Quantum Cosmogenesis and the Nature of Time (contd.)

0:00 Now Newton did not say that. For Newton, that was the absolute notion of time. If Newton had been resentful of this scripture, he would say, yeah, okay, I know you can tell us what the world is, but, I insist, we cut it like that once before. That's not what relativity did, it says that many possible slices are allowed. And in fact, the complete totality of ways of cutting up this picture itself, what matters about it. what you're allowed to call time depends on the gravitation of fear of their constant matter. So, for example, if Michael decides he's going to fill out this lecture, he comes up to shut me up. He walks three feet toward me, and as he's doing so, he changes my notion of time. I may consider very worried what's going to happen in that sense. What I haven't even allowed to call time changes for simple reason. He is changing the gravitation of fear in my presence. Now, it's an incredibly small change, but it's there. Because when he started with the early universe, everything's very, very big and you know, very, very compact, these tiny effects can become of major importance in modernization. So, the large slices depend on that, and of course, there are many different choices. So, from this point of view, this is a very anti-process picture. This is the ultimate block universe, it's called, the ultimate platonizing view of a single space-time universe, which simply is there, as it were, in some wonderful, pathetic sense. We are simply stuck on one of these slices. So, from that point of view, the notion of now, for example, would probably Now, you cannot derive the illusory nature now from a piece of mathematics that's certainly true, but nonetheless, a certain piece of mathematics may tend to encourage a certain psychological or philosophical viewpoint of history, and I think this piece of mathematics suggests, and I'm strongly, that the notion now is even more problematic than I think it is. Okay. Now, what then of the Big Bang in this picture? Well, it's the ice cream cone. After all, this picture's not actually quite technically correct, but it's quite as if we're here now, the universe was smaller a while back. so I suppose a thousand million years ago it was this size and two thousand million years ago it was even smaller, so perhaps it was this circle and so on, till we get right back to what? Well, we get right back to the Big Bang so the picture of space and time in sort of traditional cosmology is very roughly speaking

2:30 like this, it's like the ice cream cone with the creation point, it's not really a point that's why it's leading with, anyway, the creation region is right now on the face of it, this looks wonderful Surely I'd explain the origin of time, because look, here's a piece of mathematics generativity, which is very worthy, works, as well as you can tell. Here's the point, which is the Big Bang. I buy this philosophy that we can't go back to the Big Bang, we live up here, but surely, if I know the mathematics, I can go back, I can study the Big Bang in two ways. I can do what Jal does, look backwards, take the data and reconstruct what is happening down there. Or I can theoretically extrapolate from the mathematics to see what's happening down there. and they're both valid, bona fide ways of doing science. And of course, they all agree with each other. Should we, if you do this, you'll get coherence. So in particular, when one does come and talk about the creation, and then of course in particular, can we discuss what was there beforehand? Now, nature is wonderful in its own way, the way it deals with these big cards on this map, because the answer is, no, you can't. It turns out that the exact point where you want to ask some really interesting questions, like how does the universe then begin, phrase down. It's cunningly and ingeniously constructed to persuade the classical physicists is that the mathematics has exactly become singular. Everything becomes infinite, so you can't do it. You can't extrapolate backwards at all. You get stuck at that point. It's an obstruction. So not only can you not see before having a pattern, you can't theoretically extrapolate backwards either. So you've really asked if you weren't caught. And anyway, which talent is known out of this, it is a way out of it, it's introduced quantum theory. So the next step, then, in this move towards a theory of cosmogenesis, or at least, I shall say, theories of cosmogenesis, when we're talking about general theoretical schema, is to introduce quantum theory. Now, quantum theory is in itself found in a mysterious subject. In fact, all of my career, officially speaking, and I've worked in quantum gravity, which is the problem of unifying quantum theory and general relativity, but five years ago, I actually stopped doing that. I haven't told anybody. I'm coming out and fessing to a puppet now, because all I have to do is still think I do quantum gravity, but actually, I don't really. I became so convinced that quantum theory itself was so mysterious and so completely wrong in some way, but also infinitely right in another, uniquely of the quantum theory itself, which is really a coded way of saying that when you bring quantum theory into this fiction, it becomes completely and utterly incomprehensible, and yet, curiously enough, in that very act, offers a possibility of construction of the theory of the universe,

