This is no time to be worried about time

A universe without time?

Reposted from the Houston Chronicle Science Guy blog

If you've got a few minutes of, ahem, time, it might be worth reading a fine article on physics and time that I just stumbled across. The Discover magazine article delves into the role of time in modern theoretical physics.
dali.jpg
Salvador Dali
Was Dali right?

And, my friends, time may not exist:

The trouble with time started a century ago, when Albert Einstein's special and general theories of relativity demolished the idea of time as a universal constant. One consequence is that the past, present, and future are not absolutes. Einstein's theories also opened a rift in physics because the rules of general relativity (which describe gravity and the large-scale structure of the cosmos) seem incompatible with those of quantum physics (which govern the realm of the tiny).

About four decades ago, the renowned physicist John Wheeler, then at Princeton, and the late Bryce DeWitt, then at the University of North Carolina, developed an extraordinary equation that provides a possible framework for unifying relativity and quantum mechanics. But the Wheeler-­DeWitt equation has always been controversial, in part because it adds yet another, even more baffling twist to our understanding of time.

"One finds that time just disappears from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation," says Carlo Rovelli, a physicist at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France. "It is an issue that many theorists have puzzled about. It may be that the best way to think about quantum reality is to give up the notion of time — that the fundamental description of the universe must be timeless."

No one has yet succeeded in using the Wheeler-DeWitt equation to integrate quantum theory with general relativity. Nevertheless, a sizable minority of physicists, Rovelli included, believe that any successful merger of the two great masterpieces of 20th-century physics will inevitably describe a universe in which, ultimately, there is no time.

Scientists already understand that time may break down at very tiny distances, specifically the Planck length. So why not at our scale, too? The question makes physicists uncomfortable. It also makes my head hurt.