Is it time to rewrite the laws of physics?

By Tom Chivers in The Telegraph  

'Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so,” said Ford Prefect in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. For the past century, mainstream physics has agreed with him. To most of us, it seems obvious that the world is moving steadily forward through time, from a known past, through an active present, into a mysterious future. But, as Einstein said, “physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one”.

“Mainstream physics basically eliminates time as a fundamental aspect of nature,” explains Prof Lee Smolin, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, in Ontario, Canada. “It does that in various ways, but the most common is the so-called 'block universe’ picture, which is derived from general relativity.”

Under this system, what is actually real is not our passage through time, but the whole of reality at once. “Imagine taking a movie of your life,” says Prof Smolin, “and laying out the frames on a table, and saying: that is your life. There is no now, there is no change.”

He thinks that it is high time – so to speak – this view was overturned. In his new book Time Reborn, he makes the case that time is a fundamental reality of the universe, and that without it, too many of the big questions of physics are left unanswerable.

The question of what time is, and whether it is real or illusory, is an ancient one. Even before Plato, Greek philosophers were debating whether, as Heraclitus said, you cannot step in the same river twice, that all is flux and change, or whether Parmenides was right and that change is an illusion, that the universe simply exists as an unchanging lump.

The first person to address the issue in depth, according to Dr Julian Barbour, author of The End of Time, was St Augustine. He was baffled by it, and said as much. “What then is time?” Augustine wrote. “If no one asks of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.” Still, he did make an attempt to explain it, coming to the surprisingly modern conclusion that there could not have been time before the world, because there would have been no change, and without change, time is meaningless.

Sir Isaac Newton, a thousand years later, disagreed. He held the common-sense view – instinctively shared by the rest of us – that time is absolute, marching on regardless of the doings of the stuff of the universe. It was Einstein who showed that it was no such thing. According to his theories of relativity, time and space are part of an interwoven fabric: the presence of matter changes both, stretching the fabric like a weight on a sheet.

His theories are counterintuitive – arguing that someone who is travelling ages slower than someone who is standing still, and that time goes faster the further we get from the surface of the Earth – but at least, in his universe, there is such a thing as time.

“Einstein, in a way, makes time something real – with the idea of space-time, he makes it as real as space,” says Dr Barbour. But there is a fundamental difference, which leads us to one of the great problems with our concept of time: “We get the impression that we are always moving through time, when we can perfectly happily sit still and have no impression that we are moving through space. That’s a very big mystery, because the laws of physics work exactly the same way whether you run them forwards or backwards.”

Clearly, that is not how we perceive the world. We see babies be born, grow old and die; water flowing downhill; and wood burning to ash. “If you drop an egg on the floor, it breaks, and there is no way you can put that egg back together again,” says Dr Barbour.

This is due to a property called entropy, or disorder. The second law of thermodynamics dictates that the universe will move from ordered, low-entropy states to disordered, high-entropy states: ice will melt and coffee will cool, until everything is the same temperature, and everything is mixed together in an undifferentiated mass. “According to the fundamental laws of physics as we know them, it shouldn’t make any difference which way you look at them. And yet it is clearly the case that entropy increases,” Dr Barbour says.

That leaves an awful lot of questions unanswered – which is where Prof Smolin’s ideas come in. “The second law dictates that any system in disequilibrium should come quickly to equilibrium,” he points out. “But our universe, even though it’s more than 13 billion years old, is very far from equilibrium.”

This is due to particular facts about the laws of physics – such as the strength of gravity, or the precise set of particles we observe – and the very specific way that the universe began. But Prof Smolin points out that we still do not know why those laws are as they are, or why the universe should have started in its particular way: “There seems to be no simple principle that picks out the standard model of particle physics from a vast number of equally likely possibilities.” Uncountable billions of other universes could have existed in which there would be no stars, no planets, and no us.

Prof Smolin’s point is that, for modern physics, in which time is treated as an illusion, this question is unanswerable. “The initial conditions and laws, in the block universe model, are just part of the universe. It would be like asking a computer to explain the program it’s running.” But if we treat the laws as things that could have been different had history gone differently, or that can change with time, “then time has to exist prior to those laws, and then it has to be real in a way that the block universe doesn’t allow”.

There is a risk with much of theoretical physics that it strays into a realm of philosophy, away from the science of experiment and reality. Prof Smolin insists that this is not the case: his idea of “real time” includes hypotheses that make testable predictions. One such experiment might be to use quantum computers, which, in theory, will be able to detect the evolution of physical laws. Dr Barbour (whose book tends to support the time-is-an-illusion school of thought), says that observations of astronomical phenomena called gamma-ray bursts might also show violations of Einstein’s laws at the universe’s smallest scale – although so far, he says, they have proved remarkably robust.

