Quantum Cosmogenesis and the Nature of Time

0:00 ...more commercial for the Philosophical Society. For most of you, we know that. In fact, many of you are members of the Philosophical Society, but for those who are not, thank you, Scooby-Doo. We have here at Rooley House, not part of the formality of Rooley House, but certainly very much integral with the philosophy part, where the Philosophical Society, which has been going for 25 years now, was founded by Michael Lockwood's predecessor, and it is by no means for professional philosophers most of us are like me are amateur armchair philosophers but it has the big advantages not only of giving us some help and edge in the philosophy but I find coming here very much as the years go by I increasingly look forward to coming here not only for the philosophy but very much for being old friends very pleasant. The Philosophical Society has its AGM today, and my name's Charles Brown, and I'm the chairman for the next couple of years, so that's why I'm speaking to you now. Membership, very small, five funds a year, for which you get the privileges of, for example, I think I'm right in still saying that the members get slightly earlier notice, of course, than non-members and with these they look at the crowded call scenes the sooner you get your application the better the members have very much an input into what topics are being discussed in the future for example this weekend you know it was discussed as it were 12 months or more ago and I can say that it's very good value for money you not only get these privileges but you get a splendid magazine review each year 25th anniversary supplement as well in itself a slip at five to five pounds we consistently get speakers at weekends almost as good as the ones we've got this weekend joining is a matter of just getting a form from any one of the committee members that cost you five pounds we connected we all be cheered by direct debit so if anyone would like member joining please have a word with me or have a word with uh david hunt was david behind who's

2:30 in fact our magazine editor we'll have a quick word with you now about them oh sorry yes one other thing one other thing which we have started fairly recently gibson who is my my the retiring chairman um has taken the lead on this is that we found very often these weekends finishing at one time on Sunday, it all sort of fell apart and everybody dispersed. Whereas all the sort of fascinating stuff we've had already and we will have today, the rest of the day and tomorrow, a lot of people would like to ask more questions about it and discuss it among themselves and perhaps say opinions they have themselves. So we now have, starting at two o'clock tomorrow, immediately after lunch, we're meeting those of us who want to stay behind us who can afford the time and so on and are interested, stay behind. We meet in the common room where we just had our coffee and then for an hour or however long it takes we can have our own discussion on what we've had over the weekend. Our speakers probably, almost certainly, won't be there. Albie, as it were, taking the chair but not to guide it but simply to hold the ring as it were. So please if you are interested in that, stay behind a bit. Come and join us. Peter Stelton, that the previous ones have turned out very well and proved very rewarding. Thank you very much. Okay, very, very quickly, I've got to study for the time we've got. Dave Hunt, editor of the Review, just to say that essentially the Review is a collection of essays and articles by you, the members of the Society, and of course I rely on getting stuff in. Come February I get very uptight because nobody's produced anything. really need something before end of May, I suppose. But here is your chance for posterity. You can actually send in me anything, a poem, photographs of any interest, a short article, say something about a weekend, say something about a book that you've read, just anything of any philosophical import whatsoever. Ron Crutchley over there has given me a smattering of something like, how many volumes have you got of personal thoughts wrong? I hesitate. this will see the society right through not only this millennium but the next one as well but we've got to work on that in addition to being able to send essays and that which you know would be published we have the Tony Chadwick essay

5:00 prize, in fact tonight at the Philosophical Society Dean that we'll be presenting the prize which is £100 and a free philosophy weekend of the winner's choice there is a second prize known as the Berwickius Prize who wrote The Consolation of Philosophy for £50 we now have a third prize which is to be known as the Lyceum Prize a prize essay under age 25 and I'm looking around but we're trying to encourage young people to write We have those three prizes. The competition conditions are on the last page of the supplement. The supplement this year is, in fact, dedicated to Dr. Tony Chadwick, the founder of the Society, 25 years ago. I do commend this volume, too, because there's a lot of very good stuff in here. And for £5, you get this and other features of the Society, like being able to borrow tapes and early warning of the American science. Please speak to me or anyone in the committee, Charles, and I'll give you an appreciation for them. Thank you very much indeed, Eric. One final announcement. We now have a very extensive collection of tapes of the lectures at past weekends going back to 1985, starting, I think, with Anthony Quinton. And members of the Philosophical Society are entitled to borrow these and there's a catalogue of them which you could look over to see what might interest you I mean a lot of people I know who borrow these play them in the car as they drive to work and things of this kind I hope this doesn't affect them but if you think it's advisable anyway Joan Oswald our librarian will be in the common room after breakfast tomorrow. And so anybody who would like to take a look at what's on offer and perhaps borrow some of the tapes, she's the person to speak to. Okay, well, with that, I can pass you over to Professor Chris Eysham,

