Download or read book Physics and the Ultimate Significance of Time written by David Ray Griffin and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1986-01-01 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenges the conventional view of the nature of time.
Download or read book Physics and the Ultimate Significance of Time written by David Ray Griffin and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1985-11-15 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Physics and the Ultimate Significance of Time challenges the conventional view of the nature of time. The dominant twentieth-century view, supported by Einstein and many of the founders of quantum theory, implies that time is ultimately unreal. Several new schools of thought reject the notion that physics is temporally symmetrical, and that time could just as easily run backwards. Combating this conventional view of time, this book offers three new viewpoints and explores their apparent differences. Nobel prize winner Ilya Prigogine argues that irreversibility and asymmetry are more fundamental than reversibility and symmetry. David Bohm notes that while conventional notions about physics and the worldview it suggests have been based upon exclusive attention to the 'explicate order,' quite another view results when primary attention is focused on the 'implicate order.' And the growing school of process philosophy based on Alfred North Whitehead's work holds that irreversible temporal relations characterize the most 'elementary' components of the world, implying the heretical view that time exists for a single electron or atom.
Download or read book What Is Real written by Adam Becker and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2018-03-20 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A thorough, illuminating exploration of the most consequential controversy raging in modern science." --New York Times Book Review An Editor's Choice, New York Times Book Review Longlisted for PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing Longlisted for Goodreads Choice Award Every physicist agrees quantum mechanics is among humanity's finest scientific achievements. But ask what it means, and the result will be a brawl. For a century, most physicists have followed Niels Bohr's solipsistic and poorly reasoned Copenhagen interpretation. Indeed, questioning it has long meant professional ruin, yet some daring physicists, such as John Bell, David Bohm, and Hugh Everett, persisted in seeking the true meaning of quantum mechanics. What Is Real? is the gripping story of this battle of ideas and the courageous scientists who dared to stand up for truth. "An excellent, accessible account." --Wall Street Journal "Splendid. . . . Deeply detailed research, accompanied by charming anecdotes about the scientists." --Washington Post
Download or read book Philosophy of Physics written by Tim Maudlin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-26 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophical foundations of the physics of space-time This concise book introduces nonphysicists to the core philosophical issues surrounding the nature and structure of space and time, and is also an ideal resource for physicists interested in the conceptual foundations of space-time theory. Tim Maudlin's broad historical overview examines Aristotelian and Newtonian accounts of space and time, and traces how Galileo's conceptions of relativity and space-time led to Einstein's special and general theories of relativity. Maudlin explains special relativity with enough detail to solve concrete physical problems while presenting general relativity in more qualitative terms. Additional topics include the Twins Paradox, the physical aspects of the Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction, the constancy of the speed of light, time travel, the direction of time, and more. Introduces nonphysicists to the philosophical foundations of space-time theory Provides a broad historical overview, from Aristotle to Einstein Explains special relativity geometrically, emphasizing the intrinsic structure of space-time Covers the Twins Paradox, Galilean relativity, time travel, and more Requires only basic algebra and no formal knowledge of physics
Download or read book The End of Time written by Julian Barbour and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2001-11-29 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Feynman once quipped that "Time is what happens when nothing else does." But Julian Barbour disagrees: if nothing happened, if nothing changed, then time would stop. For time is nothing but change. It is change that we perceive occurring all around us, not time. Put simply, time does not exist. In this highly provocative volume, Barbour presents the basic evidence for a timeless universe, and shows why we still experience the world as intensely temporal. It is a book that strikes at the heart of modern physics. It casts doubt on Einstein's greatest contribution, the spacetime continuum, but also points to the solution of one of the great paradoxes of modern science, the chasm between classical and quantum physics. Indeed, Barbour argues that the holy grail of physicists--the unification of Einstein's general relativity with quantum mechanics--may well spell the end of time. Barbour writes with remarkable clarity as he ranges from the ancient philosophers Heraclitus and Parmenides, through the giants of science Galileo, Newton, and Einstein, to the work of the contemporary physicists John Wheeler, Roger Penrose, and Steven Hawking. Along the way he treats us to enticing glimpses of some of the mysteries of the universe, and presents intriguing ideas about multiple worlds, time travel, immortality, and, above all, the illusion of motion. The End of Time is a vibrantly written and revolutionary book. It turns our understanding of reality inside-out.
