Hur kan fysiker vara så säkra på att mätinstrumenten för kosmologi inte sviker dem?

Yourgrau calls Gödel’s gift a bomb lobbed into the foundations of physics. The response, he says, was that "a conspiracy of silence descended on the Einstein-Gödel friendship and its scientific consequences."

Today, some physicists are wrestling anew with time. Cosmological observations (and my own work on what happened before the Big Bang) depict the universe as three-dimensional, a pure space that renews itself and so has motion—but no time. Gödel’s theoretical view, still almost entirely unacknowledged, is creeping in through physics observational backdoor.

Contrary to Minkowski’s spacetime paradigm the universe has neither past nor future and at the Planck scale is not continuous but granular. It constantly renews itself through foliation and so changes. Change is expressed as motion. We see motion; our minds record it; we invent time (and clocks) to quantify it. It seems that we see change over time but isn’t so.

This gives us a new view of reality. The universe we see—space, matter and energy—foliates itself timelessly at the Planck scale. Each foliation simply succeeds the last one. It is not one Planck time later; it is simply next.


- Colin J. Gillespie