5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A good junior high discussion, July 5, 2007
This review is from: Chronos: How Time Shapes Our Universe (Hardcover)
If you're in seventh grade and know very little about time, this is your book. If you're an adult who has had any interest in the subject whatsoever, you've seen more information on the subject in Scientific American. This is a very good book for children. It is not for scientifically literate adults.
For a philosophical discussion of time, try Hans Reichenbach
The Direction of Time (Dover Books on Physics) or
The Philosophy of Space and Time.
For a more general adult level discussion, try Paul Davies
About Time: Einstein's Unfinished Revolution and
How to Build a Time Machine.
Chapter 11 gives a brief description of some standard science fiction books on time travel - again, if you have any interest in the subject, you're already familiar with the material.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
an impressive piece of work on a slippery subject, May 17, 2010
This review is from: Chronos: How Time Shapes Our Universe (Hardcover)
Chronos by Klein seems to be a collection of essays on various topics in philosophy, physics, and psychology -- all having to do in one way or another with the subject of time.
Klein is physicist/philosopher and it shows to advantage throughout.
The first nine chapters mainly concern the philosophy of time. He traces the historical development of philosophical thought regarding time. He gives brief (mostly one- and two-paragraph) accounts of the thought of St. Augustine, Marcus Aurelius, Descartes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Formey, and Kant, just to name the ones I see. Interspersed among the philosophy are explanations as to how they relate to modern ideas in physics. He does this with such topics as the Noether theorum on invariance in groups of symmetries, Galileo's quantification of time as a tool for analyzing dynamical systems (falling objects), and Max Born's interpretation of quantum wavefunction.
The next eleven chapters (10-20) are hard physics; that is, physics topics that directly relate to our knowledge of time. Here Klein proceeds beyond the fundamental philosophical notions (event, duration, flow, change, clocks) and covers things like causality, kaon parity violations, superstrings, time travel, advance waves, antiparticles that are considered as time-reversed versions of ordinary particles, relativity and inertial frames, simultaneity, the (possible) illusion of time flow, entropy and time's unidirectional arrow, the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, quantum cosmology, the granularity of Plank time.
The final five chapters are to do with the psychology of time. As with the first philosophical third of the book, these topics in psychology are discussed with a bent toward the physics. Klein skillfully and artfully weaves the physics of time with topics such as experience of time, consciousness, the unconscious, and death.
Most remarkably, Klein covers all this ground in only 191 pages (including 27 pages of detailed notes). However, since the pages between chapters are counted, and the first page of each chapter is just a few lines, the book's length is really about 30 pages shorter.
So it's plain to see that Klein has succeeded in dealing deftly with all this subject matter in a most consice and incisive way. Although the language is rather rich in a few places, he manages to say something bordering on the profound in nearly every paragraph.
There also abound juicy tidbits of knowledge throughout. For instance, on page 182 one will find a comprehensible, plain-English explanation of what a gauge invariance is, and how it is used to build all the modern quantum field theories. This is something very hard to come by; in fact the only other such effective explanation I can think of is to be found in Paul Davies' book "Superforce". Another tidbit is on page 179, where he reveals that a second method was used to determine the accelerating rate of cosmic expansion, based on certain peculiar structures of galactic clusters. I have found this info nowhere else.
Some readers may not appreciate the eclectic organization of the book. There is no real continuous thread; the chapters are meant to be read individually. All in all, I think Chronos is a great accomplishment simultaneously in brevity and scope.
BTW, for those who want another mind-bending book concerning the physics of time, try "The End of Time" by Julian Barbour.
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1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Will CERN 2007 add a new chapter to this discussion?, March 26, 2007
This review is from: Chronos: How Time Shapes Our Universe (Hardcover)
Commencing in 2007 the Hadron collider at CERN (in Switzerland) will be set to open and do what the US Congress declined to back in 1993...provide an appropriate facility for testing some of the more gross predictions of cosmic string theory.
In so doing cutting edge contemporary research may yet provide additional material that -- obviously logically -- was unavailable when this book was originally written two years ago.
That being said, this book is for the most part a serviceable discussion of the main issues regarding understanding time. As can be gleaned from a reading of the book, an arrow of time exists at a number of levels (including perceptual, thermodynamic and subatomic...all nested in that order) and its interesting to see the correspondences and disconnects between the various levels.
Sadly, when discussing the perceptual arrow of time, Klein chose to use Freud as an authority...an example of what happens when someone chooses to write outside their profession.
Perhaps a better book on this topic is Paul Davies About Time.
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