7:30 who is at Imperial College London, and is at least as much a mathematician and a philosopher, I think, as a physicist. I know that the way in which he approaches the problems that arise, for example, about time in the context of quantum gravity and so on, are very fascinating to philosophers. And I can't think of a better person to talk about these deep matters for a philosophical audience. I was delighted to have you with us. Thank you very much. Well, you would have noticed in the question at the end of his lecture, Gerald Reed neatly slipped from me the minor question of how did the universe actually begin, and does it make any sense. Plus, I should say something about the academic status, actually, of the three lectures we're having during this weekend. What Gerald was talking about is genuine science, but there's no question that people take it very, very seriously as such. Of course, there are different sort of opinions, you have different schools of thought, but it is actually genuine science. articles very credible and therefore potentially very believable. What John is going to talk about tomorrow is genuine philosophy and therefore also, of course, no, highly credible. What I have to do is to boost the gap between them and unfortunately the unholy alliance is totally unbelievable. But nonetheless, I'm here for the next hour and quarter. So I'm going to talk about quantum cosmogenesis, for which I mean the theories of the ideas, the speculations about the possibility of talking about the very origin of the universe itself as some sort of scientific event. So Jarre was talking about what happened afterwards as it were, quite a short time afterwards as it were, somewhere what actually happened so far as this is possible. Now obviously there are certain key questions you must address right from the very beginning. First of all, what is it that's actually created? What are we talking about? And already there are two quite distinct possibilities here. One is when he's talking about the origin or the creation of matter in some sort of pre-existing space and time. I'll come back to that later. Another is that time and space themselves are in some way created or have an origin. In the latter case, one naturally asks, well, what does this really mean? Because talking about the origin of time, it's a process that tells you it's contradictory in terms.

10:00 And in particular, it's fairly clear, whatever else you might or may not mean by the creation of time, It's very unlikely you mean it to be a temporal process. I'll discuss it later, later on. It's obviously a contradiction in terms to talk about the creation of time. How long did it take? Did he have quickly the same? So, rather than talking about the creation of time or the origin of time as a temporal process, it's in many ways more appropriate to think of what might call the ontological ground of time. That's to see the origin of time in a more ontological sense. And in fact, this is very relevant to what everyone wants to talk about scientifically. and here there are one basic question which comes out right at the very beginning and that's that do we expect or do we believe that the concept of time is in fact a fundamental one applicable to all conceivable scales in all conceivable possible domains of the universe we might wish to throw either experimentally or theoretically or is it more like the concept of pressure of temperature now notions of pressure work absolutely perfectly gas the size of his room, of course, we know that the concept of pressure is a very meaningful But we also know, and this is, of course, commonplace to one of the graduate students of physics, that if you study smaller and smaller distances, what's actually happening? In the danger, of course, you lose the notion of pressure on the gas on the side of a box of gas, and instead you begin to see the individual particles bouncing off. At that point, the concept of pressure simply becomes inappropriate. Now, that doesn't mean that the idea of pressure was wrong, of course, in some sort of blanket merely that it becomes inappropriate at that particular scale because I think you must take its place. The question I'm really asking about time is not, is our current concept of time wrong in some deep sense, in fact it is, but is it possible that it has to change maybe some domain of our study of the universe, where our current concept of time becomes more like pressure, simply inappropriate. Now, the problem with this is you can't win, really, because you get hung on two hawks instantly, Because if it's the case, if time, in fact, is a fundamental concept, then the question immediately arises, can normal physics cope with the idea of the very, say, creation of time, because normal physics doesn't have that at all built into its basic ideas? On the other hand, if time is not, in fact, a fundamental concept, then why should we expect to believe we could use standard physics anyway, and talk about the origin of the universe, It does presuppose that you have a certain type of notion of time.

12:30 So either way around, it turns out to be, whether we want to say that time is a basic concept or not, there come immediate problems about the status of standard physics, theoretical physics. So these are the first sort of general questions you have to ask. And the second question, which I think has already been preempted in one of the comments at the end of Jell's lecture, is, well, are such things genuine science, if I reduce them? This is a very good question, and it's not sort of obvious to me what the answer is. I'll tell you what J.R. does is search genuine science. I think what I do is more debatable. Well, you said it with philosophy terms. So, if they are genuine science, are they actually believable? I mean, you actually believe the things I'm about to tell you. I'd recommend you don't actually, but supposing you do, how do you judge them? How do you believe them? And if not, if you decide, and you may well do, that what theoretical physicists do in this domain is completely unbelievable to science. What in fact do we think we're doing? Are we in effect just producing another creation myth? Is that what we're saying? Is it the current at the end of this century, working out the same old deep-sigy human need to construct myths about origin? I can believe the answer is yes to that. But of course there's the RAE kind of research assessment exercise and I won't get any points to say We'll slip that one past in a moment. Now, let's think a little bit about time. Well, time, knowledge and time efficiency, time is certainly a fascinating subject. Let me start off with that fascination, the concept of time. Well, first of all, it's clearly interdisciplinary. It is par excellence. The one thing you can absolutely guarantee is of great interest right across the whole field of human endeavor, human thought. It's clearly of interest in the theoretical physics. but of course humanities too poetry some of the poetry T.S. Eliot is absolutely loaded with obsession with time and who reads it music psychology theology all of these areas are branches of human study which have a genuinely bona fide interest in the nature of time of course time is peculiar I make no excuse for giving you the famous Augustine quote many of you have seen before but it's such a good quote and it's the only time