5:00 It's a weird way this happens. Right, a brief synopsis of quantum theory. Obviously, it's a fundamental atomic and nuclear physics. I mean, atoms, molecules, all that sort of thing, work entirely by the quantum cameras. It's one of these nice theories which, if you go to large distances, you can more or less recover nuclear physics from it. So it sort of coheres quite nicely without... It's not totally true, I'll come back in a moment, but it sort of coheres without daily experiment. however conceptually it is profoundly different this is really the key point of the whole thing in classical physics it is deemed meaningful to say that the particle is at a certain position so if you say where is the glass I say well it is there I say well it's five centimeters a foot I'm still English a foot from that one and two feet from that one you know what I mean and you think that's sensible my mother who's in the paradigm of sensibility would agree with you that that makes sense. The quantum physics says, actually, you can't say that, but that statement is in fact meaningless. It's not meaningless if you're wrong. It's worse than that, it's actually meaningless, which is much worse than just being wrong. That's the placement that's coming through again. You say, I'm happy to have wrong theories, as long as they're theoretically right. The quantum physics says that rather than saying the particle is at x, what is a meaningful statement, is that if you were to measure the position of the particle, The probability of finding it at a certain point, at a certain number. Now this differs from the previous one in two respects. Fairly we deal with the probabilities, which of course is the key thing in quantum theory. It says nothing is certain, well, you say nothing is certain, but broadly speaking, at the fundamental sort of levels of reality to understand them, you can only get probabilistic predictions of what's going to happen, not what's actually going to happen. But it's worse than that. Because it doesn't just say that also, there's an if. The position is measured. So what has suddenly happened is the great dualism that has been introduced into the basis of physics. Now, as a good Gnostic union, I love dualism, really. I thrive on them. I keep looking from everywhere. Here's a classic one. Well, actually, the quantum one. I slipped out. To be, or to be measurable. So classical physics, plus my mother, works with the language of to be. Something is somewhere, makes sense. Things have properties. Quantum physics in its traditional form works for the language to be measurable. Now, this is this, I'll possibly be schizoid about this, because by and large we know quite well it works,

7:30 it's the sort of thing that's being measured. I mean, these incredible experiments, and so on, everywhere all over the world, we test quantum planets in this instrumentless language, it certainly works. But at all, we are realists. I mean, you cannot really imagine Shakespeare writing the language so to be measurable or not to be measurable. That is the question. It doesn't make any sense. Well, it does, but you think it's not a big deal. I mean, that wouldn't keep the crowds going for the last 500 years. So we have, you know, the realism or instrumentalists, the great sort of parallel opposite theory of modern philosophy of science. One of the big virtues has been the theoretical-physical study. The theoretical philosophy, you're allowed to make the most extravagant statement. And if someone like Michael says, ah, it's not quite right, you say, well, I'm only a theoretical physicist. So I make this extravagant statement of the great polarity of modern philosophy of science. So also, modism or dualism, because the point about this is when we use this language, you are separating out forever that which makes the measurements from that which is being measured, not a type of dualism. And this seems particularly inappropriate, of course, in the context of the whole universe. The language of measurement of life in the universe doesn't sound right at all. If you want to drop the language of measurement, you could argue, well, what really this is saying is that the probability of potentiality that Heisenberg was very fond of this. it's a bit like the maiontic creation of the ancient Greeks that the what is there is a possibility of things possibilities are weighted with different numbers so broadly speaking the bigger number the more possible now that sounds alright to ask what does it actually mean because then there's a great gap which opens up it's the movement and the potential to the actual we do not see as far as we know around us a field of possibility what we see is actuality and when we go and have dinner after we sincerely hope it's on the table might be. I'm very fond of the correct ruler, and hopefully there's a high probability that it will be there. It may not be. If it's onions that deserve, why should we disappoint? So something, there's a reification that has to take place, right? They're bringing it to be. Now, modern quantum physics doesn't know how to do this. This problem has never been solved. It's at the heart of all the really serious debates about the foundations of quantum physics. It's how do we make the move of the temptress of the real? Now, you might think, since we're talking about the creation of the universe, isn't that extremely Absolutely, it's extremely relevant. In fact, if one's honest, for all of the modern, so far as they are, theories, quantum cosmogenesis, too, which includes Hawking's version and one else's, they only have to be clearly about

