I got to thinking about something else though. Every book on particle physics I've read has operated on the assumption that anti-matter is a mirror refection of matter meaning it's the same stuff but it has opposite charges. That seems simple enough but as we probably all know when anti-matter meets regular matter they instantly annihilate with the release of a flash of energy. This after all is the attraction of matter / anti-matter as a future energy source because it is a perfect transfer, you don't lose anything in the conversion process. But this is the part that is perplexing because if matter and anti-matter were really exact copies then they both should simply vanish upon contact without any energy release.

Any equal quantity (x) of matter combined with an equal quantity of anti-matter yields nothing but a certain amount of energy. The math looks like this (-x) + (+x) = 0 + energy, but as we all know the actual math equation is just (-x) + (+x) = 0. Where does the energy (in this case gamma rays) come from?

Matter is equivalent to energy, the two are interchangeable according to the equation E=mc2. And the conservation laws tell us we can never get something from nothing but neither can we lose more than we have to begin with. In other words the two parts on either sides of the equals sign in the equation must be equivalent. Given that, from everything I know it seems we have a problem here because the matter / anti-matter equation is telling us that (-1) + (+1) = 1 (or some positive amount >1)

Either matter-antimatter interactions don't follow conservation laws like everything else known to us or their is a fundamental difference between the two types of matter that seriously contradicts established physics. Even if you say the energy comes from the bonds between the particles, you have to postulate that some part of the antiparticle is the same as a regular particle meaning the two types are asymmetrical. I don't see any other way to cut it.
Am I missing something? Anyone have any ideas?
Hopefully CERN will figure this out one way or the other, the results may be surprising.

We already know that matter and anti-matter do have an asymmetry called Charge Parity (CP) violation. But that just says that matter and anti-matter are not created in equal quantities. If at the start of the universe equal parts had poured out, then the universe would consist entirely of energy.
High Energy physics has found more than one of these near symmetries, it's enough to drive one mad in frustration because we shouldn't find any. The universe is really symmetrical but those extra dimensions all curled up (nearly) beyond measurement DO exert an influence on our level, hence the near symmetries. Add in the extra dimension and it does become symmetrical. 22.09.02

Cosmological Life

Life comes from space, carried on comets, or at least that's where I would start looking. Most likely a virus or similar ultra-simple basic self-replication device. But life doesn't live in space it just hibernates and passes through and like a virus it needs a habitable realm to spread and live. And I think we will find that life can only take hold on habitable planets or moons during a very narrow time window. Like the egg that forms a barrier upon fertilization the Earth, for example, quickly formed an atmosphere around four billion years ago which would vaporize any life entering the atmosphere then. And also we know that early Earth was bombarded by comets giving it large quantities of water. Panspermia, that life is omnipresent has some problems because after all wouldn't we find it? More likely it's out there but either localized or rare meaning thinly spread. Still life had to start somewhere and this concept merely makes it more possible by including the vastness of space (and especially those warm interstellar clouds of chemicals) as breeding ground. Abiogenesis is about the only non-supernatural hypothesis around. And at present no one really knows exactly how it did or could happen. But accidents do happen even when the chances are billions to one, as long as the accident is self-replicating it will propagate.

Special creation and the tautology of the absurdly simple

One sees the universe as being custom crafted, being made for human inhabitants (by God). That's illogical reasoning. The reason everything seems so 'special' is because if it wasn't we wouldn't be around to contemplate it! If the universe was made of black holes no life could be in it to marvel at those black holes. If the universe was all energy, no life would be in it to contemplate the all energy universe. Things are as they are because they must be that way for us to be around to see them not because of any detached, supernatural beings fickle whims. And this is not the anthropic principle either, human perception, indeed all life is secondary to the issue.

