Julian Barbour - The End of Time - The Next Revolution in Physics

Then there is one other quite different way in which my ideas could be disproved. This is if experimental evidence can be found that shows collapse of the quantum wave function to be a real physical process. In this connection, I should like to mention especially an experiment proposed by Roger Penrose to test this very possibility. He is developing it in collaboration with Anton Zeilinger, the Austrian physicist based in Vienna, who has performed so many incredibly beautiful quantum experiments. Penrose, very understandably, finds the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics extremely hard to accept (see my comments about the death of Diana), and with great persistence is trying to find a way round it. He has certainly identified the greatest single issue in modern physics. If his experiment, which could perhaps be performed within a decade, works out in the way he hopes, it will be a huge development and destroy my approach (because it will show that quantum mechanics does not hold macroscopically). The volume containing my paper (Barbour 2000) also contains Penrose’s most important paper on the subject, and also a related paper by Joy Christian, who was a student of Abner Shimony. Joy, following Abner (see my Epilogue), is trying to establish transience as a real physical thing. I think that if collapse of the wave function could be demonstrated as a real physical phenomenon, that would be true demonstration of something that one might call transience.

JB

January 2001

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