Al-Khalili claims to solve arrow of time for Christmas lectures — SkimNews
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- Prof Jim Al-Khalili says tech billionaires attempting to live forever are "wasting their time," arguing we should make the most of our "blink of an eye" in the universe rather than try to extend it
- Al-Khalili cites Bryan Johnson's plasma injection from his 17-year-old son as an example of extreme anti-ageing interventions, noting Johnson later said he saw no benefit
- The Royal Institution Christmas lectures, supported by CGI, will air on BBC and iPlayer in late December, with Al-Khalili tackling the nature of time
- Al-Khalili plans to explore Einstein's relativity — that time runs at different rates depending on speed and gravity, and that past, present and future coexist in the way points in space do
- He ties that to A Christmas Carol, suggesting Dickens' ghosts of past, present and future meeting Scrooge hints at how times may not be wholly separate
- Al-Khalili calls time travel mathematically possible via "closed time-like curves," though he notes most physicists deem it impossible due to paradoxes; travelling into the future is easier, as depicted in Interstellar near a supermassive black hole
- Al-Khalili claims to have solved the "arrow of time" problem — why time appears to flow one way despite equations showing no preferred direction — and will give the explanation in the lectures
Why it matters: Al-Khalili's claim to have cracked the arrow-of-time puzzle — a question that has kept him up at night for months or years — is the headline buried under the billionaire-bashing lede. If his explanation holds up to scrutiny from the physics community watching the flagship Royal Institution Christmas lectures on BBC, it would address a foundational gap between everyday experience and the equations of physics.
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