Stephen Hawking has been the Albert Einstein of our time. He became recognized as a prominent physicist who popularized the mysteries of the universe. But his thinking resulted, unlike the thoughts of Einstein, neither in mass destruction weapons nor in any products used in our daily life. And the universe seems more mysterious now at his death than when Einstein died. While another such superstar in science is highly unlikely, perhaps instead a skunkworks project team will in a near future get fame from pioneering research at those frontiers on which some light is shed in the following lines.

Many physicists believe, like Hawking and Einstein, in the possibility of explaining all the physical forces by means of "a theory of everything". Considered the holy grail of physics, it would be something to celebrate like the first steps in 1953 on the highest peak of Mount Everest and in 1969 on the surface of the Moon. However, the Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg has expressed a common opinion of the leading authorities: "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless". Einstein had to abandon a static model of the universe and Hawking abandoned a dynamic model with a nice symmetry for an oscillation back and forwards in time. Presently, a pointless universe is proposed as existing either in an infinite series as described by Roger PenrosePaul Steinhardt and others or in a multiverse as described by Andrei Linde.

While time has been described as an illusion in line with the view that the universe seems pointless, a wave interpretation of its flow makes everything less mysterious. Physicists describe elementary charges as having infinite existence if left alone and the same goes for photons. A continuous wave model is applicable on both these elementary particles so why not try it also on corresponding yet to be discovered elementary particles of gravity? Could that open a door to make all the physical forces described by a unified field theory as sought in vain by Einstein and others? I showed some years ago in an article entitled Beyond Higgs how to motivate an extended use of the Einstein-Planck equation so as to develop a wave theory of time, WTT. It offers a key to interpret the nature of dark matter and of the huge difference in strength between electromagnetic forces and gravitation. And it makes the so-called big number coincidences derivable instead of "explained" by anthropic reasoning.

Like a ring, Einstein's static model of the universe was limited but endless and definitively not pointless. A rolling ring can be used to describe a continuous wave (CW) that is sinusoidal and that will in the following lines be used to to do what has been said to be impossible, namely to describe time itself. In a most simple CW model of a cosmic flow of timet_c, a small measure of time dt_c varies with regard to a reference measure of time dt_r as expressed by the equation dt_c/dt_r = sin (2π t_c/T) where T is the wave period and dt_r is equal to the positive peak value of dt_c If the cosmic expansion with time is chosen to be described by means of a reference flow of time t_r as represented by atomic clocks, it shows the positive acceleration expressed by the estimated value of Einstein's cosmological constant Lambda used today for describing the apparent accelerated expansion of space. That acceleration is predicted by the equality between the ratio dt_c/dt_r and, as derived from the sine wave function above, the ratio between 2 and the sum of exp(2π t_r/T) and exp -(2π t_r/T). The cosmic expansion is conceivable, however, without any atom clocks generating the reference time t_r. In order to interpret the intrinsic nature of the cosmic expansion, it is therefore logical to apply the cosmic flow of time t_c instead of the reference time t_r making the positive acceleration an illusion and the physical existence of a force counteracting gravity and represented by Lambda simply an unnecessary assumption.

Einstein described the gravitational force as curved spacetime. WTT interprets that curvature as due to the CW nature of time where the period T is in the order of 10 exp 20 seconds in the context of a yet to be discovered elementary particle of gravity and 10 exp -20 seconds in the context of the elementary charge controlling the atomic clocks. In a more developed version of WTT, the two-dimensional CW model of time t_c becomes a three-dimensional CW model related to the Everett many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics asserting the objective reality of the universal wavefunction and challenging the view that the universe is pointless.