15:00 So here's Augustine who marks on time, he says, what then is time? Well, if no one asks me, I know, if I want to explain it to a question, I do not know. It's also true. In fact, he says, at any rate, this makes an idea of a firm mind. If nothing passed, there would be no past time. If nothing were approaching, there would be no future time. And if nothing were, there would be no present time. That's a wonderful paragraph, that's completely undetermined, affordably speaking, but it's a wonderful paragraph, and you can use it, in fact, as a sort of local, as a focal point, in much discussion of modern scientific ideas and the nature of time. Augustine was a very, very profound thinker, no question about that. There's two things here that I'd like to pick out particularly that Augustine emphasizes. One is the perplexity of the concept of time. It does bother us. I mean, space may also bother you. I remember when I was a student, I was a the Albert Hall sometimes at concerts. You know, Albert Hall's a very impressive place. I'm sitting, as I was, right from a long way away, being a student up at the top. And the orchestra's down there in the middle. And I used to think, what's in between them and me? This great vast row of people, there's nothing in between. And there's the orchestra. I used to really worry about it. I used to wake up in the middle of the night and worry about it. So I came into that for a physicist, of course. But nonetheless, I don't think we do get any existential angst about space. You can sort of live with it because you're familiar with it. But time is different. all of us worry about time one way or another, we do find it genuinely perplexing. Even if we spend all our time writing equations at our times, if we're honest, we still do find it perplexing. And the second thing, which is actually rather important from Augustine says, the diversity places on the notion of ordering and the notion of processing. These are two different aspects of the concept of time that play a key role in our modern scientific views on the matter. Ordering is the idea of one thing coming before another. That's Clearly, this is part of our human experience of time. But also, as we know, there is more than just the ordinary thing. There's also the actual process, the lived time, the things that Bergson wrote about. And also, I think you can say that Augustine is a conscious of that in his writings on the subject. Of course, in Augustine's time, he wasn't a theoretical physicist, and he said he wasn't interested in the nature of time from a scientific perspective. What he was doing was try to create, in many ways, the church's, let's say, Christian church's definitive theological position on the nature of time, really in opposition to the Gnostic schools, which were hard at work in those

17:30 days, presented in a very different perspective, and tied them all together. Now, I thought I'd like to start off actually by giving you an alternative picture of the origin of time to the one that scientists talk about these days, which I personally find just as believable. Now, one of these big advances Jar has over me is he works in a branch of theoretical physical physics, there's wonderful pictures of the universe that we have. No one fell to be impressed with these massive galaxies, glasses of galaxies, super super clusters of galaxies and so on. Those carefully tinted in pictures of the microwave radiation, red bits and drinnets. It's all clever stuff. It's all, of course, done on a computer, but nonetheless it's clever stuff. All I could offer is that. However, this is Zerication, the Zoroastrian Mazdian god of time I pick this one up, there's a wonderful example of a creation myth if you call it a myth which reflects many of the sorts of issues that in fact Augustine was struggling with and which you'll see reappear in the modern scientific theories, it's quite fascinating so many of these old ideas keep coming back here's the myth Zirvan is the primordial entity of the being in this particular branch of ancient Persian religion. Therefore, he or she, it, exists in itself, totally self-complete, without any space or time, totally in itself. And after a while, it, he, she gets a bit lonely and thinks, I'm about to create something. Now, the question is, how would the ultimate God create something? Well, if you were a sub-ultimate God, you might make sacrifices to the ultimate God. If you're actually the big cheeses of that, of the sacrifice to himself. So Zerbenok is his sacrifices to himself. And as a result of these sacrifices, some is fast to be formed, which is other than himself, which would be his son, as it were. But unfortunately, this is the absolutely typical Gnostic touch now. He suddenly thinks, is this going to work? I'm wasting my time. And in that moment of doubt, because he's gone, of all emotions become apostatized, in a very instant of doubt, something arises from that doubt, which itself is in polar opposition was trying to create. This is the power of evil. So this is this particular ancient Gnostic explanation of why did you have good and evil in the world? Because the evil power has come about from the self-doubt of the object of creating a god. Now, both powers leaping to being at this moment,

