Morris, Richard;
Time's Arrows: Scientific Attitudes Toward Time
Simon & Schuster, 1986, 244 pages
ISBN 0671617664, 9780671617660
topics: | science | history | philosophy | temporal
The nature of time has been a starting point for much human thought about
the universe.
Morris opens by pointing out that "What is time?" is a question that may not
be as trivial as it first seems to us in a world where we take time as given,
as the substratum on which life thrives!!
Starting with ancient cyclical theories of time, he moves to the theory of
linear time, and then to the notion that velocity is a function of time
(Galileo) that introduced time as an element in science.
St. Augustine: What then, is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is If
I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know. p.8
In civilization after civilization, we encounter myths of the cyclicity of
the universe - all will be destroyed, and re-creeated again.
Eternal recurrence : Pythagorieans, Stoics, Neoplatonics, etc. 10
How did we shift from a cyclic to a linear view of time?
Galileo struggled with the problem of the nature of motion for decades. Of all the q's facing him, the one he found most difficult was: what is the nature of instantaneous velocity? For years, he thought this concept was nothing but mathematical fiction, if not a contradiction in terms. Constant speed is easy - ball covers 4m in 2s at constant rate ==> vel = 2 m/s Avg speed is also ok; ball dropped from 64' reaches ground in 2s ==> avg vel = 32 ft/s but how fast is the ball moving 0.5 sec after it is dropped? there can be no notions of distance moved in an instant - in an ideal "instant", the ball does not move at all! Galileo never did come up with an adequate definition of instantaneous velocity. To handle the q, he proposed a view in which a body attained a certain instantaneous velocity, and then continued moving at that same speed [italics mine]. But he should not be criticized for using such a muddled definition; in fact, he deserve praise for attempting to deal w quantities that were changing in time, and arriving at the correct formula, v = at, without using any of the mathematical tools that were developed later to deal with rates of change.
Newton saw time as forming a steady linear background to the universe:
Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own
nature, flows equably without relation to anything external, and by
another name is called duration.
- Newton, towards start of Principia tr. Andrew Motte (209)
Evolutionary theories broadened the horizons of time considerably, followed
by modern notions like thermodynamics (entropy and irreversibility), and then
relativity altered it in ways that we are still not trying to relate to.
This brings us to how time is viewed in different disciplines - the five
arrows are five views of asymmetry in time, four arising in physics:
1. thermodynamic,
2. cosmological (expansion of the universe, curvature in space, etc.),
3. nuclear K-meson arrow (normal nuclear reactions - e.g. beta reactions
involving antineutrinos - may be reversible - though whether
reverse betar reactions really occur is not clear. But surely
k-meson decay is irreversible.)
4. the electromagnetic arrow - seems quite complex, depdneing on the
Wheeler-Feynman theory on time-reversed radiation
And the fifth arrow is from our own minds:
5. psychological arrow, arising due to our subjective awareness of a "flow"
of time, particularly the phenomenon of "now" - is it subjective or
is there some inter-subjectivity or objectivity? E.g. a baseball
being hit is seen by everyone in the stadium, who can then agree that
their "now"s for the baseball hit is shared [is it?]. Given this,
there may be objective elements in this now as well. But it is not a
mathematical instant. Also the passage of time is subjective -
sometimes is passes fast, sometimes slow.
[For more on how the brain constructs its model of objective and subjective
time, especially "now", see Robert Pollack's
Missing Moment: How the Unconscious Shapes Modern Science, chapter 3.]
Feynman's theory of antimatter as matter reversing in time. The clash of the electron and the positron is nothing but the same electron suddenly reversing itself in time. At the microscopic level, there is no notion of entropy, since entropy is only definable for the aggregate, a collection of individuated entities. Also, this reverse time ideea may be applied to an explanation of "charge" in general (p. 124-128) The probability of a glass falling on the ground and breaking are high. On the other hand if the glass has ~ O(10^25) atoms, then the probability of the fragments of glass that are on the floor joining up back together again and forming a glass in my hand is ~ O(10^-10^25) [AM: well, may be a bit less if it isn't shattered into atomic smithereens, but ok let's go on]. 10^10^25 is so big that if we had 1o^10 the number of books we had to day all the pages would not be suff to write down the this number. p. 129 If avg density of the universe < 5 x 10^-27 kg/m^3, then curvature is -ve, universe is infinite in topology. If density > 5 x 10^-27 kg/m^3, curv is +ve, like a shere, and all lines are bounded (a ray of light will return where it started, in many billion light years). The density cannot be measured well enough but may be less than this, as low as 10% even. p. 173-174 Gravity: the presence of massive objects - causes the universe [space-time] to be curved. If the curvature is +ve, then both time and space is bounded. [Karl Popper:] scientific theories can never really be proved to be correct. The most that one can do is to attempt to falsify them by looking for experimental disproofs. The theories in which we have confidence are the ones that have survived numerous attempts at falsification. 143
Also: check out this review. Also, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an excellent page on Thermodynamic Asymmetry in Time. Richard Morris has a PhD in theoretical physics, and is tha author of Dismantling the Universe and Evolution and Human nature.