Peter Lynds

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Peter Lynds (born May 17, 1975) is a New Zealander who drew sudden attention in 2003 with the publication of a physics paper about time, mechanics and Zeno's paradoxes.

Lynds attended university for only 6 months. His career as a physicist began in 2001 with his submission of an article entitled "Time and Classical and Quantum Mechanics: Indeterminacy vs. Discontinuity" to the journal Foundations of Physics Letters. At the time, Lynds was not affiliated with a university and simply listed his address as his hometown of Wellington.

Lynds rose to sudden prominence following a press release ^[1] which was picked up by the scientific news site Eurekalert.org on July 31, 2003 ^[2]. Both the subject of Lynds' article, as well as the means by which he came to the attention of the media, have remained controversial topics. An article about Lynds in The Guardian on August 14, 2003 detailed the controversy^[3].

Lynds' work involves the subject of time. The main conclusion of his paper is that there is a necessary trade off of all precise physical magnitudes at a time, for their continuity over time. More specifically, that there is not an instant in time underlying an object's motion, and as its position is constantly changing over time, and as such, never determined, it also does not have a determined relative position. Lynds posits that this is also the correct resolution of Zeno's paradoxes, with the paradoxes arising because people have wrongly assumed that an object in motion has a determined relative position at any given instant in time, thus rendering the body's motion static and frozen at that instant and enabling the impossible situation of the paradoxes to be derived. A further implication of this conclusion is that if there is no such thing as determined relative position, velocity, acceleration, momentum, mass, energy and all other physical magnitudes, cannot be precisely determined at any time either. Other implications of Lynds' work are that time does not flow, that in relation to indeterminacy in precise physical magnitude, the micro and macroscopic are inextricably linked and both a part of the same parcel, rather than just a case of the former underlying and contributing to the latter, that Chronons, proposed atoms of time, cannot exist, that it does not appear necessary for time to emerge or congeal from the big bang, and that Stephen Hawking's theory of Imaginary time would appear to be meaningless, as it is the relative order of events that is relevant, not the direction of time itself, because time does not go in any direction. Consequently, it is meaningless for the order of a sequence of events to be imaginary, or at right angles, relative to another order of events.^[4]

Since the appearance of his first article, Lynds has done work on the relationship of time to consciousness, perception and brain function. His main conclusion in this area is that our seeming innate subjective conception of a present moment in time, and the phenomenon of conscious awareness, are actually one and the same thing.^[5]

According to a 2005 article in Wired Magazine,^[6] Lynds is currently working on a book.