The changing face of reality

As we approach the end of the Twentieth Century, our intellectual horizons continue to expand in directions where common sense is an encumbrance. It is a very strange country into which we are moving. There are developments in modern physics, and new viewpoints on the nature of reality, which would astonish our Victorian forebears, with their mechanistic world model and their certainty that all the basic rules had been discovered and understood. Consider how the physics of chaos has replaced simple Newtonian mechanics and dynamics. Consider Big Bang Cosmology and the 11 dimensional world of M theory (5 pronged string theory). Consider Julian Barbour's contention that time does not exist and that all our moments are snapshots which could be strung together in different ways. Consider that in relation to the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics. Consider how Georg Cantor, back in the 19th Century may have laid the foundations of an arithmetic which could apply to current models of reality. I seem to remember that he established that on an infinitely long line every point is adjacent to every other. If space can be broken up into fundamental quants, what happens to the continuum? What happens to the idea of extension? It would appear that without a continuum, the space manifold disappears and every point (quant) is logically adjacent to every other. Spatial extension would then be an essentially arbitrary stringing together of the individual quants, not so far from Julian Barbour's idea of time.

Bibliography

Title	Author	Publisher	Date	Number
Hyperspace	Michio Kaku	Oxford University Press	1994, 1999	ISBN 0-19-286189-1
A scientific odyssey through parallel universes, time warps, and the tenth dimension
Chaos - Making A New Science	James Gleick	Cardinal Sphere Books	1988, 1989	ISBN 0-7474-0413-5
The End Of Time	Julian Barbour	Weidenfeld & Nicolson	1999	ISBN 0-297-81985-2
The next revolution in our understanding of the universe
The Elegant Universe	Brian Greene	Jonathan Cape	1999	ISBN 0-224-05299-3
Superstings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory
Random Reality	Marcus Chown	New Scientist	26 Feb 2000	Vol 165 No 2227
Space and the material world could be created out of nothing but noise. That is the startling conclusion of a new theory that attempts to explain the stuff of reality. A report on the work of Reginald Cahill and Christopher Klinger of Flinders University in Adelaide.