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The subject of time has long captivated
poets and philosophers, and now, in our century, it 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?
Every day we witness time moving in one
direction, from the past to the present to the future: a
cup that shatters does not reassemble itself; leaves that
fall from a tree shrivel and die. But contemporary science,
and particularly physics, ignores this perception. In The
Arrow of Time, a major bestseller in England, research
scientist Dr. Peter Coveney and award-wining journalist
Dr. Roger Highfield resolve these apparent contradictions
and propose a theory that is consistent with, rather than
in conflict with, time as we directly experience it.
Picking up where Stephen Hawking's A
Brief History of Time left off, Coveney and 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, and quantum mechanics.
At the center of their argument is an utterly brilliant
analysis of the second law of thermodynamics, "the
supreme law of Nature," in which the authors identify
the fatal flaw in the traditional thermodynamic approach:
it cannot describe change. Coveney and Highfield
also push forward the frontiers of the new and burgeoning
field of chaos, and make an important advance on the insights
of James Gleick's Chaos to show that unpredictability
provides a justification for the arrow of time.
"The full structure of the world is
richer than our language can express and our brains comprehend,"
Coveney states with the humility of wisdom. In The Arrow
of Time, he and Highfield together have taken a huge
step forward in finding language to explain the world's
richness, and ideas to comprehend its complexity. Drawing
on a dazzling set of allusions that range from Proust to
Mayan culture, from Aristotle to Einstein, from biorhythms
to metaphysics, The Arrow of Time is a profound piece
of scientific analysis, and an illuminating meditation on
our human experience of time.
Dr. Peter Coveney is a program leader
in the Rock and Fluid Physics Department of the Schlumberger
Cambridge Research Laboratory. He was previously a lecturer
in Physical Chemistry at the University of Wales and a Junior
Research fellow of Keble College, Oxford. He has worked
with the Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine. Dr. Coveney lives
in Cambridge, England.
Dr. Roger Highfield is the Science Editor
of the London Daily Telegraph. He carried out research at
Oxford University and the Institut Lave Langevin, Grenoble.
Dr. Highfield lives in Greenwich, London.
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