20:00 instead you see the dual brothers leaping in, the twins between brothers, the same opposite of each other, coming to being. But Zervan like all of these gods is a fair god and has to admit, well, actually it's his fault that the evil power came into being. You can't just wipe him out, but be put at that. So the evil power has to be given the possibility of the good power, which is his other son, overcoming him. And to do that, he has to create time. So in this mythology, time is created purely and simply as it means whereby this sort of bipolar split, this harmony in the original creation can be remedied or restored by the good power. Now, it's a classic Gnostic myth. I like it normally, it feels to me psychologically very much. It explains the origin of good and evil, and also why, as we think, time is somehow being bad or things. And that's what Augustine was fighting against, was that general Gnostic awareness or feeling about the badness of time. Because what theoretical physicists have to say about that, well, you can tell me at the end of my lecture. So that's my only picture that that sort of thing showed. Let me come back to the general question then about what are space and time, because one thing which is clearly true, if we are really going to talk about the origins of the universe, really the origins of the universe, and we have talked deep way. Well, what can you say about this? What are space and time? As far as scientific or philosophical thought is concerned, I suppose I shouldn't speak for philosophers, it's a very dangerous thing to do. As far as scientific thought is concerned, and arguably some philosophy, there are three main ways in the West in which we have perceived or thought about the notion of space and time. The first one is what I call psychological projection. The idea here There's a space in time that's not in fact outside us at all, although we think they are. We are responsible in some way in space and time, not reality in itself. Of course, Kant is the person who specifically produced this theory, known as a pavorite nature of space and time. They are the necessary colored glasses to which we have to see the world, and nothing we can do about that. Now, in our own time, Jung, I have to admit, I'm a great fan of Jung, my friends of Jung, because what do I do and think? Jung picked up this thesis in our own century and taught a great deal about the archetypes of space and time. What he meant by that is that space and time are things that in some ways we unconsciously project into the world. There's much reflection of our inner psyche as they are of the world itself. In fact, Jung regarded himself as a 20th century analogue Kant.

22:30 In several places, I mean, what is Jack Young? You're finding something to say. Well, I think it's great that my own Kant is that I'm trying to bring into the 20th ideas, and place them in a psychological context. And of course there's mighty old history in relation to Freud and so on, it's a good time to be doing that. I actually take this view surprisingly seriously, but again as far as the REE is concerned, I'd be definitely not the five star or even the 3B if I did that, so let's get that one. One other thing's scientific views, I'd call it that, about later in time. One says that space and time are in some way substances in their own right, and notice all the scare quotes everywhere about this I mean, I know the words that they said immediately and the second is that they also have one of the properties of things now, these are two opposite perspectives of the nature of space they both have a key role in quantum physics in fact, I would say quantum physics oscillates very easily between these two not quite sure which side to take up so, substances in their own right well, I suppose the classic example is Newtonian picture of space and time space and time pre-exist it were, they are sometimes there. So when I was sitting looking at that orchestra in the middle of the Albert Hall, there really wasn't, in a sense, something between me and the orchestra. It was empty space. So that's where that view comes from. From a slightly more conceptual, you could say, well, all this means is that spatio-temporal categories precede those of matter. So you have some ontological primacy. So if you want to talk about the universe as a whole, you must first of all sort out your spatio-temporal categories. Then you sort out your material pattern. That's what's implied, I would say, by this particular approach. And in fact, you see this happening in theoretical physics as written this way. The theoretical physicists who tend to follow this lie would think about space from time first, but then think about putting something in it. It's a natural thing to do. So space is a big container of things. It's a big box, not a big band. It's a big box there in the universe. There's space in a big box, and they are all having things in it. and in particular of course this implies that the motion of empty space is perfectly meaningful so if you took the hours forward and you moved the orchestra you moved all the seats you moved everything else one by one there'd still be empty space now said against that is a quite different perspective which is that space in time are in fact really properties of things in some way or another now this is if you like

