"[Smolin’s] book, a mix of science, philosophy and science fiction, is at once entertaining, thought-provoking, fabulously ambitious and fabulously speculative." —The New York Times "Provocative, original, and unsettling." —The New York Review of Books "Brilliant…Smolin gives what is, for me, the best analysis of the nature of time from a physics viewpoint in a popular science book I have ever seen." —Popular Science "Smolin provides a much-needed dose of clarity about time, with implications that go far beyond physics to economics, politics, and personal philosophy. An essential book for physicists and non-physicists alike, Time Reborn offers a path to better theory and potentially to a better society." —Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget and The Fate of Power and the Future of Dignity "Applying his deep mastery of cosmology, quantum mechanics, general relativity and all the diverse attempts at quantum gravity, in Time Reborn Lee Smolin weaves a convincing and entirely new view of reality. He shows us how contemporary physics eliminates time and argues persuasively that any adequate cosmology rests on making time and ‘now’ fundamental." —Stuart Kauffman, University of Vermont, author of At Home in the Universe "Smolin is an excellent writer, a creative thinker and is ecumenical in the way he covers so many different branches of thought. Even as I mentally argued with this book, I kept on ploughing through to see how Smolin dealt with the objections. I would love to sit down with him over a drink and debate the ins and outs of his theory. And that is how this book should be read: as an account that makes you ask questions." —Nature "An entertaining, head-spinning and, yes, timely blend of philosophy, science, and speculation to put the Now back into physics." —The Telegraph "An energetic case for a paradigm shift that could produce mind-boggling changes in the way we experience our world." —Publishers Weekly "A thoughtful, complex re-evaluation of the role of time in the universe…A flood of ideas from an imaginative thinker." —Kirkus "With rare conceptual daring, Smolin beckons toward a new perspective for doing cosmological theory…A thrilling intellectual ride!"—Booklist (starred review)

Autorentext

LEE SMOLIN is a theoretical physicist who has made influential contributions to the search for a unification of physics. He is a founding faculty member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He is the author of several books including T*he*Trouble with Physics, Einstein's Unfinished Revolution, The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time, Time Reborn, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, and The Life of the Cosmos.

Klappentext

One of our foremost thinkers and public intellectuals offers a radical new view of the nature of time, and explores its implications for everything from physics and cosmology to economics and climate change. What is time? It's the sort of question we rarely ask because it seems so obvious. And yet, to a physicist, time is simply a human construct and an illusion: if you could somehow get outside the universe and observe it from there, you would see that every moment has always existed and always will. Lee Smolin disagrees, and in Time Reborn he lays out the case why. Developments in physics and cosmology point toward the reality of time and the openness of the future. Smolin's groundbreaking theory postulates that physical laws can evolve over time and the future is not yet determined. Newton's fundamental laws may not remain so fundamental. Time Reborn serves as a popular primer and investigation of time, both what it is and how the true nature of it impacts our world. "...at once entertaining, thought-provoking, fabulously ambitious and fabulously speculative."--New York Times Book Review "He challenges not only Einstein's relativity, but also the very notion of natural laws as immutable truths."--Economist "One of the essential books of the twenty-first century . . . Smolin provides a much-needed dose of clarity about time, with implications that go far beyond physics to economics, politics, and personal philosophy."--Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget

Leseprobe
INTRODUCTIONThe scientific case for time being an illusion is formidable. That is why the consequences of adopting the view that time is real are revolutionary. The core of the physicists’ case against time relies on the way we understand what a law of physics is. According to this dominant view, everything that happens in the universe is determined by a law, which dictates precisely how the future evolves out of the present. The law is absolute and, once present conditions are specified, there is no freedom or uncertainty in how the future will evolve.

As Thomasina, the precocious heroine of Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia, explains to her tutor: “If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could.”

I used to believe that my job as a theoretical physicist was to find that formula; I now see my faith in its existence as more mysticism than science.

Were he writing lines for a modern character, Stoppard would have had Thomasina say that the universe is like a computer. The laws of physics are the program. When you give it an input — the present positions of all the elementary particles in the universe — the computer runs for an appropriate amount of time and gives you the output, which is all the positions of the elementary particles at some future time. Within this view of nature, nothing happens except the rearrangement of particles according to timeless laws, so according to these laws the future is already completely determined by the present, as the present was by the past.

This view diminishes time in several ways.1 There can be no surprises, no truly novel phenomena, because all that happens is rearrangement of the atoms. The properties of the atoms themselves are timeless, as are the laws controlling them; neither ever changes. Any feature of the world at a future time can be computed from the configuration of the present. That is, the passage of time can be replaced by a computation, which means that the future is logically a consequence of the present.

Einstein’s theories of relativity make even stronger arguments that time is inessential to a fundamental description of the world, as I’ll discuss in chapter 6. Relativity strongly suggests that the whole history of the world is a timeless unity; present, past, and future have no meaning apart from human subjectivity. Time is just another dimension of space, and the sense we have of experiencing moments passing is an illusion behind which is a timeless reality.

These assertions may seem horrifying to anyone whose worldview includes a place for free will or human agency. This is not an argument I will engage in here; my case for the reality of time rests purely on science. My job will be to explain why the usual arguments for a predetermined future are wrong scientifically.

In Part I, I will present the case from science for believing that time is an illusion. In Part II, I will demolish those arguments and show why time must be taken to be real if fundamental physics and cosmology are to overcome the crises they currently face.

To frame the argument of Part I, I trace the development of the concepts of time used in physics, from Aristotle and Ptolemy through Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and on to our contemporary quantum cosmologists, and show how o…