10:00 possibilities of things. They can never tell you what actually happened. So what you're really left with is the field of possibilities, but something does happen. Now, the answer why, or the answer maybe, their public principle, John has three hours to move without his greatness, but certainly as far as physics is concerned, it isn't an obvious answer. And this is why five years ago, why is that the foundations of quantum theory? It seemed to me you couldn't possibly really talk about the origin of the universe as a philosophy of that new calculus problem or finding a key, so that's what quantum theory is about, and you can see that, well, from the face, it makes things much worse. We think we're compounding problems. But nature is very wonderful in a certain aspect. What happened if we put quantum theory and general relativity together Well, I said that you could think of classical general relativity as dealing with the history of space, so space is changing. So at any given time, take a simple notion of time. At any given time, space is a certain curve of space. That's an is statement. It is a certain curve of space. It has a certain structure. Realism. That's classical geometry. Quantum theory, very naively, well not so naively, but applied to general relativity, will suggest that what happens now is rather than saying probability has a certain curvature, there's a probability that space has a certain curvature. Now, the astute of Muncher would notice that I've missed out the phrase there if we measure it. For very good reasons, I don't know how you could possibly measure the whole of space. It would be a bit difficult. You might, on a certain circumstances, this is a problem for the light, Jiao, and others who worry about the early universe. To what extent can you reconstruct the past by looking from the present? probabilities in the past. I imagine you're making the measurements now. This is one of these subtle issues that we must debate on. In any event, let's forget about that for a moment. Let's say we have the word probability. Now, the next thing is you find that there are many possible three-dimensional spaces having non-zero probability. There are many possible curves. The structure of many... This is what science will call fluctuation. It's a somewhat misnomer. Fluctuation is like a dynamical process. It's not quite as intended here. But in any event, there are many different possibilities. These spaces are many different things. that's statement number two now statement number three is it the case that they all fit into a single space and time this is the absolute quantum point so it couldn't be but I had this picture I had some space and time what about that

12:30 that's space and time and I draw possible possible equal time slices these are possible ways of slicing the space I put a slice there I put a slice there another one there it is possible the mathematics of this is such that the only things that occur in this case were non-zero probability they might occur are ones that fit into a single space of time if that were true you might make sense of all these probabilities as referring to a single space time, what you might say is you're simply not quite sure where we are so the probabilities of are we here or are we out there, I mean you might imagine doing that now that itself would be quite interesting if I said we don't quite know where we are now or tomorrow, you might find that fairly appalling, but at least you could perhaps see it in this picture, but actually it's much worse than that, because it turns out the answer is no. They do not live in a single space time. They live in zillions of them. So, a zillion is a very large number. It's big that any people think of plus one, definitely a zillion. So, there's zillions and zillions of these things. So, in some sense, we live, now this sentence is very dodgy. we live in many space times at once not clear what the in means in this context of what living means I don't call it living, I really don't know all I can say is the mathematics suggests you do these things, insofar as they do give rise to space time picture at the end of the day many space times are co-cousins now for Platonists that's quite acceptable if you think of the whole universe as a single entity you say there's many of them all sort of in phase and out of phase of each other it's quite a nice thing, I quite like it anyway person is horrendous. Because the point is, there is no process at all. The notion of time is completely lost. Because what you call time depends on the space of time, if everything's all thrust out in this way, there's no way at all you can slice those pictures. So time is completely lost, and this is true in these things. It's called the problem of time, it's more just the problem of catastrophe in time, actually. So time is lost, completely. Now, you might think, on the face of it, that was actually a disaster. If time is lost completely, surely this means the theory is absolute nonsense. Many, many years ago, I used to work at Mattress Salaam as my mentor, a crafty, if I may say, is that what appears on the face of this disaster always beheld a great triumph.

15:00 and he did this many, many times in his career and it's a wonderful I'll tell you, I said any young people, one of the young people who wants to offer us advice to you to offer you this advice but if you're faced with what appears to be a complete disaster, don't stop writing publishing, don't say it doesn't work, say look possibilities emerge so the answer is come exploited for creation theory because you see, the whole problem with creation theory is the ordinary nature A single organ, maybe a curved space, that's making a difference, a single organ will be meant, getting stuck at the beginning. If there's many space-types, you can't order them at all. You've lost the problem, haven't you? Broadly speaking. So can we exploit this situation? So the answer is yes. Well, you can exploit it, because everyone believes you, but you can certainly exploit it. And there have been a number of attempts at this sort in the last 10 or 15 years. I mean, one obvious problem for all of this is how do I actually cover normal? Because whenever I'm saying is going on in the very early universe, whatever strange it may seem, quantum fluctuations in time and space and everything, it better be that here and now we do broadly agree that I'm going to finish in five minutes or so. Quantum fluctuations, sorry, we broadly speak in five minutes. So can we do that? Well, any theory which didn't do that wouldn't be worth it. So I think John mentioned that, well, he mentioned a slightly different context. It's also true here that the natural universe, in a way, for cosmogenesis to invent, will be one that lasts for 10 to the minus 42 seconds. That was it. Now, again, as a good Jungian Gnostic, I can only appreciate this as the traumatic unity of all things. It sits there. It lasts for 10 to the minus 42 seconds. I can't say it lasts, because there wasn't any time for it to last in. It simply is. 10 to the minus 42 seconds. Then it's not there anymore. Now, I like that idea, but of course, it doesn't allow much room for you and me. let alone Bajal's career, which is still the times after that, so we never forget about that. Unfortunately, what we've found is you can get over it. This thing is called the Misner Park, incidentally. Charles Misner, a very famous American director of physicists, who discovered this in the mid-60s, the natural solutions of quantum convergences and things that lasted this long. And he wasn't determined, but he was a good, slow man. He understood what had to be done. He did it. Now, you'll be disappointed if I didn't mention imaginary time of this boat. Well, actually, we're also not in Cambridge, but probably some of you've been to Cambridge in the US.

