Customer Reviews

Time and Chance

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I am a recent graduate from an undergraduate physics program, and I'll admit that I had to struggle through this book. Albert's writing style is difficult to get past sometimes, and the content of the book is pretty difficult in itself. Having read his other book on Quantum Mechanics too, I found myself asking a question during this book that I also asked myself during that one: for whom is this book written? Some of it seems to be aimed at people who never have even heard of the laws of thermodynamics, much less the statistical formulation of the 2nd law. But then, only a few pages later, he offers some quite specific criticisms that may go over the heads of all but those who have worried about related issues for some time.
Even though this makes for reading that is sometimes a bit choppy, I think that the great content of this book makes the struggle worth it. Albert goes straight past a lot of the math and digs straight into the philosophical problems that his topic affords. From there, he's not afraid to venture into some strange territory. Do we need a new law of nature to explain what's going on? Yes? Well, then, Albert will postulate a new law of nature. Boom. That's pretty inspiring, though perhaps not for the faint-hearted who wish to read a book of simple popular exposition.

Dissapointing is the best word I found to rate this book. I think the topic is of great interest and the credentials of the author are quite good but (and is a big but) it doesn't matter at all since the writting style, and overall skills to transmit the main ideas and conclusions are poor, very complex and in my opinion stock between a book aimed for people with strong technical background and normal readers with special interest in these topics.

David Albert has a real problem explaining himself- not just in this book, but in person when trying to teach the book. Everybody has noted the main problems with the book- the man cannot write his way out of a wet paper bag. And yet, he refuses to change or improve his writing (After reading the first exasperating chapter of a new book he is currently working on I realized some people cannot improve with practice). This is partly due to the fact that he writes like he thinks; as if he is thinking out loud in a total stream of consciousness which he expects you to be experiencing as well. In fact he really does expect you to be having the same train of thought as him, as if his next sentence is the fulfillment of what you were already thinking. This is simply not the case.
His methodology is to build up a theory as being true, then decimating it by pointing out what seem (to him) to be obvious and inherent absurdities, only to end up reasserting the theory as being actually true due to some caveat. Once you finish his mental acrobatics you find that the theory is correct according to Albert because it is trivially true. As has been said in most of these reviews, his writing tends to obscure the nature of his project so that one is not sure whether anything substantive has been said. So what is the book about anyways?
Albert wants to show that statistical mechanics is an incomplete science that fails on its own. What it needs is a strong philosophical foundation with a metaphysical theory that validates its project. Albert's main problem with statistical mechanics is its untenable epistemology, it assumes its science as a priori and analytically true. This Albert rejects; but he still thinks that statistical mechanics can get it right with the addition of a metaphysical theory- the Past-Hypothesis. Now while the Past-Hypothesis stands alone as a great contribution which makes Time and Chance an actual important work, it is not uncontroversial or unproblematic. Time and Chance stands and falls on the Past-Hypothesis and the philosophical explanatory power it provides for validating the statistical mechanic project and the laws of thermodynamics.
But whether the Past-Hypothesis is true or not ends up becoming a moot point. You see, Albert is a neo-Humean and despite the fact that he writes with what seems to be a scientific realism, the Humean in him will not let that be the case. He is over awed by David Lewis and Humean Supervenience. So, at best, even though he seems sincerely dedicated to physics and philosophy, he ends all speculation with the caveat that at best these are all useful fictions.
This seems to me very puzzling, given that his main criticism of statistical mechanics, sans the Past-Hypothesis, is on its epistemology. Statistical mechanics fails on a epistemic level without the metaphysical Past-Hypothesis to salvage it. And yet, the whole project of the book troubles Albert epistemically, as a neo-Humean, which is why, in the end, the actuality of his project (though presented as realist) is operationalist in that it allows humans to survive in an evolutionary sense but only as a tool peculiar to our phenomenology given our poor epistemic state of affairs, that is, it's all a useful fiction for survival: explanatory it may be but it is still a fiction.
That said there is still the novelty of the Past-Hypothesis, which deserves critical attention. It is for that reason that you should buy this book. It helps to reread it several times from which you come away with another understanding of Albert's methodological mess every time, which in turn lends itself to a greater appreciation of this book's importance.

The title is aptly chosen. Time and chance. You'll loose out of both on this book. Try the book The Direction of Time. It is a much better written book. It is amazing that Alberts actually earned his degree in anything. The man simply cannot write worth a damn, try as hard as he does to convey what often are simple concepts.

This is one of the best books written about direction of time. It has received stellar academic reviews and justly so. What I've found is that people who have hard time understanding the material often blame the author for being a poor writer. This is not a popular science book like The Elegant Universe: it's a serious book discussing issues that are highly abstract and difficult to think about in the first place. And the book takes these issues to thinking about it at a very high level. That said, if you have the proper physics background (it doesn't need to be extensive: some familiarity with thermodynamics, classical mechanics, and statical mechanics) and have thought about the topics on your own even a little, the book should be easy to read, and you will be WOWed.

He uses common assumptions which I believe are wrong. For example he assumes that all arrangement of atoms in a gas have equal probabliity. It should be obvious that probability of an atom being in a small section of its path is inversely proportional to its velocity in that portion of the path. He describes the Maxwell demon and he is correct there but there is a second deamon analogous to the Maxwell demon. For example thee is a definite probability that all molecules of a gas in a specific volume can spontaneously be within a smaller volume. However, because the velocity of the molecules is so high the duration of the molecules is so small that it is not evident in the pressure on the walls. For a further discussion on this subject see my book "The Thermodynamics of Rheology" Chapter IV.