An Imperfect Truth

When the Perimeter Institute—a physics research institute in Waterloo, Ontario—decided several years ago to build an extension, they asked the architects “to provide the optimal environment for the human mind to conceive of the universe.” Clearly the results were effective. One of the founding faculty members, Lee Smolin, and the Harvard philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger have conceived of the universe, and have come to a number of conclusions about it, including that a) there is only one of it, and b) time is real, so all things change, mutate and get old.

To non-scientists, these main points, summed up in the book’s title, might seem unremarkable. We only have experience of one universe, so would it not be presumptuous to assert that there are more? Time is clearly real enough (just ask an editor). And Heraclitus pointed out a long time ago that “everything flows.” So how can the authors assert that the admittance of mutability “is astonishing in the reach of...