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This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation (very briefly) is that it is a consequence of almost every one of those fundamental scientific pictures--and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense--that whatever can happen can just as naturally happen backwards.
Albert provides an unprecedentedly clear, lively, and systematic new account--in the context of a Newtonian-Mechanical picture of the world--of the ultimate origins of the statistical regularities we see around us, of the temporal irreversibility of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, of the asymmetries in our epistemic access to the past and the future, and of our conviction that by acting now we can affect the future but not the past. Then, in the final section of the book, he generalizes the Newtonian picture to the quantum-mechanical case and (most interestingly) suggests a very deep potential connection between the problem of the direction of time and the quantum-mechanical measurement problem.
The book aims to be both an original contribution to the present scientific and philosophical understanding of these matters at the most advanced level, and something in the nature of an elementary textbook on the subject accessible to interested high-school students.
Table of Contents:
Preface
1. Time-Reversal Invariance
2. Thermodynamics
3. Statistical Mechanics
4. The Reversibility Objections and the Past-Hypothesis
5. The Scope of Thermodynamics
6. The Asymmetries of Knowledge and Intervention
7. Quantum Mechanics
Appendix: Gedankenexperiments with Heat Engines
Index
Reviews of this book:
The foundations of statistical mechanisms are often presented in physics textbooks in a rather obscure and confused way. By challenging common ways of thinking about this subject, Time and Chance can do quite a lot to improve this situation.
--Jean Bricmont, Science
Albert is perfecting a style of foundational analysis that is uniquely his own...It has a surgical precision...and it is ruthless with pretensions. The foundations of thermodynamics is a topic that has accumulated a good deal of dead wood; this is a fire that will burn and burn.
--Simon W. Saunders, Oxford University
As usual with Albert's work, the exposition is brisk and to the point, and exceptionally clear...The book will be an extremely valuable contribution to the literature on the subject of philosophical issues in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, a literature which has been thin on the ground but is now growing as it deserves to.
--Lawrence Sklar, University of Michigan
- Sales Rank: #1092606 in eBooks
- Published on: 2009-06-30
- Released on: 2009-06-30
- Format: Kindle eBook
Most helpful customer reviews
35 of 37 people found the following review helpful.
This book is one of the best on the subject.
By Jackson R. Jones
I couldn't stand to see this book with such poor user reviews. One can see the academic reviews are stellar. This is the best book on time that I have ever read. It is not pop-science, it is an academic work on the foundations of physics and time. As such, it is not an easy book to read, despite the fact that it is well-written and anyone should be able to follow it if their mind has not atrophied. It is not easy because it presents in almost full glory all the problems most physicists ignore with respect to questions concerning the role of time in modern physics. I gave this book four stars because I thought it was missing (2) things. One - epistemic motivation for the past hypothesis, Two - Convincing arguments that QCD time-reversal symmetry breaking doesn't really matter for the questions discussed. Anyone who thinks this is a poorly written book should survey the other literature on the topic for comparison. Dr. Albert has tackled a difficult subject with a degree of intellectual integrity and honesty uncommon in physics so don't complain if you have to think because that is the purpose of the book. I have read this book repeatedly and learn something new almost everytime I open the book. I thouroughly disagree with his attempted resolution of time-reversal invariance and entropy increase through the past hypothesis, in particular since the epistemic motivation for the past hypothesis admits necessarily of no non-circular verification. I still maintain he has done an excellent job in writing this book and the poor user reviews should not prevent anyone from reading it. Expect to read it slowly at least twice and to have to think and you will know more about time than most physics PhD's.
66 of 79 people found the following review helpful.
Fascinating Subject But Horribly Unintelligible Writing
By A Customer
Formally trained in academia as a physicist, David Albert made the switch over to philosophy to address foundational issues in physics, most notably those dealing with time and an outstanding problem in quantum mechanics known as the measurement problem. Although the endeavors of Albert are noble and worthwhile, I am afraid that he is lacking in competency as a writer to communicate his ideas in any sensible, intelligible fashion. As a former student of his, I can personally attest to how frustrating his writing and teaching style, kindly referred to by some as "unique," can be. Needlessly obtuse, ever obscure, Albert writes in such a manner that his prose can truly serve as a wonderful negative example of how not to write. Virtually every conceivable error in basic grammar and syntax is committed. Endlessly long sentences, riddled with comma splices and run on sentences, are grossly accompanied by a monstrous convolution of nestled subordinate clauses, which topple over one another and collapse any unifying logic.
