His paper rocked the physics world - and the space-time continuum. Not bad for a college dropout who critics say may not even exist.
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.
In [Lynds] 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.
[Basically in a nut shell what Lynds wrote is that there is NO such thing as TIME as we have been taught and commonly assume.]
There is no clock; "time" is an illusion
• Time has no indivisible unit.
• There is no "now," only sequences of events.
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