Download or read book Time and its Importance in Modern Thought written by M. F. Cleugh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-10 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1937. This book is a classic work on the philosophy of time, looking at the pshychology, physics and logic of time before investigating the views of Kant, Bergson, Alexander, McTaggart and Dunne. The second half of the book contains more indepth consideration of prediction, the concepts of past and future, and reality.
Download or read book The Physicist and the Philosopher written by Jimena Canales and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The explosive debate that transformed our views about time and scientific truth On April 6, 1922, in Paris, Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson publicly debated the nature of time. Einstein considered Bergson's theory of time to be a soft, psychological notion, irreconcilable with the quantitative realities of physics. Bergson, who gained fame as a philosopher by arguing that time should not be understood exclusively through the lens of science, criticized Einstein's theory of time for being a metaphysics grafted on to science, one that ignored the intuitive aspects of time. The Physicist and the Philosopher tells the remarkable story of how this explosive debate transformed our understanding of time and drove a rift between science and the humanities that persists today. Jimena Canales introduces readers to the revolutionary ideas of Einstein and Bergson, describes how they dramatically collided in Paris, and traces how this clash of worldviews reverberated across the twentieth century. She shows how it provoked responses from figures such as Bertrand Russell and Martin Heidegger, and carried repercussions for American pragmatism, logical positivism, phenomenology, and quantum mechanics. Canales explains how the new technologies of the period—such as wristwatches, radio, and film—helped to shape people’s conceptions of time and further polarized the public debate. She also discusses how Bergson and Einstein, toward the end of their lives, each reflected on his rival’s legacy—Bergson during the Nazi occupation of Paris and Einstein in the context of the first hydrogen bomb explosion. The Physicist and the Philosopher is a magisterial and revealing account that shows how scientific truth was placed on trial in a divided century marked by a new sense of time.
Download or read book Thirty Years that Shook Physics written by George Gamow and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2012-05-11 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lucid, accessible introduction to the influential theory of energy and matter features careful explanations of Dirac's anti-particles, Bohr's model of the atom, and much more. Numerous drawings. 1966 edition.
Download or read book The End of Time written by Julian B. Barbour and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Feynman once quipped: "Time is what happens when nothing else does." But Julian Barbour disagrees: if nothing happened, if nothing changed, time would stop. For time is nothing but change. It is change that we perceive occurring all around us, not time. In fact, time doesn't exist. In this highly provocative volume, Barbour presents the basic evidence for the nonexistence of time, explaining what a timeless universe is like and showing how the world will nonetheless be experienced as intensely temporal. It is a book that strikes at the heart of modern physics, that casts doubt on Einstein's greatest contribution, the space-time continuum, but that also points to the solution of one of the great paradoxes of modern science: the chasm between classical and quantum physics. Indeed, Barbour argues that the unification of Einstein's general relativity and quantum mechanics may well spell the end of time--time will cease to have a role in the foundations of physics. Barbour writes with remarkable clarity, as he ranges from ancient philosophers such as Heraclitus and Parmenides, to such giants of science as Galileo, Newton, and Einstein, to the work of contemporary physicists such as John Wheeler, Roger Penrose, and Steven Hawking. Along the way, the author treats us to an enticing look at some of the mysteries of the universe and presents intriguing ideas about multiple worlds, time travel, immortality, and, above all, the illusion of motion. Turning our understanding of reality inside-out, The End of Time is a vibrantly written and revolutionary book.