Adding to this confusion, Albert repeatedly makes distracting use of parentheses in numerous attempts to develop main ideas instead of correctly using parentheses to make brief, nonessential comments. This semantic nightmare, however, does not end here, as Albert, in page after page, then incorporates numerous, ridiculously long footnotes, which like his "parenthetical" comments are also used to develop main ideas and are so needlessly complicated as to loose any cohesive significance. The net effect of all of this is to drown whatever semblance of order or meaning Albert is attempting to convey under a cacophony of jangled ideas, which chaotically crash into one another instead of logically and succinctly flowing orderly and soundly from one notion to the other. The reader senses there is some overarching unifying thread, in which all the disparate ideas Albert greatly belabors in developing will come together. This intimation, then, pushes the reader on with a very taxed patience for that moment of a great enlightenment. The anticipation of that arrival, however, proves anticlimactic, as chapter after chapter ends as it begins: in a dissolution of fragmentary, Byzantine ideas and lost meanings. Indeed, there has not been such a level of impenetrable perplexity in literature since T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.
The most intelligible portion of this book, ironically, is to be found-not in the book itself per se-but in the description of the book on the inside of the jacket cover. Essentially, this book serves to bring an awareness to what is a fascinating problem in physics: the attempt to reconcile the temporal invariance of physical laws with our perennial everyday sense of a unidirectional nature of time. In Newtonian dynamics, for example, the governing equations of motion equally apply to both the past and the future. There is nothing in Newton's equations (or indeed in other equations that describe other physical phenomena such as electromagnetism or quantum mechanics) that specifies a direction of time. The past, in otherworlds, is just as likely to be a so-called "arrow of time" as the future is. Yet we know that there is one direction to time. In particular, the Second Law of Thermodynamics shows that we live in a universe in which entropy is ever increasing. We age and never grow younger; dropped eggs, which then crack, never spontaneous reassemble; smoke fills a room and never flows toward a point; we recall the past and not the future; and we can affect the future but not the past. Despite these common, everyday understandings of the way the universe operates, physical law makes no such distinctions of the past and future. We are as likely to become younger as we are to age; broken eggs can suddenly reassemble; smoke can converge toward a point; we should be able to recall the future as well as the past; and we can affect the past as well as the future. This is the subject that Albert is attempting to present to his readers.
Moreover, Albert offers a solution to the above problem: the so-called Past-Hypothesis, which is at the heart of this book. The Past-Hypothesis posits that the universe began in a Big Bang, low-entropy state, in which the random nature of particle motion (later argued by Albert to be possibly quantum mechanical in origin) then guarantees that the universe will evolve toward ever growing entropy, thus specifying an "arrow" of time and accounting for the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Albert argues that the Past-Hypothesis is a basic facet of physical law, irreducible to nothing else or anything more basic. This view, however, is by no means universally accepted. There are many competing theories to this problem of time, including a very interesting one by Julian Barbour, who argues in The End of Time for a fascinating possibility that there is an underlying time-less structure to the universe.
Other than stating the problem well on the book jacket (which you can view and read here on Amazon.com), I am afraid that Time and Chance really has no other merit, which would make it a book worth purchasing. I truly hope that if Dr. Albert is reading this he will understand just how difficult it is to comprehend his book, in which the difficulty lies not in the subject matter but in his writing. There were many very bright and capable people in his class who often times simply had no idea (myself included) what it was he was trying to convey. The book is in dire need of heavy revision, and I hope that this is undertaken in the future. As it stands, the book is simply too poorly written to be worth the read other than if you are one of the unfortunate students enrolled in his Direction of Time course, in which case your grade depends on you desperately trying to elucidate and understand this book.
35 of 47 people found the following review helpful.
Definitely not for the layperson
By Will Whitman
I was interested in this book because of its glowing review in Science magazine. While this may be an excellent book, I certainly couldn't tell after the first 45 pages. Major portions of the text consists of illegible footnotes. In spite of its folksy style, the author is obscure and impenetrable. It makes me wonder why, if he really has something to say, he can't explain it in a sensible fashion. While there might be people who get something from this book, a casual reader should expect some very tough going.
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