Peter Lynds was having a rotten summer. He had quit a dead-end job at an insurance agency to go to college, but his first semester of physics and philosophy classes at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, was kicking his butt. He was still haunted by the memory of watching a friend drown eight years earlier (Lynds had nearly died trying to save him). So he spent the better part of August 1999 sitting on his mother's couch watching television.

One of the bright spots in his life was that he'd recently fallen in love - with Einstein. Raiding the Wellington library, he pored over biographies like Denis Brian's Einstein: A Life and devoured explanations of the great theorist's work. One night he was watching the movie I.Q., with Walter Matthau as Einstein, Meg Ryan as his ditzy-yet-brainy niece, and Tim Robbins as a lovesick mechanic. When Robbins moves in on Ryan for a kiss, she attempts to fend him off with a 2,500-year-old paradox known as Zeno's dichotomy: Moving from point A to point B requires that you first cover half the distance, then half of the remaining distance, and so on - an insurmountable infinity of almost-theres that keeps you from point B. Robbins crashes through Zeno's logic by kissing Ryan anyway.

It was just the thing to get Lynds off the couch: What if Zeno's real lesson isn't that movement from point A to point B is impossible (obviously it isn't), but rather that there is no such thing as a discrete slice of time?

He went back to school that fall with the fervor and the audacity of the converted. During an office-hours argument with physicist David Beaglehole, Lynds pointed at the professor's coffee mug and demanded to know: At what "instant" would the mug not be moving if he dragged it across the desk? Exasperated, Beaglehole suggested that Lynds try to get his theory published, thinking that rejection from an academic journal would put the matter to rest.

Sure enough, Physical Review Letters, which published Einstein, said no thanks ("The author's arguments are based on profound ignorance or misunderstanding of basic analysis and calculus," one referee said). Foundations of Physics Letters didn't respond. A third journal, in Canada, said yes, and then sent him a bill - it was a vanity press. Lynds withdrew.

But then something extraordinary happened. Lynds called Foundations to ask for his manuscript and was told the journal had no record of his paper. So he sent it again. It got rejected. Lynds revised it and submitted it a third time ... and they said yes. The paper was published in August 2003, and Lynds became a celebrity. He was cheered (and jeered) on physics discussion Web sites. Big-name researchers talked to the press about his work. Conference invitations started pouring in.

Then again, the 30-year-old Lynds is holed up in a rustic New Zealand cabin, working on a theory-of-everything book that has no publisher. He still hasn't finished college. If that sounds a little too Unabomber for a new kind of science, well, maybe it is.

Then again, Lynds might be right.

Lynds' paper, "Time and Classical and Quantum Mechanics: Indeterminacy vs. Continuity," is the latest chapter in a story that begins with Zeno and runs through Newton and Einstein to today. The question they struggled to answer: How does matter move through time and space?

Newton described motion as a change in position over time. (In the process of figuring that out, he invented calculus.) That allowed for infinite series of infinitesimal steps, which polishes off Zeno. But for his model to make sense, Newton needed what he described as "absolute, true and mathematical time, which of itself flows equably without relation to anything external." It's a God clock, ticking out discrete instants, or, if you prefer, a universal CPU, doling out reality one cycle at a time, a series of static instants giving only the appearance of motion like the successive frames of a movie.

But Einstein didn't buy it. The heart of relativity is that everything depends on your point of view - if you're traveling at close to the speed of light (a constant), then time moves differently for you than for your slowpoke friends back home. Einstein died before he had worked out the implications of his own brilliant ideas. Among the problems left unsolved: Time could go faster or slower (or even backward), but was it divisible? And were there irreducible "atoms" of time, quantum flecks now called chronons?

Enter Lynds. In his theory, reality is merely sequences of events that happen relative to one another; time is an illusion. There's no chronon, no direction for time's arrow to fly, no "imaginary time" flowing 90 degrees off the axis of normal time. "I got to a point in my life where I was asking deeper and deeper questions," Lynds says. "If you want to understand reality, you have to get into physics. And if you're really interested in physics, you have to ask really big questions."

His answers make the mathematics of space and time look strange. If instants don't exist, then calculus - in which equations depend on fixed before-and-after positions in space - doesn't accurately describe reality. And that means a fundamental indeterminacy connects the blurry probabilities of the quantum universe with the seemingly stable macroverse where you and I live. Uniting those two seemingly incompatible worldviews dogged Einstein until his death; Lynds is happy to help the great man out. A further realization: The human perception of time as a sequence of moments is just a neurological artifact, an outgrowth of the chunk-by-chunk way our brains perceive reality. As the famous geneticist J. B. S. Haldane said: The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine.

For a while, the question of whether instants exist was superseded by the question of whether Lynds exists. His claims were so outlandish, the scandal they provoked so fervent, and his home country (apparently) so exotic that the Internet Museum of Hoaxes briefly decided Lynds wasn't real. He spent months corresponding with the webmaster to clear that up. This part of the Lynds controversy turns out to be the only mystery I could resolve without knowing advanced physics.

I met up with Lynds at the Bar Marmont in Hollywood, on his way home from a conference at Carnegie Mellon University. Over beers, he proved to be quite self-effacing. "This isn't the grand unified theory," he said. "I'm not trying to combine general relativity and quantum theory." Still, he acknowledged, that may be an outcome. The truth is, he'd rather talk about fishing than physics. And that's fine - his Kiwi drawl can be harder to untangle than Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

Even when I went to see Lynds in New Zealand a few months later, I had to initiate the physics conversation every time. "I know, I know - it's pretty bloody unlikely," Lynds said, perching on a creaky chair on the front porch of his hillside flat, a cross between a tree house and a Hobbit hole. "How the hell did I end up in this position, with this idea? I'm just some dude that's read a few books."