Download or read book Time s Arrow and Archimedes Point written by Huw Price and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997-12-04 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is the future so different from the past? Why does the past affect the future and not the other way around? What does quantum mechanics really tell us about the world? In this important and accessible book, Huw Price throws fascinating new light on some of the great mysteries of modern physics, and connects them in a wholly original way. Price begins with the mystery of the arrow of time. Why, for example, does disorder always increase, as required by the second law of thermodynamics? Price shows that, for over a century, most physicists have thought about these problems the wrong way. Misled by the human perspective from within time, which distorts and exaggerates the differences between past and future, they have fallen victim to what Price calls the "double standard fallacy": proposed explanations of the difference between the past and the future turn out to rely on a difference which has been slipped in at the beginning, when the physicists themselves treat the past and future in different ways. To avoid this fallacy, Price argues, we need to overcome our natural tendency to think about the past and the future differently. We need to imagine a point outside time -- an Archimedean "view from nowhen" -- from which to observe time in an unbiased way. Offering a lively criticism of many major modern physicists, including Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking, Price shows that this fallacy remains common in physics today -- for example, when contemporary cosmologists theorize about the eventual fate of the universe. The "big bang" theory normally assumes that the beginning and end of the universe will be very different. But if we are to avoid the double standard fallacy, we need to consider time symmetrically, and take seriously the possibility that the arrow of time may reverse when the universe recollapses into a "big crunch." Price then turns to the greatest mystery of modern physics, the meaning of quantum theory. He argues that in missing the Archimedean viewpoint, modern physics has missed a radical and attractive solution to many of the apparent paradoxes of quantum physics. Many consequences of quantum theory appear counterintuitive, such as Schrodinger's Cat, whose condition seems undetermined until observed, and Bell's Theorem, which suggests a spooky "nonlocality," where events happening simultaneously in different places seem to affect each other directly. Price shows that these paradoxes can be avoided by allowing that at the quantum level the future does, indeed, affect the past. This demystifies nonlocality, and supports Einstein's unpopular intuition that quantum theory describes an objective world, existing independently of human observers: the Cat is alive or dead, even when nobody looks. So interpreted, Price argues, quantum mechanics is simply the kind of theory we ought to have expected in microphysics -- from the symmetric standpoint. Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point presents an innovative and controversial view of time and contemporary physics. In this exciting book, Price urges physicists, philosophers, and anyone who has ever pondered the mysteries of time to look at the world from the fresh perspective of Archimedes' Point and gain a deeper understanding of ourselves, the universe around us, and our own place in time.
Download or read book Evolution of Physics written by Albert Einstein and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1938 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clear and concise explanations of the development of theories explaining physical phenomena.
Download or read book On Physics and Philosophy written by Bernard d'Espagnat and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-07 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "On Physics and Philosophy is an accessible, mathematics-free reflection on the philosophical meaning of the quantum revolution, by one of the world's leading authorities on the subject. D'Espagnat presents an objective account of the main guiding principles of contemporary physics - in particular, quantum mechanics - followed by a look at just what consequences these should imply for philosophical thinking."--
Download or read book Physics of the Future written by Michio Kaku and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The renowned theoretical physicist and national bestselling author of The God Equation details the developments in computer technology, artificial intelligence, medicine, space travel, and more, that are poised to happen over the next century. “Mind-bending…. [An] alternately fascinating and frightening book.” —San Francisco Chronicle Space elevators. Internet-enabled contact lenses. Cars that fly by floating on magnetic fields. This is the stuff of science fiction—it’s also daily life in the year 2100. Renowned theoretical physicist Michio Kaku considers how these inventions will affect the world economy, addressing the key questions: Who will have jobs? Which nations will prosper? Kaku interviews three hundred of the world’s top scientists—working in their labs on astonishing prototypes. He also takes into account the rigorous scientific principles that regulate how quickly, how safely, and how far technologies can advance. In Physics of the Future, Kaku forecasts a century of earthshaking advances in technology that could make even the last centuries’ leaps and bounds seem insignificant.
