The Last of the Time Lords

The Times They Are (Not) A-Changin'

Peter Capaldi’s first season as the Doctor, when he was sharp-edged and did not suffer fools gladly, was a suitable role model for post punk men of a certain age. Sadly, the producers succumbed to BBC pressure to make him “lovable.”

Regular readers know of my ongoing quest to build a time machine to launch myself out of 2025, either back to pre-Internet times or into whatever Planet of the Apes-type scenario follows the forthcoming collapse of human civilization. Unfortunately, this week’s brilliant physicist does not have much to offer up on that front, as he believes that time is an illusion. He’s not the first to advance this seemingly counterfactual idea. In 500 B.C. the philosopher Parmenides declared that motion is impossible because for an object to move any distance, it would have to pass through an infinite series of fractional steps to get from one place to another, and no one can take infinite steps. If motion is impossible, then change is also impossible, so therefore time…