25:00 a relation of the Magnitson view of space and time as opposed to the first one which I suppose you could argue as well wasn't you told me For example, people sometimes say time is not really a thing in itself, it's a sequence of events. So the notion of event is given time, events are what's really there. Time is simply a collection of events, not a fundamental concept. It certainly strongly suggests a process picture of time. There's a famous footnote in one of the Whiteheads, I think it's probably White's impersonation reality, he has a footnote which says that philosophy, since the last two and a half thousand years, there's nothing but a serious footnote to Plato. Well, it seems to me that if you could add to that and say that a slight exaggeration, the whole of human endeavour, the whole of human cultural and personal experience since those times has been actually the plain out of the battle between Plato and Aristotle. And I really do see the world in these terms, and I certainly see it with my colleagues all the time who do theoretical physics. There's the Platonists of whom I count myself one, Roger Penrose is the most famous mathematical platonist around the planet, I would say, who really very much take this perspective. So for us, the cathonic notion of the universe of pre-existing forms in their sort of glorious entirety feels right. Then there's the murky Aristotelian view, where it says the rubbery stuff down here, the individual thing that's really important. I can't think of anybody who can believe that, And that really is what we're playing in this. And it's absolutely true that some of the most violent discussions I've actually seen on, of all things, selection patterns by the impulsions given by the SDLC have actually rolled back a big mathematicians for taking these different points of view of some poor luckless candidate in the middle. No idea what thought was going on. Truly archetypal conflict being thought out as a result of the head. In any way, one thing is clear that this, to say that material categories precede those to space and to time. So if you're talking about the universe in this entirety, you've got to get your concept of matter, whether it be, sort it out first, and then, after that, the notion of space and time may be attached to the universe. For example, any viewer that wants to regard time as being a secondary concept like pressure is likely to take this point of view, because then the notion of time is something like an epi-phenomenon that's attached on top of a more a more profound underlying theory of matter.

27:30 So this is, as I say, a very clear sort of position we could say. Now, in particular, if there are no things around, there can't be any space and time. If space and time are dependent on matter, then nothing present means there's no space and time. And in particular, therefore, empty space is a meaningless concept in this particular approach. Now, as I said before, modern physics genuinely oscillates between these two views. of people who dabble in quantum cosmology in these areas that we can talk about. There is, I've mentioned the word quantum, you say this, there's the additional horrendous problem, what you might call quantum reality. Already these are very deep, I would say psychologically embedded conflicts when we look at the world. And that's about classicalism. In addition, you have to have on the whole mysterious nature of the quantum reality. And the thing about these quantum cosmogenesis is that they are trying to put back the origin of the universe using ideas from quantum theory. A giant idea is a quantum thing into space and time, so I think it's about 10,000 times worse. But really, it asks very, very deep, very difficult issues which arise here. Now, we have to start to pick out slowly from this some of the more genuine scientific ideas that we can use to build on to construct theories of cortogenesis. To start off, I talk about the, I mentioned just in passing, the thing which, as I said, which is the ordering nature of time. You see, it's fairly obvious, I think, if you're really going to talk about the origin of the universe, I mean, can do this. Of course, many people have said this since. Is it meaningful to really talk about the beginning of time? Is it not a contradiction in term? Could you really make sense of it? And the reason why people think it's nonsensical is because you have the notion of the ordering of temporal events. So if there was an initial event, surely there must have been ones before, because, aside, it's all. I mean, that's basically, quote-unspeak, So where does this notion of ordering come from? Well, interestingly, and arguably, it comes from the Judeo-Christian view of the nature of time. So the fascinating story, it's been very well written up about this by people interested in theology and science and religion, trying to show the way in which theological ideas have actually embedded themselves into modern science and absolutely realising. And the idea here is that the notion of time, Western notion, linear time, which we do actually have, And what's more of the directed nature of time, the past, present, and the future, the things Augustine was so strongly emphasizing,

30:00 are themselves a reflection, actually, of a theological position. It's certainly true, of course, in the Judeo-Christian heritage, that time is directed. I mean, there's the origin of the universe, and then the universe evolved to fulfill God's purpose, and then there's some eschatological end, depending on your particular beliefs. So there's a single one-off thing. the universe plays out its course and then things finish now from a mathematical point of view we know that this is because the real numbers have exactly this order in property of any given pair of real numbers it's true, either A equals B or Y is less than B or Y is greater than B that of course exactly captures our instinctive thing about how events are ordered in time so it's no coincidence that we ordered out exceptions in modern physics to use the real numbers model of the time So here, for example, we are today, there's yesterday, there's tomorrow, riding its way inextricably on. Now, this should be contrasted with what I shall call the archetype of circular cycle, which, in fact, Gerald's already alluded to through its modern apotheosis, which is oscillating universes. There is, of course, also a lot from the human psyche, not just this need for going to beginning to end, but this eye for eternal recurrence. There's many, many myths of eternal recurrence, and many, many ancient civilizations have them. They have any much further in a certain type of ancient root form. Of course, particularly there, there's no sense of history. I mean, it's totally opposite to the Christian view, clearly, the Christian today view, because here we are today, and this was yesterday. It's true that that event was yesterday, but if I wait long enough, it'll come again, between tomorrow. So the notion of history is an ordering, certainly a sense of purpose is completely lost. Instead, you get this sort of psychic repetition. Now, as he's saying, that as far as ancient Riggs was concerned, initially they liked this idea. They thought they might have set peace with it, this notion of eternal recovery, the orderless incident of the universe, everything going around, perfect motion of the circle. And I thought, what's going on? And after a while, Harold, they began to get rather weary about this, and the notion of going round and round in circles, rather than being a pleasing one, one would sort of, the psychological effect, became very distressing one, because instead, you've got this notion of being locked in your faith. You could change your faith. The green prejudice of all, of the inevitable nature of fate. And that's very much tied up this notion of circular time. So again, Augustine was fighting against this.