As our scientific knowledge has increased so has our concept of scale as we humans fit into the larger picture. At first It was just the tribe, then the continent, then planet Earth, then the solar system with Earth as the center, then Copernicus showed the sun was the center of the solar system, then we thought the Milky way galaxy was all that existed, then galaxies turned into just another smaller component of the larger whole, the Universe. But it doesn't stop there by any means, for what we see to exist requires other universes, a universe of universes and a probability or evolution of sorts on a meta-universal scale. As humbling as it is the scale and perhaps significance of humanity shrinks in accordance with the magnitude of our knowledge. Universes are like grains of sand on the beach, or stars in our sky, or atoms in our body. How high does the meta scale climb? Will we ever know? All I can conclude for now is that's definitely a niche for the philosophers! Finally if you want a theological scale-conundrum to ruminate over ask yourself who created God? 01.01.01

Heavy Gravity

Anyone who’s followed recent theoretical musings on the lifecycle of the universe knows about the dark matter debate. Fundamentally the problem is that a deficit of matter appears to exist in the universe to account for the gravitational mechanics that are observed. Thus one conclusion is that large quantities of unknown or undetected matter must exist to account for the structure of the known universe. It could be simple like neutrinos (if they have enough mass and quantity) or something totally unknown yet. But one answer I haven’t seen explored has to do with black holes (maybe I should research Mr. Hawkings work?). Since black holes suck in matter and energy without producing anything at all in return, then logically the universe today has less matter and energy than it did 10-15 billion years ago when it started out. And since the observed distant universe is farther back in time, perhaps the mass-gravitational characteristics of our universe are changing. This is actually fairly profound because it could mean that the very laws of physics are changing as well.

But in order for this hypothesis to work it would require many black holes or a few very large ones gobbling up matter and energy never to be seen again. This concept is increasingly plausible especially with the discovery of both naked black holes and stranded black holes outside galaxies. It seems that black holes may be much more abundant than previously thought. These two discoveries alone will significantly alter our ideas on the destiny of our universe. 14.01.00

Factors that made advanced life possible include the Earth's having:

* The proper distance from the sun to allow development of habitat for complex life and ensure that water remains liquid, not vapor or ice.
* The proper mass to retain atmosphere and ocean.
* Plate tectonics, which act as a sort of atmospheric thermostat, build land masses and enhance biotic diversity.
* A neighbor the size of Jupiter, not too close and not too far away, that can use its gravity to protect the planet from too many life-extinguishing collisions with comets and asteroids.
* A stable orbit unperturbed by giant planets.
* A large moon at the right distance to stabilize tilt, thus ensuring seasonal climate fluctuations that are not too severe.
* Enough carbon to support development of life but not so much to allow for runaway greenhouse conditions.
In addition, Brownlee and Ward contend, the solar system's position in the Milky Way galaxy also is key to life development on Earth. At the edge of the galaxy, many stars are too metal-poor for planet formation, while the center of the galaxy has extreme energy processes that would hinder complex life.
[From UniSci.com 19.01.2000 "We Could Be All alone In Space, Book Declares" ]

Makes you think don’t it?

I am not a firm believer in extra-terrestrial life, in fact I think that the SETI program is a total waste of money. From ‘nuclear winter’ to the ubiquitousness of cosmic intelligence closet stoner Carl Sagan was always long on story and short on tested fact. The truth is that life, when and where it occurs, is an absolute - completely overtaking a planet. If it’s there you know it and the corollary - if it can be there it will be. The fact that we have found none outside of earth and the fact that habitable planets are extremely rare if others exist at all, can only mean that intelligent life is fantastically uncommon to the point of anomalous absurdity. From quantum mechanics to environmental structures the fact we are here at all is a paradox; everything must be exactly as it is for anything to work.

Either something is missing from our knowledge of how the universe works or human life is testament to the impossible. Perhaps this explains some of the unwaning popularity of God. More likely we will discover that evolution works on a scale beyond that of our universe itself and the structures we take for granted such as time and matter are equally mutable on a meta-scale.