Lynds' modesty is a bit disingenuous. A huge Einstein devotee, he knows his own story has inescapable similarities to that of another disgruntled twentysomething who turned to physics as a respite from his crummy day-to-day life. Though it's now known as his annus mirabilis, Einstein spent 1905 - when he came up with relativity - in a loveless marriage, shuffling between a dead-end job and a cramped house filled with the cries of a colicky 1-year-old. Lynds spent 1999 feeling not much better. He was depressed about college, about his job prospects, about everything. And that led to an avalanche of ideas and thought experiments. Whether they were miraculous remains an open question.

Sometimes in science it's hard to tell the crazy, wildly off-the-mark theories from the brilliant, revolutionary ones. Uncredentialed outsiders claiming to have discovered the unified field theory or cold fusion - in a word, cranks - are always banging on the door of the physics establishment. Sometimes they're literally crazy; sometimes they're just wrong. The establishment turns them away. The thing is, the establishment also depends on crazy ideas - wormholes, quantum foam, 12 dimensions - to move forward.

Publication is generally the standard separating the real brains from the brains protected by tinfoil hats. Of course, peer review does not anoint an idea as correct - just worth considering. Lynds' paper incited a storm of commentary from physicists, armchair and professional, around the world. Someone even asked for an opinion from John Wheeler, the 94-year-old eminence who coined the term black hole and schooled both Richard Feynman and Kip Thorne. Wheeler stopped far short of endorsing Lynds, but he did venture that major changes in physics often come from outside academia. Hey, Einstein did his best work as a patent clerk, right?

In spring 2004, with the din of his debut still ringing in his ears, Lynds embarked upon a whirlwind tour of Europe to meet the great minds in foundations research. One of the more encouraging emails he had received during the initial storm of publicity was from Fran Healy, dilettante time theorist and lead singer of the Brit-pop band Travis. Healy had read about Lynds and sent him a brief note of congratulations. The two began a correspondence, and when Lynds came through London, Healy let him crash at his flat. "This dropout kid comes along with a snotty nose and dirty face and says, sorry, no, you've got it wrong," Healy laughs, and switches from his Scots brogue to a pitch-perfect Kiwi deadpan: "'Well, Stephen Hawking, he's quite brilliant, but a lot of his stuff is quite off.'"

Plaudits from rock stars, even the most cerebral ones, may be good for morale, but they won't get you into the physics pantheon. One thing that will is the help of other scientists. While in England, Lynds scored an audience with David Deutsch, the godfather of quantum computing. "We had a nice chat," Deutsch says. He told Lynds to keep working on his theory's implications for quantum computing. That's a little like a big-leaguer telling a college-baller to keep working on his swing. Lynds chose to take it as encouragement.

Lynds also had dinner in London with a fellow time theorist named Julian Barbour. In the last 30 years, Barbour has become something of an insider's outsider in physics. Over Chinese food, the two embarked on what seemed at first an enjoyable chat about their shared belief that time, as commonly represented, does not exist. But the conversation hit a semantic snag when Lynds insisted that Barbour's theories included instants by a different name. The meal ended in a less-than-friendly way.

Academia may never accept Lynds, but the rest of the world will have a chance to chew over his ideas in the next year or two, when his book on the structure of the universe comes out. Lynds has a literary agent, Heide Lange, who also represents Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code. That's the kind of firepower that practically assures publication - and serious marketing. "He's definitely tuned to a different wavelength," Lange says. "And I love an underdog."

Lange admits she doesn't fully understand Lynds' science. One thing she does know: the science of selling scads of books that give readers an intellectual tingle without overdoing it. After she saw some of Lynds' work, she says, she got a gut feeling that his picture of the universe will prove as seductive as Hawking's - and easier to digest. Hawking's A Brief History of Time may be the least-read best seller ever; Lange seems to think Lynds can be Dan Brown to Hawking's Umberto Eco.

It would be surprising if Lynds' story had such a tidy ending. After all, the second law of thermodynamics says that everything in the universe gets messier over time. Or, more formally: The entropy of any system increases. Drop a beer mug on the floor and it shatters; shards of glass do not assemble into mugs of beer and jump into your hand.

Sitting in the back of a fishing boat on New Zealand's Waihau Bay, in Maori country, I ask Lynds about the second law. He watches our lines cut through the boat's wake and then starts talking about Loschmidt's paradox, which says that, since Newtonian physics works in reverse, entropy can decrease. Experience with beer mugs suggests otherwise.

I confess that I'm baffled. All I can think of is the way the Maori describe the past: "That which is in front of us."

Lynds is still paradox-hunting. "Time doesn't flow in any direction. Period," he says. "Entropy can decrease temporarily, but that doesn't mean events will un-happen."

It's a good theory if you're someone who had one very bad summer. The past recedes into the aft horizon. The boat speeds on.

An Extremely Brief History of Time

1687: Isaac Newton

The universe has one absolute clock:

• Time and space are independant of the observer.

• Time's arrow points forward; events move ahead from the now.

1905: Albert Einstein

every observer has his or her own (accurate) clock:

• The universe exists in a space-time manifold.

• Everyone's "now" is different.

• Acceleration affects time.

2003: Peter Lynds

There is no clock; "time" is an illusion

• Time has no indivisible unit.

• There is no "now," only sequences of events.

Contributing editor Josh McHugh (josh@wiredmag.com) *also writes about Xbox guru J Allard in this issue.*Feature:

>

Time's Up, Einstein

Plus:

>

An Extremely Brief History of Time