Time's Up, Einstein ca.f881.mail.yahoo.com

His paper rocked the physics world - and the
space-time continuum. Not bad for a college dropout
who critics say may not even exist.
By Josh McHugh

Peter Lynds was having a rotten summer. He had quit a
dead-end job at an insurance agency to go to college,
but his first semester of physics and philosophy
classes at Victoria University in Wellington, New
Zealand, was kicking his butt. He was still haunted by
the memory of watching a friend drown eight years
earlier (Lynds had nearly died trying to save him). So
he spent the better part of August 1999 sitting on his
mother's couch watching television.

One of the bright spots in his life was that he'd
recently fallen in love - with Einstein. Raiding the
Wellington library, he pored over biographies like
Denis Brian's Einstein: A Life and devoured
explanations of the great theorist's work. One night
he was watching the movie I.Q., with Walter Matthau as
Einstein, Meg Ryan as his ditzy-yet-brainy niece, and
Tim Robbins as a lovesick mechanic. When Robbins moves
in on Ryan for a kiss, she attempts to fend him off
with a 2,500-year-old paradox known as Zeno's
dichotomy: Moving from point A to point B requires
that you first cover half the distance, then half of
the remaining distance, and so on - an insurmountable
infinity of almost-theres that keeps you from point B.
Robbins crashes through Zeno's logic by kissing Ryan
anyway.

It was just the thing to get Lynds off the couch: What
if Zeno's real lesson isn't that movement from point A
to point B is impossible (obviously it isn't), but
rather that there is no such thing as a discrete slice
of time?

He went back to school that fall with the fervor and
the audacity of the converted. During an office-hours
argument with physicist David Beaglehole, Lynds
pointed at the professor's coffee mug and demanded to
know: At what "instant" would the mug not be moving if
he dragged it across the desk? Exasperated, Beaglehole
suggested that Lynds try to get his theory published,
thinking that rejection from an academic journal would
put the matter to rest.

Sure enough, Physical Review Letters, which published
Einstein, said no thanks ("The author's arguments are
based on profound ignorance or misunderstanding of
basic analysis and calculus," one referee said).
Foundations of Physics Letters didn't respond. A third
journal, in Canada, said yes, and then sent him a bill
- it was a vanity press. Lynds withdrew.

But then something extraordinary happened. Lynds
called Foundations to ask for his manuscript and was
told the journal had no record of his paper. So he
sent it again. It got rejected. Lynds revised it and
submitted it a third time ... and they said yes. The
paper was published in August 2003, and Lynds became a
celebrity. He was cheered (and jeered) on physics
discussion Web sites. Big-name researchers talked to
the press about his work. Conference invitations
started pouring in.

Then again, the 30-year-old Lynds is holed up in a
rustic New Zealand cabin, working on a
theory-of-everything book that has no publisher. He
still hasn't finished college. If that sounds a little
too Unabomber for a new kind of science, well, maybe
it is.

Then again, Lynds might be right.

Lynds' paper, "Time and Classical and Quantum
Mechanics: Indeterminacy vs. Continuity," is the
latest chapter in a story that begins with Zeno and
runs through Newton and Einstein to today. The
question they struggled to answer: How does matter
move through time and space?

Newton described motion as a change in position over
time. (In the process of figuring that out, he
invented calculus.) That allowed for infinite series
of infinitesimal steps, which polishes off Zeno. But
for his model to make sense, Newton needed what he
described as "absolute, true and mathematical time,
which of itself flows equably without relation to
anything external." It's a God clock, ticking out
discrete instants, or, if you prefer, a universal CPU,
doling out reality one cycle at a time, a series of
static instants giving only the appearance of motion
like the successive frames of a movie.

But Einstein didn't buy it. The heart of relativity is
that everything depends on your point of view - if
you're traveling at close to the speed of light (a
constant), then time moves differently for you than
for your slowpoke friends back home. Einstein died
before he had worked out the implications of his own
brilliant ideas. Among the problems left unsolved:
Time could go faster or slower (or even backward), but
was it divisible? And were there irreducible "atoms"
of time, quantum flecks now called chronons?

