A 27-year-old New Zealander who dropped out of college has
posited a new theory on time and motion that has stunned the global
physics community. Some experts praise the young theorist while
others are highly critical. In the paper, published in the August
issue of Foundations of Physics Letters, Peter Lynds
refutes the assumption — 2,500 years old — that time can be
understood or thought of in a succession of physical, freezable
moments and that objects in motion have determined positions. He
claims that the new theory solves Zeno’s paradox — puzzling minds
since ancient Greece — in which Achilles and a tortoise race.
Achilles has a head start and is faster than the tortoise so that
the tortoise cannot ever catch Achilles. Lynds says that the
paradox is based on an incorrect physical assumption about frozen
moments of time. The halls of academia are in an uproar over the
new theory. John Wheeler, a Princeton physicist who worked with
Einstein, says he admires Lynds’ ‘boldness’ while another referee
for the paper said that Lynds’ ‘arguments are based on profound
ignorance or misunderstanding of basic analysis and calculus.’
Still, Lynds is looking forward to publishing further papers on the
cosmology of time, the foundations of assertion, and the basis of
consciousness. ‘I’m just a young guy from New Zealand,’ he says.
‘who had some ideas and thinks they’re worth chasing
through.’
— Joel Stonington