Download or read book Quantum Non Locality and Relativity written by Tim Maudlin and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-05-06 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The third edition of Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity has been carefully updated to reflect significant developments, including a new chapter covering important recent work in the foundations of physics. A new edition of the premier philosophical study of Bell’s Theorem and its implication for the relativistic account of space and time Discusses Roderich Tumiulka’s explicit, relativistic theory that can reproduce the quantum mechanical violation of Bell’s inequality. Discusses the "Free Will Theorem" of John Conway and Simon Kochen Introduces philosophers to the relevant physics and demonstrates how philosophical analysis can help inform physics
Download or read book The Order of Time written by Carlo Rovelli and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-12-10 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of TIME’s Ten Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade "Meet the new Stephen Hawking . . . The Order of Time is a dazzling book." --The Sunday Times From the bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Reality Is Not What It Seems, Helgoland, and Anaximander comes a concise, elegant exploration of time. Why do we remember the past and not the future? What does it mean for time to "flow"? Do we exist in time or does time exist in us? In lyric, accessible prose, Carlo Rovelli invites us to consider questions about the nature of time that continue to puzzle physicists and philosophers alike. For most readers this is unfamiliar terrain. We all experience time, but the more scientists learn about it, the more mysterious it remains. We think of it as uniform and universal, moving steadily from past to future, measured by clocks. Rovelli tears down these assumptions one by one, revealing a strange universe where at the most fundamental level time disappears. He explains how the theory of quantum gravity attempts to understand and give meaning to the resulting extreme landscape of this timeless world. Weaving together ideas from philosophy, science and literature, he suggests that our perception of the flow of time depends on our perspective, better understood starting from the structure of our brain and emotions than from the physical universe. Already a bestseller in Italy, and written with the poetic vitality that made Seven Brief Lessons on Physics so appealing, The Order of Time offers a profoundly intelligent, culturally rich, novel appreciation of the mysteries of time.
Download or read book Unsnarling the World Knot written by David Ray Griffin and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2008-03-25 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mind-body problem, which Schopenhauer called the "world-knot," has been a central problem for philosophy since the time of Descartes. Among realists--those who accept the reality of the physical world--the two dominant approaches have been dualism and materialism, but there is a growing consensus that, if we are ever to understand how mind and body are related, a radically new approach is required. David Ray Griffin develops a third form of realism, one that resolves the basic problem (common to dualism and materialism) of the continued acceptance of the Cartesian view of matter. In dialogue with various philosophers, including Dennett, Kim, McGinn, Nagel, Seager, Searle, and Strawson, Griffin shows that materialist physicalism is even more problematic than dualism. He proposes instead a panexperientialist physicalism grounded in the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Answering those who have rejected "panpsychism" as obviously absurd, Griffin argues compellingly that panexperientialism, by taking experience and spontaneity as fully natural, can finally provide a naturalistic account of the emergence of consciousness--an account that also does justice to the freedom we all suppose in practice.
Download or read book Einstein and the Quantum written by A. Douglas Stone and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The untold story of Albert Einstein's role as the father of quantum theory Einstein and the Quantum reveals for the first time the full significance of Albert Einstein's contributions to quantum theory. Einstein famously rejected quantum mechanics, observing that God does not play dice. But, in fact, he thought more about the nature of atoms, molecules, and the emission and absorption of light—the core of what we now know as quantum theory—than he did about relativity. A compelling blend of physics, biography, and the history of science, Einstein and the Quantum shares the untold story of how Einstein—not Max Planck or Niels Bohr—was the driving force behind early quantum theory. It paints a vivid portrait of the iconic physicist as he grappled with the apparently contradictory nature of the atomic world, in which its invisible constituents defy the categories of classical physics, behaving simultaneously as both particle and wave. And it demonstrates how Einstein's later work on the emission and absorption of light, and on atomic gases, led directly to Erwin Schrödinger's breakthrough to the modern form of quantum mechanics. The book sheds light on why Einstein ultimately renounced his own brilliant work on quantum theory, due to his deep belief in science as something objective and eternal.
