dependent on our own motion through the other three dimensions. We even discovered that we could use this new knowledge to improve our lives through the application of modern physics and its step-child, electronics. Through all of this new understanding, however, time still flowed in one direction. True, it meandered a bit, and speeded up and slowed, depending on circumstances, but it only went that way, toward the future. In 1949 Kurt Goedel decided to spend some quality time reviewing Einstein’s relativity equations. To put this event into context, you should know that Goedel was arguably the finest mathematician and logician of the last millennium. When he tackled Einstein’s General Relativity equations, he discovered a solution that had eluded Einstein. Einstein’s solutions describe an expanding universe in which time flows only one way, albeit with turns and speed variations. Goedel’s solution describes a rotating universe where time twists back on itself, so that if somehow you were to go all the way around the universe, you would arrive back where you started before you got underway. In Goedel’s universe, time has whirlpools, which scientists call “closed time-like curves.”
Einstein was not happy with several developments that flowed from his original work with Relativity. He was especially bothered by the implications of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle which says, in effect, that on the very small scale, it is impossible to know for a particle both its exact position and the precise time it was in that position, which forces researchers to deal with very small things statistically. He said, “The Old One [God] doesn’t roll dice,” and insisted that ultimately things still were deterministic, that they were ruled by cause and effect.