If Prof Smolin is right, he believes that it will have implications far beyond academic physics. “A lot of our thinking about many things, from the nature of being human to political and environmental problems, are poisoned by the belief that the future is already determined and that we can’t find truly novel solutions,” he says. “For example, in economics, the insistence that the laws are formalised in a timeless mathematical setting, like Newtonian physics, leads to some incorrect ideas, which helped contribute to the economic disaster of 2008.” A model of the world in which “the future is open, and the universe can discover novel structures, novel ideas, creates a very different idea of our possibilities” – and could lead to some very different thinking.

Whether he’s right or not, only time itself will tell. Certainly, physics has done away with the concept of time for so long that simply saying that it is real feels almost revolutionary.

Another Country

Many of those who govern us do not in their hearts belong here. They belong to a different culture, a different world, which knows as little of its own acts as it knows of those who suffer them

GEORGE MONBIOT

Those whom the gods love die young: are they trying to tell me something? Due to an inexplicable discontinuity in space-time, on Sunday I turned 50. I have petitioned the relevant authorities, but there’s nothing they can do.

So I will use the occasion to try to explain the alien world from which I came. To understand how and why we are now governed as we are, you need to know something of that strange place.

I was born into the third tier of the dominant class: those without land or capital, but with salaries high enough to send their children to private schools. My preparatory school, which I attended from the age of eight, was a hard place, still Victorian in tone. We boarded, and saw our parents every few weeks. We were addressed only by our surnames and caned for misdemeanours. Discipline was rigid, pastoral care almost non-existent. But it was also strangely lost.

A few decades earlier, the role of such schools was clear: they broke boys’ attachment to their families and re-attached them to the instititions – the colonial service, the government, the armed forces – through which the British ruling class projected its power. Every year they released into the world a cadre of kamikazes, young men fanatically devoted to their caste and culture.

By the time I was eight those institutions had either collapsed (in the case of colonial service), fallen into other hands (government), or were no longer a primary means by which British power was asserted (the armed forces). Such schools remained good at breaking attachments, less good at creating them.

But the old forms and the old thinking persisted. The school chaplain used to recite a prayer which began “let us now praise famous men”. Most of those he named were heroes of colonial conquest or territorial wars. Some, such as Douglas Haig and Herbert Kitchener, were by then widely regarded as war criminals. Our dormitories were named after the same people. The history we were taught revolved around topics such as Gordon of Khartoum, Stanley and Livingstone and the Black Hole of Calcutta. In geography, the maps still showed much of the globe coloured red.

My second boarding school was a kinder, more liberal place. But we remained as detached from the rest of society as Carthusian monks. The world, when we were released into it, was unrecognisable. It bore no relationship to our learning or experience. The result was cognitive dissonance: a highly uncomfortable state from which human beings will do almost anything to escape. There were two principal means. One – the more painful – was to question everything you held to be true. This process took me years: in fact it has not ended. It was, at first, highly disruptive to my peace of mind and sense of self.

The other, as US Republicans did during the Bush presidency, is to create your own reality. If the world does not fit your worldview, you either shore up your worldview with selectivity and denial, or (if you have power) you try to bend the world to fit the shape it takes in your mind. Much of the effort of conservative columnists and editors and of certain politicians and historians appears to be devoted to these tasks.

In the Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt explains that the nobles of pre-revolutionary France “did not regard themselves as representative of the nation, but as a separate ruling caste which might have much more in common with a foreign people of the same society and condition than with its compatriots.”(1) Last year the former Republican staffer Mike Lofgren wrote something very similar about the dominant classes of the US: “the rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their fellow American citizens … the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot. Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it.”(2)

Secession from the concerns and norms of the rest of society characterises any well-established elite. Our own ruling caste, schooled separately, brought up to believe in justifying fairytales, lives in a world of its own, from which it can project power without understanding or even noticing the consequences. A removal from the life of the rest of the nation is no barrier to the desire to dominate it. In fact it appears to be associated with a powerful sense of entitlement.

So if you have wondered how the current government can blithely engage in the wholesale transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, how its front bench can rock with laughter as it truncates the livelihoods of the poorest people of this country, why it commits troops to ever more pointless post-colonial wars, here, I think, is part of the answer. Many of those who govern us do not in their hearts belong here. They belong to a different culture, a different world, which knows as little of its own acts as it knows of those who suffer them.

Captaincy

	Andrew Strauss: undemonstrative on the field, but he gets the job done © Getty Images Enlarge
Related Links Saad Shafqat : The new, cautious face of Pakistan cricket Players/Officials: Misbah-ul-Haq | Andrew Strauss Teams: England | Pakistan

Ed Smith in Cricinfo 15/02/2012

A few years ago, I played in a charity match with an Australian cricketer. He was captain for the day and casually told the fielders to just "spread out". As we walked off at the end, after a laidback game, he said (at least half-seriously): "How can Tugga [Steve Waugh] get paid so much extra money just for doing that?" 