Feature:
Time's Up, Einstein
Plus:
An Extremely Brief History of Time
Enter Lynds. In his theory, reality is merely
sequences of events that happen relative to one
another; time is an illusion. There's no chronon, no
direction for time's arrow to fly, no "imaginary time"
flowing 90 degrees off the axis of normal time. "I got
to a point in my life where I was asking deeper and
deeper questions," Lynds says. "If you want to
understand reality, you have to get into physics. And
if you're really interested in physics, you have to
ask really big questions."

His answers make the mathematics of space and time
look strange. If instants don't exist, then calculus -
in which equations depend on fixed before-and-after
positions in space - doesn't accurately describe
reality. And that means a fundamental indeterminacy
connects the blurry probabilities of the quantum
universe with the seemingly stable macroverse where
you and I live. Uniting those two seemingly
incompatible worldviews dogged Einstein until his
death; Lynds is happy to help the great man out. A
further realization: The human perception of time as a
sequence of moments is just a neurological artifact,
an outgrowth of the chunk-by-chunk way our brains
perceive reality. As the famous geneticist J. B. S.
Haldane said: The universe is not only stranger than
we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine.

For a while, the question of whether instants exist
was superseded by the question of whether Lynds
exists. His claims were so outlandish, the scandal
they provoked so fervent, and his home country
(apparently) so exotic that the Internet Museum of
Hoaxes briefly decided Lynds wasn't real. He spent
months corresponding with the webmaster to clear that
up. This part of the Lynds controversy turns out to be
the only mystery I could resolve without knowing
advanced physics.

I met up with Lynds at the Bar Marmont in Hollywood,
on his way home from a conference at Carnegie Mellon
University. Over beers, he proved to be quite
self-effacing. "This isn't the grand unified theory,"
he said. "I'm not trying to combine general relativity
and quantum theory." Still, he acknowledged, that may
be an outcome. The truth is, he'd rather talk about
fishing than physics. And that's fine - his Kiwi drawl
can be harder to untangle than Heisenberg's
uncertainty principle.

Even when I went to see Lynds in New Zealand a few
months later, I had to initiate the physics
conversation every time. "I know, I know - it's pretty
bloody unlikely," Lynds said, perching on a creaky
chair on the front porch of his hillside flat, a cross
between a tree house and a Hobbit hole. "How the hell
did I end up in this position, with this idea? I'm
just some dude that's read a few books."

Lynds' modesty is a bit disingenuous. A huge Einstein
devotee, he knows his own story has inescapable
similarities to that of another disgruntled
twentysomething who turned to physics as a respite
from his crummy day-to-day life. Though it's now known
as his annus mirabilis, Einstein spent 1905 - when he
came up with relativity - in a loveless marriage,
shuffling between a dead-end job and a cramped house
filled with the cries of a colicky 1-year-old. Lynds
spent 1999 feeling not much better. He was depressed
about college, about his job prospects, about
everything. And that led to an avalanche of ideas and
thought experiments. Whether they were miraculous
remains an open question.

Sometimes in science it's hard to tell the crazy,
wildly off-the-mark theories from the brilliant,
revolutionary ones. Uncredentialed outsiders claiming
to have discovered the unified field theory or cold
fusion - in a word, cranks - are always banging on the
door of the physics establishment. Sometimes they're
literally crazy; sometimes they're just wrong. The
establishment turns them away. The thing is, the
establishment also depends on crazy ideas - wormholes,
quantum foam, 12 dimensions - to move forward.

