Peter Lynds (born May 17, 1975) is a New Zealander who first drew attention in 2003 with the publication of a physics paper about time, mechanics and Zeno's paradoxes.
Lynds attended university for only 6 months.[1] He submitted an article entitled "Time and Classical and Quantum Mechanics: Indeterminacy vs. Discontinuity"[2] to the journal Foundations of Physics Letters. Among other things, the paper put forward a solution to Zeno's paradoxes based on the idea that instants, instantaneous magnitudes, determined positions, and time itself, do not actually exist.
Lynds rose to sudden prominence when the paper was published and a press release about it appeared on the scientific news site Eurekalert.org on July 31, 2003.[3] Both the subject of Lynds's 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.[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, Lynds was then working on a book.[1]
Lynds has recently put forward a new cosmology model in which time is cyclic and the universe repeats exactly an infinite number of times. Because it is exactly the same cycle that repeats, however, it can also be interpreted as happening just once in relation to time. Lynds argues that this resolves a number of thorny issues in cosmology.[6][7]