The view that captaincy is easy - perhaps even irrelevant - is not uncommon. Professional sport is a macho culture that prefers to deal in physical realities rather than abstract concepts. That bowler is quick, that batsman is powerful, that fielder is fast - as skills, they are all easy to admire. Leadership, in contrast, is an elusive thing to identify. That captain is shrewd, that one is subtle, that one encourages the players around him to be themselves - sportsmen are not trained to recognise or celebrate those gifts.

But the evidence is overwhelming: leadership matters. Look at the turnaround in Pakistan cricket. Two years ago I was at Lord's on the Saturday before the News of the World published their scoop about spot-fixing. Pakistan were not merely losing, they were broken. When Salman Butt was bowled, he initially stood his ground, as though he was waiting for some outside intervention that allowed him to have another go. When Mohammad Yousuf was caught on the boundary, hooking, he too stood still in disbelief. It was sad to watch.

Now, under the captaincy of 37-year-old Misbah-ul-Haq, Pakistan are revived and victorious - and able to beat the world's top Test team 3-0. It is a powerful riposte to the critics who argue that no one should be selected as captain if he isn't an automatic choice as a player. In fact, the best team is simply the 11 players who produce the most effective cricket. If the presence of a good captain improves the team by a greater margin than the advantage gained by picking a slightly superior player, then it is obviously rational to select the superior captain. The best XI is the most effective team: end of story.

The next question is much harder to answer: what makes a good captain?

It is easy to fall back on familiar clichés: "the natural captain", "the leader of men", "the alpha male". But it is striking how many effective captains do not fit that mould. Take Andrew Strauss. When Strauss was appointed England captain in 2008, several English cricket legends criticised the appointment because he "wasn't a natural captain". What did they mean? They meant that Strauss is unshowy and undemonstrative on the field. Off the field, he is not the biggest, loudest man at the bar. Tactically he doesn't go in for flashy, "original" field-placement. In press conferences he avoids controversy. In short, he is isn't Mr Obvious or Mr Born to Lead. Strauss - we now know - has gone on to win two Ashes series as captain.

The whole business of captaincy is misunderstood. It tends to be thought of as a list of qualities, a set of boxes to tick - as though a good captain has to be x, y and z. In fact, all captains are different. Perhaps the only essential characteristic for any captain is the one that cannot be taught or emulated: he must be himself.

Instead, pundits look for qualities they recognise in themselves and assume that's what makes a good leader. When I was appointed captain of Middlesex, a senior figure at the club asked me what "kind of captain" I was going to be, as though I had a list of adjectives up my sleeve. When I asked what he meant, he said, "You know, are you going to be a strong captain?" I replied that I'd have to be seriously stupid if I announced at the outset that I wanted to be a weak captain.

We have captaincy in the wrong box. We should not think of captaincy - or leadership in general - as a characteristic or even a quality. Instead, it is an effect. If the captain has a positive effect on the group then he is leading effectively. That doesn't sound like much. But it is, of course, mighty difficult.

	Off-field stability, good management and strong relationships at the heart of the team are infinitely more important than moving silly mid-off half a yard to the left

Captains are always being judged, but most of the analysis focuses on largely irrelevant side issues. During the deciding Test against Australia at The Oval in 2009 - it turned out to be the very day that the Ashes turned in England's favour - I bumped into a former England player who has become a leading voice in the media. "What a stupid mistake of Strauss', not using the heavy roller!" he began. "Schoolboy error! You just can't make mistakes like that!" I was surprised at the vehemence of the reaction. Despite many years as an opening batsman, it was often unclear to me when to use the heavy roller, or indeed if the decision was worthy of much analysis or energy.

Many "talking points" about captaincy are complete red herrings. Should he have a third man? Why is gully standing so deep? These "controversies" are often just convenient distractions to fill the airwaves and newspaper columns. Yes, very occasionally an inspired field placing can strangle a batsman, or a shrewd bowling change can lead to a wicket. But much more often we read far too much into surface decision-making, and radically underestimate the underlying foundations that lead to success: off-field stability, good management and strong relationships at the heart of the team. They are infinitely more important than moving silly mid-off half a yard to the left.

Captaincy is both overrated and underrated. It is overrated because people expect too much of it in the short term. Very few losing teams can be galvanised by a single stirring team-talk. "Gee them up!" is the commonest (and stupidest) advice given to captains.

But captaincy is underestimated over the long term. Losing teams often think that they should change the captain every five minutes "until the right person emerges". Quite the opposite happens: the latest captain merely takes over an unsteady ship. In contrast, successful teams quickly forget their debt to their captain, imagining that they would be just as good - or better - if they axed him. When you're winning, it's easy to underestimate the culture that helped you to win.

When it comes to leadership, cricket teams should remember a line from Bob Dylan: "No matter what you think about, you just won't be able to do without it."