We need a physics based on the uniqueness of each moment

Two scientists writing for The New York Times dare to note that the Big Bang might be unravelling before our eyes and consider what might come next. What we need most, in my opinion, is a new physics of time…

Last week, I was somewhat astounded to read – in The New York Times of all places – that the Big Bang theory might well be beyond salvaging, a position I have taken since the early release of data from the James Webb Space Telescope last year.  At the time, I figured it would be at least a decade until scientists admitted the error of their ways and sure enough, it wasn’t long before the establishment donned their priestly robes of authority to claim all was well, when clearly it wasn’t.  Physics in general has grown stagnant and somewhat woke, but “The Story of our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel” by Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester and a theoretical physicist at Dartmouth College respectively, takes a view far more akin to my own.  As they put it, “one of the Webb’s first major findings was exciting in an uncomfortable sense: It discovered the existence of fully formed galaxies far earlier than should have been possible according to the so-called standard model of cosmology.  According to the standard model, which is the basis for essentially all research in the field, there is a fixed and precise sequence of events that followed the Big Bang: First, the force of gravity pulled together denser regions in the cooling cosmic gas, which grew to become stars and black holes; then, the force of gravity pulled together the stars into galaxies.  The Webb data, though, revealed that some very large galaxies formed really fast, in too short a time, at least according to the standard model. This was no minor discrepancy. The finding is akin to parents and their children appearing in a story when the grandparents are still children themselves.”  From there, they concluded, “Physicists and astronomers are starting to get the sense that something may be really wrong. It’s not just that some of us believe we might have to rethink the standard model of cosmology; we might also have to change the way we think about some of the most basic features of our universe — a conceptual revolution that would have implications far beyond the world of science.”  This is a welcome understatement.  The Big Bang does not exist on its own.  Instead, it stands upon an edifice of physics and mathematics that themselves are based on a number of assumptions that are, in my view, unwarranted.

Chief among them is that moments in time are reproducible, that is to say there’s nothing essentially unique that differentiates one moment from the next.  In principle, if you can recreate the starting point of any system – up to and including the universe itself beginning with the Big Bang – events would play out in precisely the same manner, no matter how many times you rewound the film.  The same input will produce exactly the same output, nor do our current equations care in which direction time flows.  They work forward and backward just the same, and do not differentiate at all between the two, providing no reason why time in the real world flows ever forward, a river that simply cannot be dammed.  To be sure, few, if any scientists, believe it’s possible in practice to recreate the universe as it is today.  As a system increases in complexity, replicating the precise conditions becomes more and more difficult, until it is practical impossibility.  Scientists also acknowledge that small changes in conditions can lead to big changes in the output, the famous Butterfly Effect, but this does not change the underlying principle:  If we were omniscient, we could recreate another universe exactly as our own by replicating the same precise starting conditions.  This has led a growing number of contemporary theorists to claim that time is an illusion, and beneath the surface, there is no such thing as past, present, and future.  All are one.  There is, of course, no actual evidence for this in the real world.  Outside of our theories and equations, time itself only appears to run in one direction and every moment certainly seems to be unique.  Beyond our experience of reality, we have never perfectly recreated any complex experiment with no difference at all in the outcome, hence the phrase “margin of error” familiar to all of us from high school.  In my opinion at least, this should be enough to prompt the question:  What if every moment truly is unique and non-reproducible?  What would that mean for physics and our broader understanding of the universe?

I am, of course, not a physicist, but I do not think that precludes me from providing the framework of an answer to these questions.  Logically speaking, there are a wide range of conclusions that can be drawn from assuming that each moment is unique.  First and foremost, this implies that the time is real and the arrow only runs in one direction.  This does not mean that we experience the fullness of time or that we have access to the underlying nature of time.  Instead, it means that each moment is contingent on everything that came before it.  Because these moments cannot be recreated by definition, there is no going back, only forward.  In this view, time can be seen as the change that occurs between each moment, taking the contingent events of one moment, and turning them into the contingent events of the next.  As Roberto Unger and Lee Smolin have argued, time in this view is likely to act upon everything, matter, space, and the rules that govern their interaction, meaning the laws of physics themselves can change with time.  Otherwise, we run the risk of the same reproducibility issue:  If the laws themselves are fixed, there is nothing that precludes replaying time again, but if the laws are contingent on their own history like everything else, then events no longer become reproducible because everything evolves, not merely time, space, and matter.  Some may point out that there is a circularity to this argument, but it is no different than the one physicists rely on right now and it is hard to see how we can probe these issues without making at least some assumptions that are beyond our ability to prove.  The goal should be develop the most complete and satisfying view we can, one that accounts for as much of our experience and observations as possible. We can also add one more assumption to the list:  Each moment is indivisible, meaning it is impossible to slice time apart into smaller and smaller elements until we arrive at some fundamental unit.  Time is rather like a classic line or curve, assembled from a potential infinity of points and ultimately smooth.  This has the benefit of lining up with our own experience where one moment blends immediately into the next, the difference impossible to tell except via measurement, and also the idea that time is fundamentally distinct from matter.  I can break an item down to molecules, the molecule down to atoms, and the atoms into energy and their constituent parts, but cannot dissect a moment in this manner.