32:30 Augustine was one of the people undoubtedly was responsible for developing this which would be now regarded as an obvious inverted corpus Western view of the world actually at the time. But as Jared Mark, it's very intriguing that oscillating universes won't go away. And what he said is absolutely right that the Russians, particularly in the in the 60s when they were still, you had to be politically correct, in those days that really meant something serious if you were a scientist in Russia, you had to be politically correct, you couldn't have them, they fell, better off or worse, but the notion of a big bang suggested some sort of theistic explanation, now whether that's really true is to itself quite debatable, but they felt that anyway, and so they were almost obliged to propagate this notion of oscillating universes, and as Jack says, it's very true, the theoretical since at most times, still do the same trick. It's sort of locked in their own unconscious. They have to do this. They still don't quite that easy about this or the sort of trick to its habit. It's interesting. Okay. But we don't, these days, apart from that sort of particular manifestation, we don't work with this anymore. We think of this as the way of doing things. But then, of course, we do have a problem with the origins of this. If time is really meaningless, the notion of the origin itself would be meaningless to simply be the eternal recurrence. by its way, they don't mean them whatsoever. Of course, we have a doctrine, Christian, so we have to think about the origins. You may want to think about it theologically, but if you want to think about it scientifically, it's obviously a problem. Right. So, let me start now to track through some of the ideas we've talked about. The first one, John's seen this transphatic before, you recognize it. we first met actually at a conference in the Vatican organized by the Vatican talk about exactly these things it's a good field to be a lot of money you'd be surprised it's much easier to get a grant to work in that than it is in fact the foundations of quantum field here was the first people talked about this is the one the plagiarists would like they could have it their way entirely This is the creation of what? Well, it's the creation in space and time. So ideas of this type where we say there exists, as it were, a pre-existing space and time, whatever that may mean, it's there.

35:00 And suddenly, at some point, as it were, at some creation point, what we call the material continuity of the universe pops into being. So this is creation from nothing. Here, nothing literally means no thing, which, of course, in this absolute view of space and time, which simply means empty space, which, of course, seems to be meaningful concept in that place in this view of things. So this is no thing. As a first event, even in the past time, these are just the sort of diagram Jowell was using in his talk, space going this way, time going that way. Really, of course, there should be three spatial dimensions. Obviously, one's limited for a computer. Here's the idea. Something pops into existence. Now, there was a fairly lengthy debate, a great discussion of energy, at the end of the last talk. Energy is a subtle concept, far subtle than one might think at first sight. universe popping into being was actually a favourite violation of the conservation of energy. First of all, there's nothing there whatsoever, just empty space, which I presume has zero energy, and suddenly the universe is there, which presumably is quite a lot of energy, you might think. It turns out this is not really true, or at least for the very plausible argument you can make. By very plausible, being means it's vaguely plausible, it's a vaguely plausible argument you can make. But all of the positive energy, which is in the universe around us at the moment, is actually balanced out by the negative exist between any pair of bodies. And the total energy is actually zero. Now, it's not exactly correct. We don't get involved with general activities as to the ways of the rise of this. But there's a certain sense in which it is true. And it does show you the extreme importance of the motion of gravity. Because gravity is the only force that we know of which has this universal property that every pair of objects, wherever they may be in the universe, interact gravitationally and have this negative energy. And therefore, everything can, in a sense, have this total energy balanced off to zero. force wouldn't do. In fact, this is true, and it's interesting how it arises in the more modern fitness, is that gravity, again, is the central key feature. So that's one of the lessons that we have in our times to do this scientifically, is that gravity is going to be the critical factor. Now, Augustine didn't like this picture. This, if you like, is the Plato's picture. It's what you might call demiurge creation. It's the idea of a demiurge, hard at work on pre-existing matter, or sorry, pre-existing form, anyway. So, in that sense, if I can say about something from Giles, because he had, I like the quotation about it, we know particularly important, he wrote this down as a vacuum.

