Time, Immportality and The New Physics

C.K. Raju holds a Ph. D. from the Indian Statistical Institute. He was part of the initial C-DAC team which built the Param series of parallel computers. He wrote a book Time Towards a Consistent Theory, (Kluwer 1994), whih uses the hypothesis of a tilt in the arrow of time to construct quantum reality. He is currently writing another book on time, on a fellowship of the National Institute of Science, Technology and Development Studies.

The harmony of science and religion has been recently reassorted in the West: a practising physicist has written “a book purporting to show that the central claims of Judaeo-Charistian theology are in fact true, that these claims are straightforward deductions of the laws of physics…….”.

God lies in the equations of physics, time has a beginning (creation, singularity) and an end (apocalypse, omega point), when everyone will be resurrected in the flesh to live on eternally. The theory is based on the “rarefied branch of physics created by Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose”(sic).

I point out that the central claim of “Judaeo-Christian” or “linear” time actually flows from the theology of Augustine, which was decided by the politics of the Church more than logic or scriptures. Augustine rejected “pagan” “cyclic” time, mistakenly identifying it with the Stoic notion of eternal return; a mistake institutionalised through ecumenical anathemas against the belief in “cyclic” time. This confusion has persisted ever since in Western thought in the fallacious belief of a dichotomy between “linear” and “cyclic” time. The dichotomy enables one to hold on to contradictory time beliefs by labelling both e.g. “linear”, the contradiction may now be used to derive any chosen conclusion.

This theological artifice guides the very postulates of global general relativity: Hawking’s chronology condition is supported solely by a formally identical reproduction of Augustine’s fallacy. Conclusions about the beginning or end of time, which anyway do NOT follow from the postulates, are not, therefore, reliable.

The dichotomy continues to infect current physics in e.g. the grandfather paradox or Hawking’s (1992) chronology protection conjecture, both aimed against the possibility that spacetime warps may be utilised for time travel, making the world “unsafe for historians”.

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