Time and Chance - Couverture souple

Albert, David Z.

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0674011325 ISBN 13 : 9780674011328

Editeur : Harvard University Press, 2003

Synopsis

This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation (very briefly) is that it is a consequence of almost every one of those fundamental scientific pictures-and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense-that whatever can happen can just as naturally happen backwards. Albert provides an unprecedentedly clear, lively, and systematic new account in the context of a Newtonian-Mechanical picture of the world of the ultimate origins of the statistical regularities we see around us, of the temporal irreversibility of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, of the asymmetries in our epistemic access to the past and the future, and of our conviction that by acting now we can affect the future but not the past. Then, in the final section of the book, he generalizes the Newtonian picture to the quantum-mechanical case and (most interestingly) suggests a very deep potential connection between the problem of the direction of time and the quantum-mechanical measurement problem. The book aims to be both an original contribution to the present scientific and philosophical understanding of these matters at the most advanced level, and something in the nature of an elementary textbook on the subject accessible to interested high-school students.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

David Z Albert is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Harvard University Press
• Date d'édition: 2003
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0674011325
• ISBN 13: 9780674011328
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 186
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: Amazon EU Sarl; 0; www.amazon.com; ; 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; L-1855; Luxembourg