37:30 Now, that is really what this means, and there's a real subject which is a clue, is demiurge creation, or meontic creation, is in fact the creation from that. So that, as it were, is what's there. I can use the phrase here. And suddenly what's up there are all these particles we've created on that. And that's broadly speaking, sort of what I was talking about. So this would be a very Platonist view. And Paul Augustine didn't like it, for a simple theological reason. But if God had created the universe in this way, there was something that was, as it were, outside God, mainly the pre-existing potentiality of being, which is perhaps 75 and 70 space. to diminish God's almighty power. And of course, Augustine didn't like that. The Greeks were quite happy with this. They were more sort of fair-minded, but Augustine didn't like it. He wanted a, you know, a Greek, a Greek, Greek God. But that was his reasons for doing this. He actually pointed out a killer argument. There's nothing at all for them in theology, which is still as good to say as it was then, which is the where and when of creation. Because if this picture were really true, what could possibly determine the point in time indeed the point in space at which this creation event took place. Why should it be now, when it was 15,000 million years ago, rather than 15,000 million years ago in three seconds, shall we say? Now, first of all, that's our manufacturer's question. When you realize it's an extremely profound question, what it's saying actually physically is that there was an infinite amount of past time before that event. And you have this, this is the only equation I'm going to write down next to it, is infinity of the past 2.7. Now, this could be anything you want, but it's absolutely true. So if you slide this picture up and down in a little case, the maths couldn't possibly tell the difference. And therefore, no scientific theory you could write down could possibly ever actually give you a picture like this. It simply couldn't happen. And that is actually a reflection of Augustine's work, exactly Augustine's work, about what would determine the when of creation. And I don't think you've applied these sorts of theories. This is not what is done at all these days in the scientific world. That hasn't been done now for some time. Now, Augustine's famous resolution of this, which is very much closer to what people do try to do these days, was to perform his famous doctrine of Crianzo et Nihilo. And there, nothing was really nothing, absolute nothing.

40:00 Oh, God. Not even the potentiality of being, total non-being. Now, in Giles' presentation, what that comes from is to be rubbing out an auction of people, and just leaving the inverted commas. So this is Augustine's view, was the creation of nothing at all, even the So the idea was that space and time are themselves created in some way. Now, this obviously raises now the problem of the beginning of time, not just the beginning of material events, but the actual beginning of time itself. It's part and parcel. of the creation of the universe. Pentecost just raises the obvious question, well, what was there beforehand? I mean, if someone says the universe, time suddenly began, you cannot psychologically resist the question of what was there beforehand. And of course, the answers there were where, actually, because space was created at the same time. There wasn't even anywhere for it to be beforehand, whatever it was. So many co-philosophical problems, in that way of summarizing that's a thing. It was a big philosophical heritage here, as many people recognize, points. Now the problem here is clearly partly one of language. It is unfortunately true that since we speak English, we are obliged to use verbs, and verbs are tensed unavoidably, and you simply cannot talk about the origins of the universe, except you would be a past tense. It was very peculiar to talk about the origins of the universe using a future tense. It was a serious thing to do, and yet clearly we don't really mean that. It cannot really be the case, which is in some serious sense, you want to talk about the origin of process, even if it did take place in the past, we have to reconcile these two different motions of time somehow. So, there can't really be any sense of before or attempt to process. And the only way out of this is that somehow the concept of time must change looking backwards. Now, in a sense, Jao used a lot of this in his lecture from a more sort of soft physics perspective, but in order to discuss that in the early universe, we have to look backwards, that's all we can do, and strike the bubble from whenever we can see. And there's parts We can't think about that. We can project it. We can't do it. But what from the conceptual point of view is that perception applies. We cannot get outside the universe. So talk about the beginning of time, what was there before time. It sounds as if you could step outside the whole universe and say, hmm, look, there's the universe. What's beforehand? But of course you can't. You're in it. All your categories are constructed in it. You have to work in that way. And that is the key out of the conceptual point of view of what in fact theoretical

