In March 1955, about a month before his own death, Albert Einstein sent a letter to the family of his recently deceased friend Michele Besso. “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me,” he wrote. “That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however stubbornly persistent.”
I do not know whether Besso’s family was comforted by this claim, but most of those who have a solid grasp of the issues say that Einstein was right about the science. A debate going back at least to Heraclitus (535-475BCE), who said that the primary feature of the universe is that it is always changing, and Parmenides (who said that there is no such thing as change) appears to have been settled. Indeed in 1949, on the occasion of Einstein’s 70th birthday, Kurt Gödel presented him with a mathematical proof of the nonexistence of time. Nature, it appears, is governed by eternal laws that stand outside time.
Not so fast. Notable among those who disagree is Lee Smolin, from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada. Smolin is one of the bad boys of contemporary physics and cosmology; a generator of radical ideas and an iconoclast. In the mid 90s he proposed that black holes spawn baby universes. In the middle of the last decade he published a searing attack on string theory which, he said, had failed to create a single testable prediction. And in his 2013 bestseller, Time Reborn, he argued that time is real and nothing transcends it, not even the laws of nature. Such laws are, like everything else, features of the present, and can evolve.
I’ve heard it said that many physicists in the academy groan at the very mention of Smolin’s name. But if he is wrong, he may at least be wrong in an interesting way. Strikingly, Smolin believes the reinstatement of time has implications for our daily lives. “If the flow of time is not an illusion, it makes our lives more precious and valuable,” he says. This might not seem as consoling as Einstein’s view that death does not have the finality we think it does. But if the laws of physics can change and evolve, so too can the space of possible futures. “The impression that we have that we can create novelty is true,” says Smolin. “This makes the universe much more hospitable. We can have free will. We have choices. I find that a much more comforting idea.”
Smolin has not been cowed by the sceptical reception of his ideas to date. And his new book, a broadside against many of the most widely accepted theories in cosmology, is co-written with someone who is even more of a maverick than he is. Roberto Mangabeira Unger is a humanist, a professor at the Harvard Law School whose students have included Barack Obama, and a progressive politician. He served as a minister in the administration of Lula da Silva in Brazil from 2007 to 2009. As a political philosopher he has achieved prominence, or notoriety, with calls for fundamental reform of democratic, market and civic structures across the world. His ideal is what he terms “deep freedom”, whereby all people, recognising both their mortality and their unbounded potential, can become more god-like. The self, he says, has indeterminate if not unlimited depth, and there is more dignity and potential in the commonplace than the grand.
Unger can sound more like a prophet – or to his detractors a crank – than a legal scholar. In The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007) he says that the root of human experience is “groundlessness – astonishment that we exist, that the world exists, and that the world and our situation in it are the way they are rather than another way”. Astonishment, he says, “is accompanied … by awareness of the incomprehensibility, and of the sheer alienness, of the world in which we find ourselves.” The change of life that we should seek, he writes in The Religion of the Future (2014), “is to live in such a way that we die only once … We squander the good of life by surrendering to a diminished way of being in the world. We settle for routine and compromise. We stagger, half-conscious, through the world. Anxious for the future, we lose life in the only time that we have, the present.”
You might expect a book co-authored by Smolin and Unger to be an exchange about science and human values – something, perhaps, in the region of the 1930 dialogue between Einstein and the polymath Rabindranath Tagore. But The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time is not that kind of thing: it is a big and daunting book, harder to read than recent works by either author. The first section, by Unger, includes among other things an exploration of the global, irreversible and continuous attributes of time, followed by an analysis of proto-ontological assumptions. The second section, by Smolin, contains an approach to solving the meta-law dilemma, outlining linear cyclic models, branching models and branching cyclic cosmologies before it dives into cosmological natural selection, pluralistic cosmological scenarios and the principle of precedence.
If it sounds difficult that’s because it is. Still, some essential points can be readily grasped. Unger and Smolin want to overturn a picture of cosmology with which many of us are broadly familiar through a hundred different popular accounts. In that version, the universe – and therefore time as part of the space-time continuum – came into being following a big bang 13.8bn years ago. At first the universe was inconceivably tiny but then approximately 10 to the power of minus 37 seconds into the expansion, something called cosmic inflation led to exponential growth and the seeds of what we observe today. Oh and, the theory suggests, ours is just one of an infinite number of universes in the multiverse.
Unger and Smolin say that parts of this model are essentially preposterous. There is, they argue, just one universe. Time is real and the laws of nature are not timeless but evolve. Mathematics is not a description of some separate timeless, Platonic reality, but is a description of the properties of one universe.
Kafka once asked, if a book doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” This tries to be such a book. For many of us, it may be too heavy to lift up so that we can bring it down with a crash on the ice, but we may watch vigilantly for any fractures that appear from its use elsewhere.
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