17:30 We mentioned Stephen Hawking's book, Imagine of Time. There's one way of implementing this idea. Now, the key point about this, let me say again, the idea is that however you do it, however you approach it, you will find that near the actual creation point, the notion of ordinary time is lost. Well away from the creation point, in some non-spatial temporal centre, well away from that, the ordinary time must reappear. In some way, in such a way, the whole thing fits together a coherent mathematical model. That's what you'll find with it. So this is one particular way of doing it, which is Hawking's one, which has become very famous, which is the use of imaginary time. Now, the use of imaginary time, by imaginary time, I mean, of course, time to the square of minus one, which is one. I mean, the whole theory is imaginary in the other sense, but it's not the story. The theory of square minus one is actually a perfectly respectable thing to do in quantum I mean, classical physics doesn't have the meaning of time, but it is. To turn that in quantum physics, there's a very simple thing you can do, which is genuinely true. It's not in any way speculative. If you imagine energy against positions, imagine some sort of potential energy moving around in space. If you have something like this, so there's something there, I can't get it all, I move up to it, I can't get through. Of course, in classical physics, You will simply come along, and you will hit the wall, and you will bounce back. And you can try it from that wall, and believe me, you can just punch it and see what happens. Now, in quantum physics, it's not quite like that. This is one of the remarkable things about quantum physics, because this really works, and the whole semiconductor needs to progress on this point, is that in quantum physics, there's a small probability that you actually get to the other side. So according to this small probability, if I walk up to the wall, and all of a sudden find myself on the other side, I had to say it's an extremely small probability, and lose the last two minutes of the lecture, and that would happen. But that itself is a deeply quantum mechanical thing. To compute this is something that we give our second year undergraduates to do at the end of their big lecture course on quantum mechanics, and do these sorts of calculations. It turns out there's a crafty classical way of doing it, which is quite amazing, is that for a leading order, an approximation that looks very closely to the actual physical answer, is by the solve the classical theory, but with time placed by minus time. And the reason for that is Newton's equations are force equals mass times acceleration. Acceleration is the second derivative of the position with respect to time.

20:00 So time appears twice. If you put time goes through i times time, you get i squared, which is minus 1. So the equation is looked at earlier, not minus 1. Take the minus of force to get minus that. What was once repulsive force? Time becomes an attractive force, so you can go the way through it. I mean, probably speaking, that's being what is to it. So if this diagram gets dirty, now you find the constant, it'd rather be the potential barrier. It's a way that sucks you in, and you can say it through. Now, incredibly, if you work out the classical solution to that problem, there's a way of putting them into the constant, so you get them out of the plot of the quantum atom. So it's in that sense that people say that imaginary time gives you the, to good stream accuracy, imaginary time used classically degree of accuracy, the actual quantum predictions are deeply quantum mechanical effects. Now this is absolutely dead off. It still does work. You can see mathematically why it works. It's very, very remarkable. Of course, it's not saying that the matter in time exists in some sense. I mean, mathematics doesn't do with such what does or doesn't exist. All it's saying is that this is mathematically the case. Now, if you can't get any way of what you can do, you follow somebody else's So if creating the universe is a bit of a tricky thing to talk about, which it is, classically doesn't work at all, why not think about it as if it was a quantum mechanical problem done like this, not like Stephen did, like Hawking did. So what Hawking talks about is imaginary time. What he's really doing is he's pretending he's solving the classical Einstein equations for purely imaginary time, which simply means that space and time have an equal state of then he pretends that's some do of the quantum theory now I'll say pretend that sounds slightly rude anything quite like that but he pretends in a sense there isn't a theory of quantum gravity to test the things when I said here that it worked what I meant was you could do the calculations properly as our students are forced to do in one day a problem sheet and you can check you get the right answer here there is no proper calculator because I've managed to do it so instead you pretend that this is the right answer to see what happens I mean this was fair enough now these are these remarkable pictures that you get if you do this is that the origin of the universe in this sense the words have to be chosen carefully but the origin of the universe in this sense is some sort of chromatic region right back

