The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics

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Snow Storm – Steamboat off a Harbour’s Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead. The Author was in this Storm on the Night the Ariel left Harwich (1842). The 67-year-old Turner claimed that he had made the sailors bind him to the Ariel’s mast so that he should be forced to experience the full fury of the storm.

PREFACE

We must philosophize about these things differently.

Johannes Kepler

On a beautiful October afternoon in 1963 I travelled to the Bavarian Alps with a student friend, Jürgen. We planned to spend the night in a hut and climb to the peak of the Watzmann at dawn next day. On the train, I read an article about Paul Dirac’s attempt to unify Einstein’s general theory of relativity with quantum theory. A single sentence in it was to transform my life: ‘This result has led me to doubt how fundamental the four-dimensional requirement in physics is.’ In other words, Dirac was doubting that most wonderful creation of twentieth-century physics: the fusion of space and time into space-time.

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