If Earth were 1% farther from the sun the surface would have been frozen solid for the past 2 billion years. Or if Earth was five percent closer to the sun in its orbit the oceans would have boiled away to create a world like Venus. If Earth’s radius were 10 percent larger then so much carbon dioxide would have been released during the volcanic period that the atmosphere would have formed a blanket around the earth, trapping heat and raising temperatures above the boiling point of water. If Earth’s radius were less than 94% of its actual value the gravitational attraction would have been too small for the planet to develop an ozone layer preventing surface life from existing.

Had the sun’s mass been less than 83% of what it is a habitable zone would case to exist. Meaning that planets would either freeze or boil without any middle ground. If the sun were much larger than its present size it would consume its fuel too quickly and burn out before life could become established.

And what about the moon? Coincidences abound there too like the fact that Earth’s moon is exactly the correct size and distance to crate perfect eclipses. I wonder what the statistical possibilities are for that occurring? Probably not outrageously unlikely, just unusual that’s all. But the moon is odd in other ways too such as the extreme age of the rocks on its surface; they pre-date everything found on earth. Our moon is so large that it effects Earth in many ways, from tides to biorhythms. Human life couldn’t have existed without the moon gravity creating energy from wave action in the archaic seas.

The point is that, beyond the intriguing philosophical aspects extra-terrestrial life is not something we as a species should be concerned about at the present stage of our development. Not that all space exploration is worthless; on the contrary near-Earth pioneering should be of primary concern to everyone. We need to deal with the life and death struggles going on right here on Earth before we gamble on the incomprehensibly insignificant odds that friendly and intelligent life is within communication and travel distance. 02.12.99

Live for when?

Why does it seem like when we live for today everything fails and strategic planning was what should have been done; yet whenever we try to plan ahead the results get destroyed by future events anyway?! It's all so pointless, we don't really know anything! Quantum fluctuations create the presents future - it's probably impossible to control all of the choices - how much power does one individual have. Besides all structures are dynamic and rely on multiple choices to determine the outcome.

Reality is heaven and hell at the same time! Like a beggar in a grocery store. So much potential for so few to gain!

What can I control then? Very little it seems. If everything is merely a guess anyway well never gain anything since at best the odds are 50/50. Is it a closed system where If I win someone else must equally lose? If so then maybe I should concentrate on making others lose! I can't see how it must be a closed loop and even if it is the whole structure is so large it hardly matters. Still in many ways I have more power than the average, much energy is still potential. I know what I want but not how to get it. This potential energy needs to be channeled towards those goals but momentum is a necessity - even if it starts out in the wrong direction, in other words you can't win or lose until the chips are on the table. When you want much it's tough to be patient or satisfied with current efficacy. 09.01.98

Biological Evolution in Perspective

Evolution can be viewed as a perception of change from the present to the past. Obviously the animal fits the environment (otherwise it dies out) but that’s the same thing as everything else in the background of reality - it all fits together in a logical pattern. But if human consciousness can alter its perception of reality then evolution is a misnomer, no biological succession from one form to another actually occurs. Evolution is merely a reverse view of perceptional changes in reality, the life forms merely fitting in like puzzle pieces to form the most logical pattern for the given reality at any time period. That applies to non-sentient life not to human evolution which is much more complicated than this principle or even standard biological evolution.

Several problems develop in this theory though for what defines consciousness, and if every human has reality shifting abilities than how can they all be interacting on the same planet? In other words whose perception is defining both the ‘evolved’ background life and everything else? I find it extremely difficult to make this theory work without employing a solipsistic system. But solipsism runs into the problem of why aren’t all humans the best fit for their environment like the other life forms? Obviously the stupid and weak outnumber the strong and intelligent, what gives?

