Abstract
This is not about what Einstein himself thought his biggest mistake but about a crucial conceptual error at the very heart of classical mechanics. There's no idea which has obstructed the development of physics since time immemorial so disastrously effective as the idea that our universe was created by some outside intervention, by God, or, what's in a name, a 'Big Bang'. This essay argues that the fundamental problems of present physics, how nature's different forces can be unified, how General Relativity can be reconciled with Quantum Mechanic and how to get rid of the contradictions and infinities which plague present physics, arise out of a completely outdated paradigm. Here the contours are sketched of a radically different paradigm, showing our universe to be quite different from what we think it is, much stranger but also, finally, understandable by reason, that is, if we are willing to trade our preconceptions about what's logical for Nature's logic. As the view here presented also differs in very subtle ways from what the reader is familiar with, (s)he may have a hard time to even grasp it (though if the solution to our problems would be easy to fathom, it would've been found long ago: it requires a drastic revision of our notion time, of how we look at things, of ideas which have passed their shelf life.
Anton W.M. Biermans