EPILOGUE
Life Without Time
Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him
It is a pity that Gerard Manley Hopkins’s finest line in this poem implies that creation is a male prerogative and is so inappropriate for the dawning millennium. But what beauty past change the wave function does manage to find in the nooks and crannies of Platonia! What are we to think of life if time and motion are nothing but very well-founded illusions? I have selected a few topics, trying to anticipate some of the questions that the reader, as a human being rather than a scientist, might ask. I also give some hints of how I think the divide between impersonal science and the world of the arts, emotions and religious aspirations might be bridged somewhere in Platonia. I love and respect the disciplines of both. Can they be shown to flow from a common view of the world?
Can We Really Believe in Many Worlds?
The evidence for them is strong. The history of science shows that physicists have tended to be wrong when they have not believed counterintuitive results of good theories. However, despite strong intellectual acceptance of many worlds, I live my life as if it were unique. You might call me a somewhat apologetic ‘many-worlder’! There are occasions when the real existence of other worlds, other outcomes, seems very hard to accept. Soon after I started writing this book, Princess Diana was killed, and Britain – like much of the world – was gripped by a most extraordinary mood. Watching the funeral service live, I did wonder how seriouslyone can take a theory which suggests that she survived the crash in other worlds. Death appears so final.
Such doubts may arise from the extraordinary creative power – whatever it is – that lies behind the world. What we experience in any instant always appears to be embedded in a rich and coherent story. That is what makes it seem unique. I would be reassured if the blue mist did indeed seek out only such stories. Shakespeare wrote many plays, nearly all masterpieces. But we do not even have a unique Hamlet: producers are always cutting different lines, and producing the play in novel ways. Variety is no bad thing: I have enjoyed many outstanding Hamlets. In the timeless many-instants interpretation, they were all other worlds, and that is what makes timeless quantum cosmology fascinating. Our past is just another world. This is the message that quantum mechanics and the deep timeless structure of general relativity seem to be telling us. If you accept that you experienced this morning, that commits you to other worlds. All the instants we have experienced are other worlds, for they are not the one we are in now. Can we then deny the existence of worlds on which ψ collects just as strongly as on our remembered experiences?
Does Free Will Exist?
Anyone committed to science has difficulty with free will. In The Selfish Gene (2nd edition, pp.270-71), Dawkins asks, ‘What on earth do you think you are, if not a robot, albeit a very complicated one?’ From personal introspection, I do not believe that my conscious self exercises free will. Certainly I ponder difficult decisions at length, but the decision itself invariably comes into consciousness from a different, unconscious realm. Brain research confirms that what we think are spontaneous decisions, acts of free will, are prepared in the unconscious mind before we become aware of them.
However, the many-instants interpretation puts an intriguingly different slant on causality, suggesting that it operates in nothing like the way we normally believe it to. In both classical physics and Everett’s original scheme, what happens now is the consequence of the past. But with many instants, each Now ‘competes’ with all other Nows in a timeless beauty contest to win the highest probability. The ability of each Now to ‘resonate’ with the other Nows is what counts. Its chance to exist is determined by what it is in itself. The structure of things is the determining power in a timeless world.
The same applies to us, for our conscious instants are embedded in the Nows. The probability of us experiencing ourselves doing something is just the sum of the probabilities for all the different Nows in which that experience is embedded. Everything we experience is brought into existence by being what it is. Our very nature determines whether we shall or shall not be. I find that consoling. We are because of what we are. Our existence is determined by the way we relate to (or resonate with) everything else that can be. Although Darwinism is a marvellous theory, and I greatly admire and respect Richard Dawkins’s writings, one day the theory of evolution will be subsumed in a greater scheme, just as Newtonian mechanics was subsumed in relativity without in any way ceasing to be great and valid science. For this reason, and for the remarks just made, I do not think that we are robots or that anything happens by chance. That view arises because we do not have a large enough perspective on things. We are the answers to the question of what can be maximally sensitive to the totality of what is possible. That is quite Darwinian. Species, ultimately genes, exist only if they fit in an environment. Platonia is the ultimate environment.
In Box 3, I said that Platonia is a ‘heavenly vault’ in which the music of the spheres is played. This formulation grew out of numerous discussions with the Celtic composer, musicologist and poet John Purser (brother of the mathematician and cryptographer Michael, who made the comment about my parents with which I ended the Preface, and brought to my attention the Shakespeare quotation). With the inimitable assurance of which only he is capable, John is adamant that the only theory of the universe that ever made sense was (is) the music of the spheres. My guts tell me that he and the artists quite generally are right. But harmony rests on mathematics, of course. Rather appropriately, given my extensive use of meteorological metaphor, John and his wife Bar live in the misty Isle of Skye, where at least one of the said discussions took place while the better part of a bottle of whisky was consumed, mostly by John.
You will naturally ask why we do not hear this music of the spheres. Keats provides a first answer: ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter’. But Leibniz may have given the true answer. In his monadology, he teaches that the quintessential you, everything you experience in consciousness and the unconscious, is precisely this music. You are the music of the spheres heard from the particular vantage point that is you. This is taking a little liberty with the letter but certainly not the spirit of his great philosophical scheme. On the subject of liberties, I have taken fewer with Leibniz than Michael did with Shakespeare. Hal does not actually ask Falstaff (‘fat-witted with drinking of old sack’) why he should be so superfluous ‘to inquire the nature of time’ but to ‘demand the time of day’. But, were it not for the blessed Sun and its diurnal rotation (our fortunate circumstances), the one question would be as profound as the other.