Another intriguing aspect of quantum reality shifting or QRS, is that death would appear to be impossible. In fact we could be dying all the time and never realize it simply because consciousness can’t exist without the living support organism. If the body dies then consciousness would be forced to immediately shift to a parallel world where death did not occur! But doesn’t birth imply death also? The universe was ‘born’ at a finite moment yet it may well expand infinitely, why not consciousness also? Regardless I have no memory or irrefutable evidence of my birth so theoretically it may not have ever occurred. Aging is natural just like the universe but that doesn’t mean life is finite, aging could extend to eternity, why not? QRS theory is so profound it can literally turn everything upside down and still ‘fit the facts’, the malleability of everything is truly startling and not a little disconcerting! 01.01.98

"...if the strong nuclear force had been slightly weaker, the universe would have been composed of hydrogen only; slightly stronger, and all the hydrogen would have been converted to helium. Slight variation in the excess of protons over antiprotons - one billion and one to one billion- might have produced a universe with no baryonic matter or a cataclysmic plenitude of it. Had the expansion rate of the universe one second after the big bang been smaller by one part in a hundred thousand trillion, the universe would have recollapsed long ago. An expansion more rapid by one part in a million would have excluded the formation of stars and planets." Wrinkles in Time p.293 by G. Smoot. 21.02.98

Everything explained

Quantum mechanics has a very difficult time explaining why things happen even if it can predict what will happen. I have a problem with all the current theories such as the many-universes because they all are too complicated. It seems more likely that the nature of quantum reality is fundamentally very simple even if doesn’t necessarily appear that way. We need to go back to ‘Occam's razor’, the simplest answer is the most correct. Modern quantum science’s second error is the assumption that the descriptions of quantum systems are mutually exclusive, that only one explanation is valid - they’re not ! It’s all just different facets of the same object.

The first point to explain is time. Time is a human limitation on our perception of reality; we can’t know it all, only a tiny bit. The sense of matter, energy, everything is merely looking at the same object from different angles like rotating a die we see different numbers but it’s all on the same object. Time is just a perception of different sides sequentially ordered. We cant see the whole cube at once but we can see the parts if they are spread out on a historical timeline!

Now if this dimensional analogy is extended to create an object with infinite sides , like a sphere, that is our universe. It’s impossible for us to see each side but we can know one tiny, tiny part at a time.

Evolution, life, death its all a path of connected scenes from facets of the infinitely sided object. It makes sense (history, future etc.) to us because it follows the line of most probable events. Nothing changes, all is as it ever will be, every possibility exist simultaneously. So, going back to the dice analogy, something like evolution or our own lives is just looking at the dice multiple times. Overall any number on the slide show is random but the whole number set follows a probability; two dice average out to a most common number of seven.

This is fractal geometry at work because it mimics the quantum reality that we measure. In other words if we look at a small enough unit (one frame in the film) it becomes random and unpredictable - quantum uncertainties, but the larger structure follows statistical patterns, it’s ordered and predictable (like life systems).

The number seven is the equivalent of our universe, the one we see with the Hubble telescope and the electron microscope. Our whole universe is a completely normal average occurrence, we are 7 ! Small scale randomness i.e. the snake eyes or the double sixes are here too but they don’t dominate they just add color to the painting.

So if nothing really changes who defines the order of the slide show? Who or what determines the pattern of time that we perceive? I think it’s a combination of group perceptions spread by communication and solipsistic interpretations. Think about it though, can anyone feel exactly the way I feel, to feel what I feel?! No! all perceptions are inherently individualistic. Everyone has their own reality. The simplest solution to the problem of group perceptions is to just eliminate the group. After all every sense of reality ultimately boils down to personal perceptions, feelings and sensations. Everything is ME, I am the universe; reality is my own filmstrip.

Next comes the question why is everything the way it is? Why does time follow an order a repetitive pattern? All reality is tautology! I perceive time thus what I see in the universe (how everything evolves) supports this reasoning of time scale. Evolutionary structures are statistically the most probable method of creating a perception of time. None of this is good or bad, it’s just statistics! It’s all the number seven.

