Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point: New Directions for the Physics of
Time
By Huw Price
Oxford University Press, USA | December 1997 | ISBN: 0195117980 | 320 pages |
PDF | 15,6 MB
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 these great mysteries of modern physics, and
connects them in a wholly original way.
Price begins with the mystery of the arrow of time. Price shows that, for over
a century, most physicists have thought about problems of time in 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.
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.
CONTENTS
1 •
The View from Nowhen 3
2 • "More Apt to Be Lost than Got": The Lessons of the Second Law 22
3 • New Light on the Arrow of Radiation 49
4 • Arrows and Errors in Contemporary Cosmology 78
5 • Innocence and Symmetry in Microphysics 114
6 • In Search of the Third Arrow 132
7 • Convention Objectified and the Past Unlocked 162
8 • Einstein's Issue: The Puzzle of Contemporary Quantum Theory 195
9 • The Case for Advanced Action 231
10 • Overview 261
NOTES 269
BIBLIOGRAPHY 285
INDEX 293
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