Time Reborn
Time Reborn: From the crisis in physics to the future of the
universe
Published in 2013
Pedro Ferreira in Nature, April 25, 2013
download review: Nature review of TR 4-24-13
James Gleick in the New York Review of Books, June 6, 2013
Alan Lightman in the New York Times Book Review, May 5, 2013
New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, May 10, 2013
Dennis Overbye in the New York Times reflects on Time Reborn July 1, 2013
Ray Monk in The Guardian, June 6, 2013
Gillian Tett in the Financial Times, May 24, 2013
The Economist, May 25, 2013
Michael Berry in The Times Higher Education, June 27, 2013.
Frank Close in Prospect Magazine, May 22, 2013
Roger Highfield in The Telegraph, June 6, 2013
Philip Ball in The Guardian, June 10, 2013
Marcus Chown in The Rationalist Association, May 8, 2013
Big Think: book of the month
Alex Good in Quill and Quire
Tam Hunt in the Santa Barbara Independent
includes interview
link to review
Manny Rayner in Goodreads.com
Andrew Zimmerman Jones on About.com
Clara Moskowitz on LiveScience.com
Dan Falk in the Globe and Mail
Nathan Whitlock in The Star, May 10, 2013
David Topper in the Winnipeg Free Press
Bloggers:
Jay Elwes in Prospect Blogg
Raymond Tallis in The Guardian, May 27, 2013:
Philosophy isn’t dead yet.
A. C. Lee in The Stone, NY Times blog, May 7, 2013
Santi Tafarella in Prometheus Unbound
Steve Fuller in Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective
Brian Clegg in Popular Science
Peter Woit: review and discussion
Sabine Hossenfelder
Adam Frank on NPR
Philip Gibbs
Pre-publication Reviews
Kirkus Review
A distinguished physicist delivers a thoughtful, complex re-evaluation
of the role of time in the universe.
Smolin (The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of
a Science, and What Comes Next, 2006) points out that no one doubts that
space is real. If the cosmos were empty, space would exist, but there would
be no time. So time is inextricably bound up with the material universe,
a real phenomenon at the heart of nature. This turns out to be controversial
since the great thinkers from Plato to Newton to Einstein taught that time
is an illusion that humans must transcend to achieve true understanding.
Smolin disagrees, maintaining that embracing its reality is the key to solving
the great problems in physics. He makes a case that Newton’s paradigm—knowing
the forces acting on any system allows us, following natural laws, to predict
its future state—is a fallacy. It works for limited areas and short periods
but fails on universal scales. In fact, natural laws themselves are less
immutable than time. For a straightforward popular introduction to time,
read Sean Carroll’s From Eternity to Here (2010). Smolin has bigger fish
to fry as he muses over great issues in his field as they relate to time,
such as the stubborn refusal of relativity to mesh with quantum theory, pausing
regularly for detours into cosmology, economics and climate change. This
is a work as much of philosophy as science. Despite the absence of mathematics,
it requires close attention, but readers who make the effort will absorb
a flood of ideas from an imaginative thinker.
TIME REBORN: From The Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe
By Lee Smolin
April 23, 2013
9780547511726
Booklist Review
Was Einstein wrong? At least in his understanding of time, Smolin
argues, the great theorist of relativity was dead wrong. What is worse,
by firmly enshrining his error in scientific orthodoxy, Einstein trapped
his successors in insoluble dilemmas as they try to devise timeless laws
explaining the origins and structure of the cosmos. How, Smolin asks,
can such laws account for the highly improbable set of conditions that
triggered the Big Bang jump-starting the universe? How, Smolin further
wants to know, can scientists evn empirically test their timeless cosmic
hypotheses? With rare conceptual daring, Smolin beckons toward a new
perspective for doing cosmological theory, a perspective allowing
Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason to open surprising
possibilities. This horizon not only readmits time as a reality; it
enshrines time as the reality, the indispensable point of flux allowing
everything else, including the laws of matter and energy, to evolve and
change. Embracing time as real, Smolin asserts, will allow cosmologists
to convert laws once regarded as timeless into the contingent data they
need to develop testable new theories of galactic evolution. More
immediately, Smolin anticipates that this paradigm shift will help
climatologists understand global warming and economists to ameliorate
financial turbulence. A thrilling intellectual ride!
— Bryce Christensen
