Time Revisited

A remarkable paper, published in the August 2003 issue of Foundations of Physics Letters, has turned the scientific community upside down. Titled: Time and Classical and Quantum Mechanics: Indeterminacy vs. Discontinuity, the paper is amazing not only for the manner in which it redefines our perception of time (and all calculations based on time), but also for introducing its extraordinary young author to the world.

Peter Lynds, a 27 year old New Zealander, began thinking about time while working in a tedious, dead-end insurance job. "I've had an interest in time right through my life," he says. "But I didn't develop an interest in physics or the philosophy of science until I was about 19 or 20."

His paper describes why time cannot be thought of in physical, definable quantities. That may seem obvious to those not familiar with physics, but to some scientists it's heresy. Current thinking in quantum mechanics relies on time being made up of tiny, discrete packages. Lynds says there is no moment at which time can be considered to have stopped—even for an instant—and so an object's position can never be precisely determined at any time. This has implications for everything from quantum mechanics to the theories of the famous physicist, Stephen Hawking.

"The main idea of it," Lynds says, "is that there is a necessary trade off of all precise physical magnitudes at a time, for their continuity (i.e. change and movement) over time. More specifically, there isn't a precise instant in time underlying an object's motion. While its position is constantly changing over time—and as such, never determined—it does not have a determined position at any time. Since there is no such thing as a determined, relative position at any time—velocity, acceleration, momentum, mass, energy and all other physical magnitudes can't be precisely determined at any time, either. Other implications of the paper are that (1) time doesn't actually flow or physically progress, that (2) in relation to indeterminacy in precise physical magnitude, the micro and macroscopic are inextricably linked and both a part of the same parcel, rather than just a case of the former underlying and contributing to the latter, that (3) chronons, proposed atoms of time, aren’t compatible with a consistent physical description, that (4) it doesn't appear necessary for time to emerge or congeal from the big bang, and that (5) Hawking's theory of imaginary time would appear to be meaningless."

Heady stuff, coming from a young man with only a few college courses under his belt.

Lynd's paper flies in the face of much previous work, but is also garnering a great deal of praise. "His work resembles Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity," said a referee of the paper, while Andrei Khrennikov, Professor of Applied Mathematics at Växjö University in Sweden and Director of ICMM, said, "I find this paper very interesting and important to clarify some fundamental aspects of classical and quantum physical formalisms. I think that the author of the paper did a very important investigation of the role of continuity of time in the standard physical models of dynamical processes."

"Strictly speaking," Lynds says, "my paper isn't a theory. It can't make any testable predictions (other than just that, if correct, motion and physical continuity should take place). As such, it's purely about understanding and falls somewhere uncomfortably between physics, philosophy, and mathematics. I'd like to think that because it clarifies a number of things to do with time—classical and quantum mechanics, indeterminacy, cosmology, etc.—it's a worthwhile contribution to each of these fields."

Time will tell.