Everyone gets into the philosophical argument over what created the universe, or how did universes begin evolving? It’s irrelevant; creation is a meaningless concept to the meta universe(s). The structure consists of nothing and everything superimposed simultaneously! This hyper-structure that our universe exists in isn’t some grandiose concept or a playpen for God, it’s really a fantastic simplicity that stunts comprehension. All that is, will be, or can be, is nothing more than a minimal fundamental duality, it’s so simple I can’t even explain it well! It’s a unit that consists of a ‘-’ and a ‘+’, a yin and a yang or a 1 and a -1.

This is everything:

( 1 + -1 )
minus the parenthesis of course!
or just
0

Every universe that has lived and died and reproduced all at compressed to instantaneousness. The amazing complexity of what we see is nothing more than a portion of the ultimate mathematical simplicity, a singularity. Complexity is just a fraction of simplicity! Commutatively, the sum of all complexity is simplicity. That's it right there!! The sum of all complexity is total simplicity. ‘Everything’ is ultimately just a portion of ‘nothing’.

The most ridiculous collective myth is that everything means something, that a purpose and a goal exists. The truth is that nothing has substance outside of the fraction of a second that is consciousness! Matter, time, and energy are just reflections of higher dimensionality. Just as we can’t comprehend a 2-D reality neither can we understand how a 5th or 6th dimensions functions. 13.06.98

Here's an article that meshes rather well with what I've hypothesized on my own

Does time really exist?

TIME seems to be the most powerful force, an irresistible river carrying us from birth to death. To most people it is an inescapable part of life, a fundamental element of the Universe.

But I think that time is an illusion. Physicists struggling to unify quantum mechanics and Einstein's general theory of relativity have found hints that the Universe is timeless. I believe that this idea should be taken seriously. Paradoxically, we might be able to explain the mysterious "arrow of time"-the difference between past and future-by abandoning time. But to understand how, we need to change radically our ideas of how the Universe works.

Let's start with Newton's picture of absolute time. He argued that objects exist in an immense immobile space, stretching like a block of glass from infinity to infinity. His time is an invisible river that "flows equably without relation to anything external". Newton's absolute space and time form a framework that exists at a deeper level than the objects in it.

To see how it works, imagine a universe containing only three particles. To describe its history in Newton's terms, you specify a succession of sets of 10 numbers: one for time and three for the spatial coordinates of each of the three particles. But this picture is suspect. As the space-time framework is invisible, how can you determine all the numbers? As far back as 1872, the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach argued that the Universe should be described solely in terms of observable things, the separations between its objects.

With that in mind, we can use a very different framework for the three-particle Universe-a strange, abstract realm called Triangle Land. Think of the three particles as the corners of a triangle. This triangle is completely defined by the lengths of its three sides-just three numbers. You can take these three numbers and use them as coordinates, to mark a point in an abstract "configuration space" (see Diagram, p 30).

Each possible arrangement of three particles corresponds to a point in this space. There are geometrical restrictions-no triangle has one side longer than the other two put together-so it turns out that all the points lie in or on a pyramid. At the apex of Triangle Land, where all three coordinates are zero, is a point that I call Alpha. It represents the triangle that has sides all of zero length (in other words, all three particles are in the same place).

In the same way, the configurations of a four-particle universe form Tetrahedron Land. It has six dimensions, corresponding to the six separations between pairs of particles-hard to conceive, but it exists as a mathematical entity. And even for the stupendous number of particles that make up our own Universe, we can envisage a vast multidimensional structure representing its configurations. In collaboration with Bruno Bertotti of Pavia University in Italy, I have shown that conventional physics still works in this strange world. As Plato taught that reality exists as perfect forms, I think of the patterns of particles as Platonic forms, and call their totality Platonia.

Platonia is an image of eternity. It is all the arrangements of matter that can be. Looking at it as a whole, there seems to be no more river of time. But could time be hiding? Perhaps there is some sort of local time that makes sense to inhabitants of Platonia.

