The Big Bang Never Happened

■ IMPLICATIONS "■THE PARADOXES OF TIMEThe basic answers to these questions have been formulated byIlya Prigogine and his colleagues over the past twenty years.Prigogine, a Russian-born chemist raised in Belgium, receivedthe Nobel Prize for his work in reconceptualizing thermodynamics.In his view, the paradox arises from a misunderstandingof time and of nature. He believes that there is no real tendencytoward decay in the universe—on the contrary, order tends toarise out of chaos, the universe tends to move toward greatercomplexity and faster rates of evolution. The universe doesn'tneed to have been wound up because it isn't running down.Nor is there a contradiction between the time-reversible lawsthat operate on the atomic and subatomic levels, and irreversiblelaws that operate on larger scales. Time, Prigogine argues, isirreversible at all levels—the reversible laws of physics are onlyapproximations. In reality, temporal irreversibility is "built into"the universe from the tiniest particle to the mightiest galaxy.Time is not merely another dimension, it is the history of theuniverse.What exactly is wrong with the conventional physics' understandingof time? Let me begin by describing these views a bitmore exactly. There are, in fact, two views of time for two differentworlds. First is reversible time for a world of changelessperfection. For this world real time—time with past, present, andfuture—does not exist. In this world, Einstein's world, the entiretyof time is laid out like a map in four dimensions. The yearone billion B.C. and one billion A.D., as well as 1991, all exist withequal reality. All is predestined.In this world, an object's history is described by its "trajectory,"a line drawn in four dimensions from the start to the finishof its existence. The line does not come into existence point bypoint. It exists in four dimensions, and describes where the particleis in the three spatial dimensions for any value of the fourthdimension, time.Where does this timeless world of perfect predictability exist?Either in the world of the very small—atoms and elementaryparticles—or in the giant world of the heavens—stars and planetsmoving in accord with the laws of gravity. We have encountered286