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An introduction to the arrow of time and a new, related, theory of quantum measurement.
While experience tells us that time flows from the past to the present and into the future, a number of philosophical and physical objections exist to this commonsense view of dynamic time. In an attempt to make sense of this conundrum, philosophers and physicists are forced to confront fascinating questions, such as: Can effects precede causes? Can one travel in time? Can the expansion of the Universe or the process of measurement in quantum mechanics define a direction in time? In this book, researchers from both physics and philosophy attempt to answer these issues in an interesting, yet rigorous way. This fascinating book will be of interest to physicists and philosophers of science and educated general readers interested in the direction of time.
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.
In our century, the subject of time has become an area of serious inquiry for science. Theories that contain time as a simple quantity form the basis of our understanding of many scientific disciplines, yet the debate rages on: why does there seem to be a direction to time, an arrow of time pointing from past to future? In The Arrow of Time, a major bestseller in England, Dr. Peter Coveney, a research scientist, and award-winning journalist Dr. Roger Highfield, demonstrate that the commonsense view of time agrees with the most advanced scientific theory. Time does in fact move like an arrow, shooting forward into what is genuinely unknown, leaving the past immutably behind. The authors make their case by exploring three centuries of science, offering bold reinterpretations of Newton's mechanics, Einstein's special and general theories of relativity, quantum mechanics, and advancing the insights of James Gleick's Chaos.
This fine example of critical writing examines the arrow of time as it is conceived by theoretical physicists. Exploring areas in science from quantum theory and relativity to cognitive science and philosophy, the book appeals to a more classical realism, approaching a work tempered for the conservative scientist while remaining provocative enough to challenge any reader. The arguments are build upon currently accepted theory, however, the radical conclusion reveals a surprisingly consistent view between classical and modern physics, illustrating how classical physics can be reasonably advanced, instead of replaced, to account for contemporary theory. To accomplish this coherent view, all that is required is a shift in the way we think about time. By simply demystifying the arrow of time, we can begin to see how the inexplicable nature of modern physics, such as “quantum weirdness,” is not only comprehensible but is exactly what we would expect from our theories. Though this conclusion is counter to the consensus in the physics of the last century, the book is highly persuasive. Indeed, it may just compel every reader to rethink the predicament in today’s theoretical physics.
We say that the processes going on in the world about us are asymmetric in time or display an arrow of time. Yet this manifest fact of our experience is particularly difficult to explain in terms of the fundamental laws of physics. This volume reconciles these profoundly conflicting facts.
Measurements and Time Reversal in Objective Quantum Theory is a three-chapter book that begins with a discussion on the fundamentals of conventional quantum theory. The second chapter focuses on the time arrow of quantum theory. It specifically presents a schematized account of the results of an interesting paper on time reversal in quantum theory published by Aharonov, Bergmann, and Lebowitz. The last chapter presents the authors' conclusions and additional comments in this field. This book will be valuable to students of wave mechanics and will serve as a supplement to textbooks, which fail to present an appropriate discussion of these matters.