This principle is largely hidden in modern physics.  In their essay, Drs. Frank and Gleiser reference it obliquely by noting,  “We may be at a point where we need a radical departure from the standard model, one that may even require us to change how we think of the elemental components of the universe, possibly even the nature of space and time.  Cosmology is not like other sciences. It’s not like studying mice in a maze or watching chemicals boil in a beaker in a lab. The universe is everything there is; there’s only one and we can’t look at it from the outside. You can’t put it in a box on a table and run controlled experiments on it. Because it is all-encompassing, cosmology forces scientists to tackle questions about the very environment in which science operates: the nature of time, the nature of space, the nature of lawlike regularity, the role of the observers doing the observations.”  Putting this another way, one of the chief failures of modern physics is that it fails to account for the totality of the world as it is, preferring instead to consider items that are denied our observation in principle.  This includes the period before the Big Bang, the potential for a multiverse, and dark matter and dark energy, which have never been observed but are said to account for 96% of the universe.  The result is a physics that has gone far afield from the object of its study – that is the universe itself – and substituted assumptions for actual evidence.  Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than the nature of time, which as described above, currently bears no resemblance to what we actually experience and is instead treated merely like a fourth dimension that can start, stop, even run backwards.  This might finally be starting to change, at least if this New York Times guest essay is any indication.  Drs. Frank and Gleiser noted, “One possibility, raised by the physicist Lee Smolin and the philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger, is that the laws of physics can evolve and change over time. Different laws might even compete for effectiveness.”  This is the first time I have read the work of either mentioned in any major article or publication, though I have followed them both for years and believe, admittedly as a layman, that their view has many advantages over the current consensus.

To begin with, it solves a number of paradoxes plaguing physics aside from merely observational issues.  Time travel is no longer possible, and you cannot kill your mother before she is born.   You can no longer go to the future because it has not been written yet, nor visit the past because the tape cannot be replayed.  There is the here and now, and nothing else.  This might seem like the stuff of science fiction, but it is hugely important:  Physics, at least any sensible one, shouldn’t permit a universe that can crash like a computer and a paradox is exactly that.  Eliminating time travel paradoxes entirely stabilizes reality.  Quantum uncertainty largely disappears as well.  Schrodinger’s Cat is no longer both dead and alive because the actual universe only contains events that have happened and are observable.  Our equations can say whatever they like about what is occurring when something is not being observed or measured, but the real world is only the end result, moment by moment, things either happen or they don’t.  This is no mere theoretical concern either.  Quantum uncertainty led directly to the idea of the multiverse, if not an infinity of universes.  Ending it at least in the practical sense in the world as we know and can only know it would be another huge stabilizer.  This does not preclude the occurrences of effects that we cannot currently perceive or might not ever be able to perceive, but it does greatly reduce the need for endless universes and dimensions to explain phenomena that are by definition not observable.  Freewill also becomes possible.  Though it is largely left unsaid, it’s difficult to see how freewill can exist in a universe where everything is one and the future has already happened.  A universe where each moment is unique and the future is unwritten, however, allows for a much broader range of possibility.  Lastly and perhaps most importantly, it would better align our understanding of the universe with how the world actually works.  Despite what our physics claims, time has never run backward, there is no direct evidence that time sprung into existence at some point, there is no proof that time can actually be divided rather than merely measured, and no indication that each moment is anything but unique.

Generally speaking, the idea that physics can be advanced by direct observation of the world around us has fallen out of favor for somewhat obvious reasons.  Once, geniuses like Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, and Sir Isaac Newton observed the world and penetrated its workings with a unique combination of perception, insight, and mathematical prowess (to varying degrees considering Da Vinci knew only geometry and could not do basic algebra).  Today, however, we’re studying things far too small, too far away, or too deep in the distant past to see with the naked eye, and dealing with forces far too powerful for the human mind to comprehend.  At the same time, the devices we use – from radio telescopes to particle accelerators – augment human observation rather than replacing it outright.  Even with them, we still cannot see the promised dark matter, dark energy, additional dimensions and universes, though not for lack of trying.  This alone should tell us something.  Our inability to observe an object or a force does not rule out its existence in the absolute sense, but one should expect that a reason why any phenomenon should be hidden from observation by definition needs to be convincing.  Scientists are fond of pointing out that the unobserved has been posited and then subsequently observed in the past, but in none of those cases was there the simultaneous belief that it simply cannot be observed.  That is a crucial difference when you consider that the extent of our observational capacity now extends out some 13 billion lightyears and descends into the inner workings of the atom.  There still might be things that defy us forever, but given the breadth of our experience, it seems unlikely to me at least, that they would account for a huge percentage of the universe and the day to day workings of time itself.

Ultimately, Drs. Frank and Gleiser posit that “a revolution may end up being the best path to progress. That has certainly been the case in the past with scientific breakthroughs like Copernicus’s heliocentrism, Darwin’s theory of evolution and Einstein’s relativity. All three of those theories also ended up having enormous cultural influence — threatening our sense of our special place in the cosmos, challenging our intuition that we were fundamentally different than other animals, upending our faith in common sense ideas about the flow of time. Any scientific revolution of the sort we’re imagining would presumably have comparable reverberations in our understanding of ourselves.”  To this, I couldn’t agree more.  Science after all is the study of the world for the advancement of human knowledge.  Divorcing it from human knowledge and observation does not serve anything in my opinion except mathematics and research budgets.  We need a new physics based on what makes us unique and that is time itself.