42:30 do do, who work in this area, is that they construct areas which, in principle, do actually make coherent sense, what I say that do. Well, let me say it, I don't believe it, I'll say it anyway, you can challenge me afterwards, they construct areas which, in principle, make coherent sense. They may have a few defects in the details, but, well, what is up serious need? They certainly need general activity, at least we presume they do, because the only a branch of the physics we know of, which actually you can talk about space and time as active things, sort of a life of their own, capable of being predicted, is general relativity. The rest of physics, without exception, works with Newtonian picture. Special relativity for these purposes is no better than Newtonian physics. But it's just a space that sits there, that's the bad one. For what to create space and time, we have to change that as the general relativity. And for what reasons I'll explain at the moment, it has to be quantum theory, too, that you have to use, so you really aren't bringing together, or trying to bring together two of the most difficult branches of modern science. Now, I'm not, since I end with talking about general ideas here, I'm pretty much not going to give a five minute spontaneous lecture on general relativity, but I must say something about the subject to convey what is that that's going on. So, here was, here's the picture that Einstein had about what is going on in his view of Look, this, incidentally, is a key point that you know we emphasize too strongly. Einstein's theory of general relativity is a theory of gravity is also a theory of space and time. Now, I remarked five minutes ago that anyway you could see that gravity was going to be important because it's the only way you can balance off positive and negative energies to get zero. But now, from a totally different perspective, it comes in as the only known theory of space and time. Now, it's not a coincidence, I'm sure, but nonetheless, they are on the face of it. They're separate facets of what's happening, and I find this very intriguing. Here's what Einstein said, a picture of Levitre. Einstein's idea was that space and time in which we live are not flat, but curved. So the pictures that Jal drew, the pictures I drew just now, were flat. Now as part of it, the overhead transparencies are flat, but nonetheless, we tended to be flat. So there's a flat overhead transparency. If I turned it round, there's a curve overhead transparency. So that's a curved space-time, you see, because it's curved in that direction,

45:00 luckily to speak, like a glass-based time. Okay, now, the idea of generativity is space-time is curved. So that's what's meant to be drawn here. You want to think of this as like a circuit here. Now, I don't want to destroy one of Imperial College's precious colour from the balance of these plus a pound each, you know, not to mention a plus a theme. But why, if we do so, I could crunch it in the middle, you see. You think of time going up like that, so space is going this way, you see. This is actually, this is like a steady state universe. Nothing's like this happening. I thought you were actually staring at me. The quantum wiggles are coming in. Anyway, time is going up like that, but the universe is staying the same. Now, if the universe is getting bigger, the thing would become more like an ice cream cone, you see, would sort of come out like that. A little smaller. This is what this is meant to represent. So here we are, third time. The universe is getting smaller in some reason. It's getting bigger again. I'm not saying this is an authentic picture of anything particularly, it's just to illustrate the point. Now, Einstein claimed, or showed, in fact, that you get a very good theory of gravity by thinking about space and time as curved, and then say, what actually happens is the particles are always travelling straight lines. So it's this minute-manifestive force, as I'm pointing to you, if I throw something off the roof, clearly it's not going in the straight line, it's going in the curved line. Now I say, aha, yes, it's going in the curved line with the flat space, but it does the same thing as the straight line with the curved space. Right, so that's certainly not that one. So this is Einstein's brilliant idea, works very well, is that matter curves space inside. Everything really goes in a straight line. So the whole of your life is in a straight line. You didn't realize that. The whole of your life is in a straight line. A very Judeo-Christian notice. Christian notice is a certain difference. But what happens is that the space gets curved by your very present, everybody else's present. So you end up doing what you think you're doing, which is your moon's going around the earth. Okay, now, the physics of that, of course, is not trivial. I don't want to go into any more detail. implications for cosmogenesis and it's this. Let us ask, within the context of this particular theory, what then can we say about the nature of time? What actually draws a space-time picture? This is a very fond of these things. You see, Jardim might miss with the light codes coming backwards, but he wanted to talk about the venture line. So he had time, he had space, he had space, and he had things like this. Things looking backwards sort it was going down this way. I mean, we're more looking forward

47:30 to going down that way, but the picture is basically the same. But the key thing about these pictures is that they do suggest, overall, a very different perspective on the nature of the relation between space. Because from one point of view, you can say a space-time is a history of space. So space now becomes something that lives, in a sort of biological sense, but has a dynamics of its own. And indeed, this is one way of interpreting Japan. It's that space in which we live three-dimensional space, shifts and changes and evolves in time. It has a history. It's part of Augustine's brain scheme of the space of history to expect. However, at that point, what you have is the single four-dimensional, it should be four-dimensional, I've only drawn two, curved space-time. And the question is, how does time relate to this? Now, my next comment is technical, but it's absolutely fundamental, and it's this. I have taken this to be sliced like this. So these circles on the outside of the slice are meant to be one-dimensional space. It really should be three dimensions, but that's what we can do. So that's how I actually draw on the thing. So it looks as if, as I said, it's a history of space. On the other hand, the whole thing in itself has a sort of natural existence of itself. And in fact, what I'm trying to show at all the size of this particle spectrum is that actually you can slice this picture up in lots of different ways. If you imagine having shape. You could cut it like this, but you could cut it that way as well. And if you cut it this way, obviously, in this particular picture, what I get with a series of ellipses, I open a series of circles with a series of ellipses, and that then looks like the history of an elliptical universe. And it looks like the history of a circular universe, seeing all these green things in circles. I cut it this way.