22:30 you know, before as it were, sitting there like Zerbein, actually, this is Zerbein this is Zerbein sitting there there's chromatic unity actually, you see, in place and time are the same there's no dynamics nothing changes in time so that's like Zerbein, he was there for eternity this really is eternity Or Custinian would like this, too, but it's a little model, so it's true. But then around the edge here, now I don't know whether it's Steven or Zerbe, but someone starts praying to himself for something to happen, and something happens, the universe appears. Now, does it make any sense? No one says, yes, it doubts, and so forth. It turns out there are solutions to the sorts of equations you have here, where up here you get what looks like the cone I talked about, so it looks like classical relativity, to expand the universe. Back here, it's totally non-classical. There is no notion of process. There's nothing. There's simply this unity of four-dimensional being with no edges, no boundaries, nothing. And then, you can't say something happens at the edge, because that sounds like a temporal statement. You can't say that because if something happens, sounds like you go up there and something happens. You can't really say that. All you can say is there's a solution to the equation where you have genuine time up here, this primordial in between is something which cannot be temporarily interpreted at all, but nonetheless it solves the equation. And this is one approach to the form of the Genesis. You'll find much literature on this. There are many possibilities here. For example, you have many universes being produced. You can have just one, you can have many ones, or the thing I think John mentioned, you can have this picture with lots of bits coming and going, so it's more like sort of a continual wormhole type of picture. But nonetheless, it is a important to realize is what's being said is that the problem of the origin of time you've bought the fact that time changes and goes back here so if you ask what does it look like it happens theoretically here you get the region where normal time is fading away truly parametric time is coming into being and in between there's an interesting thing going on in the sky in between and that's the actual picture so you have to take it or leave it they say you may less than the coffee so uh just late on in the lecture thought about it really thought of an hour to the blah time and i've all just done my skin so so what has been achieved well i've kept you captive for now and ten minutes

25:00 what has been achieved first of all gravity is clearly if anything is the key to cosmogenesis this is a true and seriously if there ever were to be a really complete theory of cosmogenesis These are only ideas people are aware of, but you've got to. It seems to me, fairly clear, that gravity would play a central fundamental point. And that's for two different reasons. One is the fact that there's this curious nature, the universal nature of the gravitational force, that the negative and the positive can cancel out from gravity in a way they can't anywhere else. That seems genuinely true. And the second one is the relation of gravity to space and time. So for both these reasons, you can see why gravity, as I said earlier, comes in. And I believe that's genuine insight here. of the last sort of 30 years, if you like, which is, in that sense, true. And I suppose in passing, certainly, that gravity and the rest of the fundamental forces have not, in fact, been unified. If they had, these famous toes, the theories of everything people talk about, would, in fact, as a sort of side effect, include creation, in which we want some parts of that figure theory. But at the moment, it's not. People talk about gravity more or less by itself, in the sense of toes, anyway. and the second thing is that you've learned that time fades away at its origin and again I believe this is a genuine insight it's not something that philosophers would have thought about and I have a great I mean Kant and Jung my two great cults here as you see had profound admiration for Kant but he did not critique him there was a third way it resolved with his famous antinomy this is the notion of time itself would change in some way as it gets to the critical point of course he would have said that's a meaningless statement because change itself concept, so it's so contradictory. But I think we can honestly say that one thing that modern mathematics has shown is that other ways of talking about that than the simple notion of ordering of events, and the particular notion of imaginative time or complex time, is a genuine, I think, possible box that's been made. Of course, perhaps the final thing to think about is how this might be picked on these more general psychological or philosophical ones, a personal time against a lot of space time. these pictures now I'm biased because I'm a platonist as you will have noticed these pictures to me suggest very strongly that the motion of process time is wrong actually wrong you can't say concept wrong it's inappropriate to discuss the very universe so that's important why they've got it wrong that wonderful scheme it's important to ride

