MORE WIRED THAN WIRED

The cutting-edge, ultra-tech, hyper-hip bible of the alpha geeks is Wired Magazine. If you want to be knowledgeable about the future of the Information Age, you have to subscribe to Wired.

So it was with a great deal of satisfaction that I read a cover story in Wired’s current June, 2005 issue about a young physicist who was overthrowing Einstein and revolutionizing the concept of time. Satisfying, because To The Point subscribers learned about him almost two years ago, in September, 2003.

The Wired article is entitled Time’s Up, Einstein, on pages 124-126, describing how a high school dropout in Wellington, New Zealand named Peter Lynds wrote a paper, "Time and Classical and Quantum Mechanics: Indeterminacy vs. Discontinuity," that challenges the foundations of modern physics. The paper was published in the August 2003 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Foundations of Physics.

It took Wired a little under two years to tell its subscribers about Lynds. It took To The Point less than a month, in The 21st Century Einstein. Frankly, I think it is very cool for To The Point to be, in this case, more wired than Wired.

Here’s a suggestion. Read both articles and see which one explains Lynds’ theory more clearly and intelligibly. I’d be very interested in hearing what you think.

It all sounds very abstract, but Lynds’ thesis can have enormous practical consequences. For all its immense achievements, modern physics has been moving towards mysticism ever since Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle asserted reality was fundamentally unknowable.

Lynds promises to reverse this direction, back towards a rational knowable reality. The “There are no absolutes – we don’t know anything for certain – nobody’s morals are better than anybody’s else’s” crowd is going to suffer a mortal blow once Lynds’ thesis is accepted by science.

Modern science has a defining impact on how people view the world. Change the way science itself looks at the world, and basic shifts in political and moral outlooks follow. It will be intensely interesting to watch the impact of Peter Lynds’ dragging science out of the 20th century and into the 21st.