Questions accumulate. Why does an electron know immediately about the result of a measurement made on another electron, even if the two are at two extremities of a galaxy? Why do elementary particles preserve their symmetries with respect to time reversal with the exception of the K0 meson, which seems to feel time’s intricacies better than other particles? Is the fact that anti-particles can be described as particles living in reversed time a mathematical trick or a symptom of deeper meaning?
Even if we have no answers to these perplexing questions, they are illuminating in some sense. The very fact that we ask them suggests that time is not a priori with respect to the universe but is somehow involved in the process of its becoming. This suggestion is strengthened by slowly accumulating indications that on the fundamental level there is no space and no time, at least in the usual sense, and that both space and time emerge from primordial symmetries only on higher levels of complexity.
Steven Weinberg and many physicists with him are dreaming Dreams of a Final Theory (his book describing the search for nature’s ultimate laws). Until we have a solid mathematical structure well rooted in trustworthy empirical results, the final theory will only be the subject of our dreams.
When we at last have this theory, will it end our struggling with Chronos? Life is a journey through time. As long as we live, let us have our dreams.