27:30 however I have many friends who take the opposite point of view because they like the motion of process so that they strive and strive and to bring it back in. I have a very close friend in America who's spent his whole life devoted to the problem of time, quantum gravity, and he's always striving to bring back process. Perhaps he feels the need for redemption. See, this is the classic idea of redeeming time for a process that takes place in time. Whereas, of course, as Augustine knew very well, if you simply posited the whole of space in time, a single entity, what was we left to do? The human individual, what's the fight to be good or bad or anything? It's all there already. You know, they all thought that we would have some. that itself is a tiny part or reflects on this general sort of philosophical issue. Finally, I often find myself giving lectures like this in meetings on science and religion because I have a big interest in this sort of thing. I suppose John and I first met one of these things. People often ask, well, what does it say about religion? I wouldn't remotely attend in the last minute to comment on that whatsoever except to say that one has to distinguish very clearly between what I call the ground of being and temporal origins What I talk about is a mathematical theory, which certainly purports to deal with or give you ideas or schemas whereby you could deal with things like the origin of time. But it does so in a very precise, specific, preconceived philosophical and conceptual framework. I want to emphasize this, we're not talking about the origin of theories that are being created. We have, in other words, cast into the existing theoretical structure through ideas we already have about space and time. and we're just mixing around a little bit to kind of force them to fit this preconceived good old Jungian mold. So in that sense, I think it is worth appreciating this, that when we construct these theories, we are making huge extrapolations. We are forcing our experience of the current world, of things that are with atoms and so on, right back into an area where, arguably, we shouldn't be going at all, in this sense of tropics. So here, anyway, ought to be a final qualifying conduct, the whole thing, and the simplicity of the whole thing is that there are lots of assumptions I believe made. But apart I do genuinely believe these first two points have been a real achievement. Thank you. Where do we start? Yes, David. it's quite interested that you decided behind a veil to invest your time in

30:00 looking at quantum theory in detail. My question is, are you likely to make advances more in the mathematical use of quantum theory or in the The thing that has deeply fascinated me throughout my career, actually, is the subtle interplay between conceptualists using mathematical tools in quantum physics, that the mathematics itself naturally fits in a certain type of conceptual framework and vice versa. So that at the moment, the work I'm doing, in fact, with Jeremy Butterfield, who's a philosopher here, is extremely mathematical work. I mean, it's very, very mathematical work. We look at a quantum theory in a totally new mathematical way. mathematics, brings a new type of conceptual structure with it, which may be more appropriate. See, I'm not one of these people who thinks that working in the foundations of quantum theory means just taking existing theory, just rethinking ways of talking about it, and people do that, and, you know, it's very good work is done, that's real philosophical work, if you like, but my interest is to take new mathematical ways of looking at quantum theory, but with the aim that brings with it a new conceptual framework, so that's, to me, the interest and to get a if you like a new concept is important for using that elsewhere that's fine that's why i do it yes i mean there is a school of thought or maybe one hears of people well the mathematics gives the right answer what more do you want we don't understand it it's counterintuitive forget that the mathematics gives the right answer perhaps you're saying the interpretation is an integral part of progress that's my personal belief in fact That has to be right. As I say, the thing that Jawa people talk about is quite different. I mean, they've got sensible mathematical models which can reasonably help to be complete. But this is not like that at all, which means there's steps along a very long path. But that's right. The hope would be that by thinking about these conceptual things, there's a feedback oscillation between the physics and the math. Would you say that time-space fades back and emerge for true eternity? That if this eternity is truly eternal, how can it be before anything? Because it could not contain within its nature any relation to something which is eternal. Yeah, I know it's splendid, isn't it? Yes, that's the virtue of mathematics, you see.

32:30 It manages to do these things. No, that's absolutely right. That's what I was saying. If you look at that picture, I know the seriousness. Whatever you say about this picture, it's a picture. It is a reasonably honest picture, actually, of a particular solution that is actually used by Hawking's collaborators. Now, it's a piece of mathematics represented as a diagram. If you ask, what does it mean in the sense that you've just done, you hit exactly the points I was making, is that that's right. You see, here, time and space are co-equal. Truly, there's no notion of process. So whatever happens, whatever the relation between this region and that region is not one of temporal evolution. And yet it's there in the mathematics. Now, you see, perceived as a single entity, photonically, that causes no problem at all. It simply is what the maths is. happens up here to look like ordinary time, and down here to look like pure, if you like, eternal time, and in between what it is. So for a non-processed thinker, this causes no difficulty. But of course, for a processed thinker, it causes profound difference. So you've just said, it was quite clearly a language of process and evolution is inappropriate. Because you're saying that at a fundamental level, you've got a timeless view of everything. Yes, that's right. And what we think of as the history of the universe is simply something embedded in this structure. I mean, that's the way of looking at it, yes. I'm aware, because you've argued about that, but yes. I mean, the clock, in a certain sense, it hasn't, that the clock has stopped, the clock has never started ticking. The clock simply is. It just is, yes, correct. Michael, is this not more like using eternal here? There's a danger of misunderstanding eternal by thinking that eternal means a long, long, long time. Whereas eternal here, is meant in the religious sects and that God is eternal, the outside of time, absolutely. Yes, I chose these words deliberately. I mean, Keith Ward and I, who knows the professor of theology here, I mean, we've often appeared together doing once even a joint act for half an hour each on stage. And these pictures of space and time do, he's sympathetic to them because they do sort of reflect what you just said. I'm not saying that's what it means. I'm not suggesting it's a theological meaning to this diagram, particularly. But you're right. I mean, the liberty of you senses. If this time goes on forever, that's eternal in the sense of everlasting time, our time. This is more like chromatic time. Yeah. The phrase you used, we cannot get outside the universe. I'm wondering, isn't

