The 21st Century Einstein
When Albert Einstein wrote and offered his initial papers on the Special Theory of Relativity in 1905, he was an unknown clerk in the Swiss Patent Office with no academic credentials. Needless to say, for established professional physicists, the overthrow of the principles upon which their lives’ work was based by a 26 year-old kid nobody every heard of did not go over too well.
So almost 100 years later, here comes another kid, a high school dropout no less, who may impact 21st Century science the way Einstein did the 20th. Peter Lynds, a 27 year-old broadcasting school tutor from Wellington, New Zealand, may change the way that we think about time and its relationship to classical and quantum mechanics and cosmology.
Lynds’ paper, “Time and Classical and Quantum Mechanics: Indeterminacy vs. Discontinuity” in the August 2003 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Foundations of Physics, establishes that there is no such thing as an instant in time.
The assertion that there are such instants — elementary particles of time physicists such as Stephen Hawking call chronons — is a bulwark of modern physics. Lynds shows that the concept of chronons is a fiction: “There’s no such thing as an instant in time or present moment in nature,” he observes. “It’s something entirely subjective that we project onto the world around us. That is, it’s the outcome of brain function and consciousness.”
Lynds points out that in all cases a time value represents an interval on time, rather than an instant. “For example, if two separate events are measured to take place at either 1 hour or 10.00 seconds, these two values indicate the events occurred during the time intervals of 1 and 1.99999…hours and 10.00 and 10.0099999…seconds respectively.” Consequently there is no precise moment where a moving object is at a particular point. From this he is able to produce a fairly straightforward resolution of the Arrow paradox, and more elaborate ones for the others based on the same reasoning. A prominent Oxford mathematician commented, “It’s as astonishing, as it is unexpected, but he’s right.”
Lynds is in the tradition of the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus who famously said, “You cannot step in the same river twice,” and Aristotle, who defined time not as a physical property but a conceptual structure. “Time,” Aristotle maintained, “is a measurement of motion.”
Following Aristotle, Lynds says, “With some thought it should become clear that no matter how small the time interval, or how slowly an object moves during that interval, it is still in motion and it’s position is constantly changing, so it can’t have a determined relative position at any time, whether during a interval, however small, or at an instant. Indeed, if it did, it couldn’t be in motion.”
Lynds thesis threatens the foundation of modern physics known as quantum mechanics, which is based on Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. The indeterminancy of, say, an electron’s speed vs. position in space is not, says Lynds, “a consequence of quantum uncertainty.” Cosmologically, Lynds’ thesis disposes of many basic concepts of the famous cosmologist Stephen hawking, author of “A Brief History of Time.”
Time, Lynds says, doesn’t congeal out of the quantum foam of the Big Bang, and it’s meaningless for the order of a sequence of events to be imaginary, or at right angles, relative to another sequence of events, as Hawkings asserts.
2500 years ago, Zeno of Elea offered a proof that motion is an illusion: the Paradox of the Arrow. “Imagine,” said Zeno, “an arrow in flight. At every moment in time, the arrow is located at a specific position. If the moment is just a single instant, then the arrow does not have time to move and is at rest during that instant. Now, during the following instances, it then must also be at rest for the same reason. The arrow is always at rest and cannot move: motion is impossible.”
Modern functional mathematics has grappled with Zeno with calculus (summing an infinite series of numbers to provide a finite whole) and other various contortions such as Weierstrass’s at-at theory. But as Ayn Rand says, when faced with a contradiction, “check your premises.” By checking the premises underlying our concept of time, Peter Lynds easily solves Zeno’s paradoxes, and threatens to shake modern science from sub-atomic physics to the formation of the universe right to its core.