Publication is generally the standard separating the
real brains from the brains protected by tinfoil hats.
Of course, peer review does not anoint an idea as
correct - just worth considering. Lynds' paper incited
a storm of commentary from physicists, armchair and
professional, around the world. Someone even asked for
an opinion from John Wheeler, the 94-year-old eminence
who coined the term black hole and schooled both
Richard Feynman and Kip Thorne. Wheeler stopped far
short of endorsing Lynds, but he did venture that
major changes in physics often come from outside
academia. Hey, Einstein did his best work as a patent
clerk, right?

Feature:
Time's Up, Einstein
Plus:
An Extremely Brief History of Time
In spring 2004, with the din of his debut still
ringing in his ears, Lynds embarked upon a whirlwind
tour of Europe to meet the great minds in foundations
research. One of the more encouraging emails he had
received during the initial storm of publicity was
from Fran Healy, dilettante time theorist and lead
singer of the Brit-pop band Travis. Healy had read
about Lynds and sent him a brief note of
congratulations. The two began a correspondence, and
when Lynds came through London, Healy let him crash at
his flat. "This dropout kid comes along with a snotty
nose and dirty face and says, sorry, no, you've got it
wrong," Healy laughs, and switches from his Scots
brogue to a pitch-perfect Kiwi deadpan: "'Well,
Stephen Hawking, he's quite brilliant, but a lot of
his stuff is quite off.'"

Plaudits from rock stars, even the most cerebral ones,
may be good for morale, but they won't get you into
the physics pantheon. One thing that will is the help
of other scientists. While in England, Lynds scored an
audience with David Deutsch, the godfather of quantum
computing. "We had a nice chat," Deutsch says. He told
Lynds to keep working on his theory's implications for
quantum computing. That's a little like a big-leaguer
telling a college-baller to keep working on his swing.
Lynds chose to take it as encouragement.

Lynds also had dinner in London with a fellow time
theorist named Julian Barbour. In the last 30 years,
Barbour has become something of an insider's outsider
in physics. Over Chinese food, the two embarked on
what seemed at first an enjoyable chat about their
shared belief that time, as commonly represented, does
not exist. But the conversation hit a semantic snag
when Lynds insisted that Barbour's theories included
instants by a different name. The meal ended in a
less-than-friendly way.

Academia may never accept Lynds, but the rest of the
world will have a chance to chew over his ideas in the
next year or two, when his book on the structure of
the universe comes out. Lynds has a literary agent,
Heide Lange, who also represents Dan Brown, author of
The Da Vinci Code. That's the kind of firepower that
practically assures publication - and serious
marketing. "He's definitely tuned to a different
wavelength," Lange says. "And I love an underdog."

Lange admits she doesn't fully understand Lynds'
science. One thing she does know: the science of
selling scads of books that give readers an
intellectual tingle without overdoing it. After she
saw some of Lynds' work, she says, she got a gut
feeling that his picture of the universe will prove as
seductive as Hawking's - and easier to digest.
Hawking's A Brief History of Time may be the
least-read best seller ever; Lange seems to think
Lynds can be Dan Brown to Hawking's Umberto Eco.

It would be surprising if Lynds' story had such a tidy
ending. After all, the second law of thermodynamics
says that everything in the universe gets messier over
time. Or, more formally: The entropy of any system
increases. Drop a beer mug on the floor and it
shatters; shards of glass do not assemble into mugs of
beer and jump into your hand.

Sitting in the back of a fishing boat on New Zealand's
Waihau Bay, in Maori country, I ask Lynds about the
second law. He watches our lines cut through the
boat's wake and then starts talking about Loschmidt's
paradox, which says that, since Newtonian physics
works in reverse, entropy can decrease. Experience
with beer mugs suggests otherwise.

I confess that I'm baffled. All I can think of is the
way the Maori describe the past: "That which is in
front of us."

Lynds is still paradox-hunting. "Time doesn't flow in
any direction. Period," he says. "Entropy can decrease
temporarily, but that doesn't mean events will
un-happen."

It's a good theory if you're someone who had one very
bad summer. The past recedes into the aft horizon. The
boat speeds on.