35:00 there a sense in which we have a safe awareness in which we can do just that? I'm thinking of Chattanova Dyer here, but he talked about Psychic time, which you mentioned, historical time, which is the big way today of Christian time, and existential time, which has always seemed to me the T.S. Eliot's intersection of the timeless moment. And there's a sense in which the intuitive moment of acquiring the concept is in fact a type of singularity, and it is a sense in which we are coinciding with conceptually. Yes, I wouldn't disagree with that. People often do talk about three sorts of time. Can I ask you a question about this? I mean, the way that quantum mechanics works, what you're really going to get out of this, surely, is not just this thing which you've shown. But you're going to get a whole slew of them, or somewhat different. You're going to get a vast superposition of different emergent universes. That's not right. Each will have a certain probability, a probability density associated with it. Then you have to decide what probability means. So what this really means is heavily dependent upon how you interpret quantum mechanics itself. And if you took an average type view, if you took the superposition seriously, rather than thinking that in some... I mean, in ordinary quantum mechanics, you can think that there is a collapse of the wave function. But that only makes sense as something which happens in, ostensibly, only makes sense as something that happens in time. That doesn't seem in this, when you're using quantum mechanics in this way, the concept of a collapse of the wave function, which just gives us one of the elements of the superposition renders the others to non-existence. That doesn't seem to make sense in the context of this moment. Is that right? Yes, that's true, but you can say a bit more than that. Up here is where we all know how living is at the moment. Whatever you believe about what mechanics would apply. I mean, if you have a particular collapse there that you like by the environment decoherent.

37:30 I'm talking about magic. No, no, no. No, in fact, I personally profoundly believe that the whole standard structure of quantitatively, but mathematically and conceptually is inappropriate, I think. Completely, that's why it's kind of work. Ah, yes. No, I agree with you, totally. But up here, where you actually see it, after you don't see it down there, in a sense you see the reference up here, you can use whatever your favourite collapse there is. I see. John, of course, is probably the likes of the universe. Is it you, John? Have you ever heard of Wheeler's tomorrow? I am... I have an argument with Schubert. Go to Deutsch's version of Everett'sism. Otherwise, you get into terrible paradoxes, which, since I don't want to take up the time of meeting, Michael Lockwood can explain it to me. I'm supposed to take up the time, so everyone will come back to the many worlds. Yes, sir? Well, it seems to me so that this is rather parochial, in the sense that we're worrying about all these issues about time, which he bothers us. But if you imagine God wrote an enormous Schrodinger equation and had a huge superposition of possible universes, many of which didn't have any time, wouldn't mean anything. It would be some completely different thing that we can't imagine. What is the big deal about time emerging from this superposition? And certainly we have a space-time. It doesn't imply to me that there's a problem that time emerged as something. If you accept that there could be a huge assemblage of other universes and other types of ways to exist that maybe didn't involve time, involved imaginary time, time squared, something that wasn't even time, who knows? The whole concept of worrying about it bothers me in this sense because I just don't see a problem. Why can't we have trillions of different kinds of universes? And then why should we worry that what we worry about, time, makes sense? Well, I mean, I'm a high-committal physicist, so I don't know about these things. I mean, at the end of the day, we are doing real physics. We hope we are. And you are really trying to predict actual things. I mean, there's a real challenge. Stuff that we heard about in previous things takes place to be set up here. I guess they've been thermalization, the inflation has passed it off. Well, these things have to be patched up together. And it's hard gone for people to do that. I mean, as long as there's a genuine scientific challenge, which is to make a coherent picture for the whole works.