In classical physics, something like time can indeed creep back in. If you were to lay out all the instants of an evolving Newtonian universe, it would look like a path drawn in Platonia. As a godlike being, outside Platonia, you could run your finger along the path, touching points that correspond to each different arrangement of matter, and see a universe that continuously changes from one state to another. Any point on this path still has something that looks like a definite past and future.

Now's the place

But we know that classical physics is wrong. The world is described by quantum mechanics-and in the arena of Platonia, quantum mechanics kills time.

In the quantum wave theory created by Schrsdinger, a particle has no definite position, instead it has a fuzzy probability of being at each possible position. And for three particles, say, there is a certain probability of their forming a triangle in a particular orientation with its centre of mass at some absolute position. The deepest quantum mysteries arise because of holistic statements of this kind. The probabilities are for the whole, not the parts.

What probabilities could quantum mechanics specify for the complete Universe that has Platonia as its arena? There cannot be probabilities at different times because Platonia itself is timeless. There can only be once-and-for-all probabilities for each possible configuration.

In this picture, there are no definite paths. We are not beings progressing from one instant to another. Rather, there are many "Nows" in which a version of us exists-not in any past or future, but scattered in our region of Platonia.

This may sound like the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics, published in 1957 by Hugh Everett of Princeton University. But in that scheme time still exists: history is a path that branches whenever some quantum decision has to be made. In my picture there are no paths. Each point of Platonia has a probability, and that's the end of the story.

A similar position was reached by much more sophisticated arguments more than 30 years ago. Americans Bryce DeWitt and John Wheeler combined quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of general relativity to produce an equation that describes the whole Universe. Put into the equation a configuration of the Universe, and out comes a probability for that configuration. There is no mention of time. Admittedly, the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is controversial and fraught with mathematical difficulties, but if quantum cosmology is anything like it-if it is about probabilities-the timeless picture is plausible.

So let's take seriously the idea of a "probability mist" that covers the timeless Platonic landscape. The density of the mist is just the relative probability of the corresponding configuration being realised, or experienced, as an instantaneous state of the Universe-as a Now. If some Nows in Platonia have much higher probabilities than others, they are the ones that are actually experienced. This is like ordinary statistical physics: a glass of water could boil spontaneously, but the probability is so low that we never see it happen.

All this seems a far cry from the reality of our lives. Where is the history we read about? Where are our memories? Where is the bustling, changing world of our experience? Those configurations of the Universe for which the probability mist has a high density, and so are likely to be experienced, must have within them an appearance of history-a set of mutually consistent records that suggests we have a past. I call these configurations "time capsules".

Present past

An arbitrary matter distribution, like dots distributed at random, will not have any meaning. It will not tell a story. Almost all imaginable matter distributions are of this kind; only the tiniest fraction seem to carry meaningful information.

One of the most remarkable facts about our Universe is that it does have a meaningful structure. All the matter we can observe in any way is found to contain records of a past.

The first scientists to realise this were geologists. Examining the structure of rocks and fossils, they constructed a long history of the Earth. Modern cosmology has extended this to a history of the Universe right back to the big bang.

What is more, we are somehow directly aware of the passing of time, and we see motion-a change of position over time. You may feel these are such powerful sensations that any attempt to deny them is ridiculous. But imagine yourself frozen in time. You are simply a static arrangement of matter, yet all your memories and experience are still there, represented by physical patterns within your brain-probably as the strengths of the synapse connections between neurons. Just as the structure of geological strata and fossils seem to be evidence of a past, our brains contain physical structures consistent with the appearance of recent and distant events. These structures could surely lead to the impression of time passing. Even the direct perception of motion could arise through the presence in the brain of information about several different positions of the objects we see in motion.

And that is the essence of my proposal. There is no history laid out along a path, there are only records contained within Nows. This timeless vision may seem perverse. But it turns out to have one great potential strength: it could explain the arrow of time.

