George Ellis is not afraid to rock the establishment. In his youth in South Africa, his target was a recognizably corrupt and racist government. Now a cosmologist at the University of Cape Town, Ellis has set his sights on something more abstract: the flow of time itself.
First developed by Albert Einstein early in the 20th century, the orthodox view holds that the passage of time is an illusion. There is no difference between the past and the future — both are set in stone. Yet for Ellis, the philosophical implications of this mainstream theory do not simply run counter to our intuitions; he considers them dangerous because they rob us of free will and moral accountability. Ellis’ scientific goal, motivated by his ethical views, is to put time back into physics, allowing the cosmos to create its fate and giving us the ability to change our destiny.
Origin of a Cosmologist
Ellis refined his new theory of reality, in which time exists and the future remains unwritten, while on sabbatical at the University of Cambridge, the institution that during the 17th century boasted Isaac Newton, first as a student and later a professor.
In Newton’s Principia Mathematica, the British physicist formulated a notion of time that fits with our everyday experiences. He pictured a universal stopwatch whose ticks beat out the steady passage of seconds, minutes and hours across the cosmos. No matter where you are or how you are moving, in Newton’s view, you would agree that Ellis takes exactly 10 minutes to sip his coffee on a bench in a leafy quadrangle of Trinity College before placing his cup down beside him. Every 15 minutes, he hears the bell of Trinity’s ornate clock tower — set in place half a century before the young Newton ever set foot on college grounds — punctuating the forward march of time.