40:00 Whether one writes about these conceptual things, well, I don't know. I mean, I had about a physics department one or some years ago. There's a very famous particle physicist. I saw him in the lift one day. He wanted to work on these things. He started here to write about conceptual problems in quantum theory. He said, what do you mean? There are no conceptual problems. He was a particle physicist, you see. He spent vast sums of money You know, that's what he did. To me, there is a profound problem, because I think quantum mechanics is inconsistent. All of its known crystal formulations. And I think this particular situation brings it home to you with crystal power. Well, what I was actually thinking about was earlier philosophical questions, where we worry about what happened before time. I think the question is meaningless if you accept the possibility that maybe the universe is without time. It's the point that I'm trying to make, perhaps, a bad one. Okay, fair enough. a layman question it seems do you think that we are limited by our own humanity by our own ability to think somewhat yes very narrow let me say that I take Kant and Jung profoundly seriously extremely seriously so the answer has to be yes with a capital Y do you think that perhaps And Augustine had an insight into this, maybe, in going on from your statements about it, about the concept of how could we possibly understand the past or the future anywhere but the present. Yeah, so I have profound respect for Augustine. Can I get straight about the difference between Kant and Jung here? And I take it that if Kant was right, this would apply to all perceiving rational beings. So it's no use, you know, trying to contact aliens somewhere that maybe they wouldn't have our sort of conceptual hang-ups. But on the other hand, what a little I know about Jung suggests that for Jung, it doesn't have to be universal in nearly so in that very, very sweeping sense that Kant's is. that it is peculiar, it's proper to our culture, not proper to our culture, but proper to our shared humanity, at least. Is that not right? Yes, I mean, Jung was a man of his own time.

42:30 Quite. And, in fact, it's remarkable in his works how literally he refers to certain things. One of them is animals, which might never exist. The other is music, curiously. Which you think for someone who was so moved by inner forces would so be completely blind to the power of music. Sorry, that's a slight remark, but it's true. I agree. But of course, that doesn't mean he wasn't right. I mean, I don't know whether Kant seriously thought about it. Did he really mean all possible beings and all possible planets to even think about such things? All rational beings. All rational sensitive beings. I'm sure that the categories and the forms of intuition are intended to apply to all rational sensitive beings. By rational, it wouldn't mean rational in the sense that we are. Isn't that rather begging the issue? I mean, if you mean rational in the sense that we are, then of course one has to agree with it. I mean, if we lived on the moon rather than here, I don't imagine you'd change your ideas about Kant or five people. The next weekend is on Understanding Card. Perhaps we could ask... Ask a billion to come on. Yes, Charles. Can I just suggest a response to the question earlier about Baroque are a lot of people who do this going back to what happened before in creation is extremely important because if it can be if out of it there can be a creator then this is a powerful boost to religion especially christian religion out of which the other end apart from looking back is the future because the future is hope of wife after death and so on and that's why this is very Because if the creation, the God-type creation, isn't justified at one end, you have extreme difficulty justifying the immortality of the other. That's why, though it may be parochial scientifically, it is extremely important to very many people. I'm sorry, many theologians take this stuff very very seriously. Some of the theological aspects are going to be addressed tomorrow. but of course we haven't the fine tuning problem provides comfort to theists these days you've discussed the possibility of huge ensemble of possibilities as I understand it

45:00 perhaps do you want to talk about the possibility of what I believe is that there are a huge range possibilities, but actually only what's actually there is the only one of the possibilities that became possible. We somehow condense or come back to the sequence. I actually think that's what most physicists think in their hearts. But the problem is knowing how that one actual thing comes to be. It's very, very tricky, this, because I think most people, if you think very carefully, tend to think even physicists, what quantum mechanics says. What quantum mechanics says is that lots of things are possible, but something actually But the trouble with that is that's not what quantitatively says. He says if you make measurements, there's a certain probability that something will happen. So I think there's sort of a gap between that final conclusion that most people would like and the mathematical framework, which is actually different. I mean, that was really the point I was gesturing to earlier, that, I mean, there are theories like, for example, the collapse of the wave function, which can get you one of those, only one of those possibilities being actualized once you've got time. It isn't clear to me how those devices are going to be applicable to the emergence itself, which precisely is, amongst other things, the emergence of time. That was the point. Yes, I agree. That's very strong. Well, I think we're going to stop there, but thank you very, very much. You've burned your feet ten times over at my life, sir. I've forced it to be as far as the administration. You don't mind imagining him on the Constitution. No, no, of course not. You're going to be here tomorrow? Yes, I'm sure. Okay, so I'll give you my integral on the average theory. Look, I'll just really, very quickly buy you. In those universities, you have differentiation of... Thank you.

47:30 Yes, yes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.