We are so accustomed to history that we forget how peculiar it is. According to conventional cosmology, our Universe must have started out in an extraordinarily special state to give rise to the highly ordered Universe we find around us, with its arrow of time and records of a past. All matter and energy must have originated at a single point, and had an almost perfectly uniform distribution immediately after the big bang.

Hitherto, the only explanation that science has provided is the anthropic argument: we experience configurations of the Universe that seem to have a history because only these configurations have the characteristics to produce beings who can experience anything. I believe that timeless quantum cosmology provides a far more satisfying explanation.

In Platonia, there are no initial conditions. Only two factors determine where the probability mist is dense: the form of some equation (like the Wheeler-DeWitt equation) and the shape of Platonia. And by sheer logical necessity, Platonia is profoundly asymmetric. Like Triangle Land, it is a lopsided continent with a special point Alpha corresponding to the configuration in which every particle is at the same place.

From this singular point, the timeless landscape opens out, flower-like, to points that represent configurations of the Universe of arbitrary size and complexity. My conjecture is that the shape of Platonia cannot fail to influence the distribution of the quantum probability mist. It could funnel the mist onto time capsules, those meaningful arrangements that seem to contain records of a past that began at Alpha.

This is, of course, only speculation, but quantum mechanics supports it. In 1929, the British physicist Nevill Mott and Werner Heisenberg from Germany explained how alpha particles, emitted by radioactive nuclei, form straight tracks in cloud chambers. Mott pointed out that, quantum mechanically, the emitted alpha particle is a spherical wave which slowly leaks out of the nucleus. It is difficult to picture how it is that an outgoing spherical wave can produce a straight line," he argued. We think intuitively that it should ionise atoms at random throughout space.

Mott noted that we think this way because we imagine that quantum processes take place in ordinary three-dimensional space. In fact, the possible configurations of the alpha particle and the particles in the detecting chamber must be regarded as the points of a hugely multidimensional configuration space, a miniature Platonia, with the position of the radioactive nucleus playing the role of Alpha.

Ageless creation

When Mott viewed the chamber from this perspective, his equations predicted the existence of the tracks. The basic fact that quantum mechanics treats configurations as whole entities leads to track formation. And a track is just a point in configuration space-but one that creates the appearance of a past, just like our own memories.

There is one more reason to embrace the timeless view. Many theoretical physicists now recognise that the usual notions of time and space must break down near the big bang. They find themselves forced to seek a timeless description of the "beginning" of the Universe, even though they use time elsewhere. It seems more consistent and economical to use an entirely timeless description. But for these ideas to be more than speculation, they should have concrete, measurable results. Fortunately, Stephen Hawking and other theorists have shown that the Wheeler-DeWitt equation can lead to verifiable predictions. For example, established physical theories cannot predict a value for the cosmological constant, which measures the gravitational repulsion of empty space. But calculations based on the Wheeler-DeWitt equation suggest that it should have a very small value. It should soon be possible to measure the cosmological constant, either by taking the brightness of far-off supernovae and using that to track the expansion of the Universe, or by analysing the shape of humps and bumps in the cosmic microwave background. And a definitive equation of quantum cosmology should give us a precise prediction for the value of the constant. It is a distant prospect, but the nonexistence of time could be confirmed by experiment.

The notion of time as an invisible framework that contains and constrains the Universe is not unlike the crystal spheres invented centuries ago to carry the planets. After the spheres had been shattered by Tycho Brahe's observations, Kepler said: "We must philosophise about these things differently." Much of modern physics stems from this insight. We need a new notion of time.

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PLEASE MENTION NEW SCIENTIST AS THE SOURCE OF THIS STORY AND, IF PUBLISHING ONLINE, PLEASE CARRY A HYPERLINK TO : http://www.newscientist.com/
The author of this article, Julian Barbour is an independent theoretical physicist who lives near Oxford, UK.
Further reading: Julian Barbour's The End of Time is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20