Diary – 11 July 2013

The frantic promotion of the proposed HS2 rail line — a white elephant in the making — is a reminder to those of us living outside London that we suffer from a disability: one so severe that it is worth spending £40 billion to shorten the journey to the capital by a few minutes. Our condition will get worse as centralisation proceeds and London’s gravitational force becomes ever stronger. Eventually ‘the provinces’ will evacuate their contents into the south-east, and England will be a megalopolis surrounded by deserted villages, towns and cities. Such are the apocalyptic thoughts of someone who now finds himself having to travel from Stockport to London several times a week because that’s where the events, meetings, headquarters or whatever are to be found. This week, I had to spend four days in London to participate in the national conversation.

London is sometimes a compromise meeting place for provincials holed up in different corners. So this was where, on Tuesday, I met up with Raja Panjwani, who is studying the philosophy of physics at Oxford. He has agreed to subject the MS of my next book — Of Time and Lamentation. Reflections on Transience — to critical examination. The book aims, among other things, to snatch time from the jaws of physics. For many people (and not just physicists) the last word on time — its nature, its existence or nonexistence, its relationship to everything else in the universe — is whatever physics says it is. If Einstein says that the difference between the past and future is an illusion, then it is an illusion. If physicists, in the course of developing a Theory of Everything, find they can do without time, then time is unreal. This dismissal or reduction of a mysterious and fundamental facet of our existence is an egregious form of scientism.