Time Reborn

From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe

De: Lee Smolin

Narrado por: Sean Pratt

What is time?

This deceptively simple question is the single most important problem facing science as we probe more deeply into the fundamentals of the universe. All of the mysteries physicists and cosmologists face - from the Big Bang to the future of the universe, from the puzzles of quantum physics to the unification of forces and particles - come down to the nature of time.

The fact that time is real may seem obvious. You experience it passing every day when you watch clocks tick, bread toast, and children grow. But most physicists, from Newton to Einstein to today's quantum theorists, have seen things differently. The scientific case for time being an illusion is formidable. That is why the consequences of adopting the view that time is real are revolutionary.

Lee Smolin, author of the controversial best seller The Trouble with Physics, argues that a limited notion of time is holding physics back. It's time for a major revolution in scientific thought. The reality of time could be the key to the next big breakthrough in theoretical physics.

What if the laws of physics themselves were not timeless? What if they could evolve? Time Reborn offers a radical new approach to cosmology that embraces the reality of time and opens up a whole new universe of possibilities. There are few ideas that, like our notion of time, shape our thinking about literally everything, with huge implications for physics and beyond - from climate change to the economic crisis. Smolin explains in lively and lucid prose how the true nature of time impacts our world.

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Probably the best Science book I've listened to

There is not a wasted concept in this book. The author explains everything you need to understand about time and why he thinks it is real and how modern physics has taken it out of the equation. He starts with defining mathematics as the study of the unchanging. Math (in the Platonic/Western Thought way) is how how we sneak timelessness into our way of thinking about the universe. The Newtonian paradigm adds to taking time out of the equation by the way we always must consider a subset of the universe as a whole and we are the observers and we create the time, but the part under study never covers the whole universe. Time is external to that which is under study.

The author explains "Boltzman's Brain" so that I finally understand what it means and why it's important, he explains entropy, entanglement, the standard model and Einstein's General relativity and how they relate to how we take time out of the model.

This book will forever change the way I think about time. I think it is probably the best of all the 50 or so astrophysics/cosmology/physics books I've read and reviewed over the last 2 years.

I highly recommend listening to this book. The narrator knew exactly when to have the mocking laugh, the inflection and so on. I suspect the author worked with the narrator to make the presentation that flawless.

(p.s. At the core of this book lurks the question "why is there something instead of nothing". I just listened to Holt's book "Why does the world exist". It's mostly a philosophical book, but both this book and that book do complement each other and would make and excellent summer read).

Listened twice

Smolin is a very original thinker and it shows in this book. He is arguing a minority viewpoint and it makes for unique content.

REBUTTING STRING THEORY AGAIN?

As you try to read this remember Dr. Smolin is a physicist and you and he live in different worlds. He's arguing a point that has been pretty well settled for forty years. Space and time are intimately related. Time in my cosmology proceeds in one direction, albeit relative to the motion of the observers. Max Planck from the late 1800's. I see no new insights. Iris the second law of thermodynamics and the thing with the box of particles. I have no problem with the science, however other than bashing String Theory again, I see no direction.

When Science Makes Us Think Like Philosophers

This book is just beautiful! It can be a little hard to follow in the beginning but Mr. Smolin does a great job connecting different authors, various theories and explaining some seriously complicated science stuff into simple words to make your jaw drop by the end of the book.

This book is not only scientific but also very philosophic. In fact, this work was born from a series of conversations and discussions with Brazilian philosopher/ex-minister Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Smolin's long time colleague.

Your head will spin with ideas that time isn't real, and then it's real again, and then space isn't what you think it is, and dimensions are dynamic, entropy will eat you alive, etc, etc. It sounds a little overwhelming and confusing but it's not... Well... The book is complex but it's so brilliantly wrapped up in the end that I actually felt pretty brilliant for understanding it - when I know that the reality is that the author is fantastic!

Summing up: This book is gonna make you feel dumb, smart, worthless, special, godlike, powerless and, in the end, very human, since neither our lives nor our Universe is perfect, or stable, static and unchangeable. And this is actually what makes The Universe - and our lives - quite interesting. =)

Interesting Read, well reasoned and measured

Lee gives a well-reasoned and measured explaination of why he thinks that time is fundamental and the reasons why he believes this is necessary for the future of physics.

The last 2 chapters are disjointed and don't add to the argument of the book, but overall a very good foil to the block universe model and Boltzmann's infinite universe hypothesis.