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Title: ABOUT TIME: Einstein's Unfinished Revolution by Paul Davies ISBN: 0-684-81822-1 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 09 April, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.15 (34 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Comprehensive but banal overview.
Comment: "About Time" is a broad inventory of physicists' understanding of time, spanning quantum theory, relativity, and speculative gravitational geometries. Davies provides a well-informed introduction to most of the cosmological observations, theoretical speculations, and experiments that helped direct and refine our understanding of time and space in the twentieth century.
Unfortunately, the glue that holds this assemblage of reporting together is Davies' own rather unhelpful commentary.
In the early chapters, where Davies is covering the subject of relativity, he does goes into tedious detail on the simpler aspects of time dilation, but presents the more challenging claims of relativity theory as the necessary conclusions -- without corresponding support. For example, he presents the arithmetic of time dilation to really demonstrate how that works, but fails to return to this level of focus when dealing with more mind-bending cases.
When discussing the temporal effects of black holes, he repeats the point ceaselessly that the spaceship in the thought experiment couldn't REALLY stand still -- the gravity would be too enormous for any buildable engines to withstand. He doesn't, however, mention the possibility of orbiting the black hole, or even discuss the tidal effect of gravity on the ship.
The book progresses from the interesting problems of relativity and quantum mechanics to the fully speculative: wormholes, time loops, time reversal, time travel. Interestingly, Davies tends to give a certain amount of respect to the speculations of physicists, while scoffing at the speculations of philosophers, although when it comes to subjects such as time reversal, pretty much anyone's musing is worthless.
One of the most irritating aspects of the book was the recurrent appearance of "the skeptic" in a different font, representing those who doubt the findings of science -- apparently the spokesman for an intuitive understanding of time. Near the beginning he more or less implies that this is the voice of the kind of crackpot amateur scientist who writes letters to physics departments around the world rejecting the findings of physics without understanding them. Whatever the voice is supposed to represent, the objections and questions posed by this straw man were almost never the anything close to the objections or questions that occurred to me. It was a constant distraction that Davies used to give himself an opportunity to reiterate the basic concepts in different language, whereas what I wanted was some mathematical or comprehensible explanation of the consequences of these concepts.
All in all, I was intrigued by the problems the book presents, but disappointed by Davies' incomplete and unsatisfying explanations of them.
Rating: 5
Summary: Sorry it wasn't longer
Comment: This was such an enjoyable and lucid book I was sorry it wasn't even longer! Although I've come across many of the concepts in other books on quantum and relativity physics and cosmology, this is the first book I've read that was specifically dedicated to time itself. I was amazed at the number of ways there are of analyzing time. Among a myriad of other topics, Davies discusses it: as an historical subject of conjecture among the early Greeks, a subjective experience of the human mind as a byproduct of consciousness, a possible artifact of the "big bang," a possible reversible process in the event of the "big crunch," a vector quantity exhibiting directionality, rate of movement and even possibly a rate of change, the multiworld hypothesis and the possiblity of different types of time in these other worlds, and so on. Although some of the book is a little dated--the information from the Hubble orbiting telescope is mentioned in future tense--on the whole almost everything that can be said of time is included in the book in a clear fashion. I'm not a math-physics type person really, but I found the Davies book quite understandable. I especially enjoyed his insertion of a "devil's advocate," so to speak, who could point out problems or ask pertinent questions of the author. It was like attending a class with a particularly gifted student in its midst. Very much worth the time!
Rating: 4
Summary: Breathtaking even at a superficial level.
Comment: This is a highly ambitious book about time from the physicist's point of view (there is even an interesting chapter from the psychologists viewpoint). The concepts it deals with are profound, and sometimes absurd (cf. the paradoxes of quantum physics). The book is well organized and well written, but at the same time I don't believe that Davies has a special gift for explanation. I could follow much of what was being said at a superficial level, and even at a superficial level it is breathtaking. My biggest disappointment? Davies spends a fair amount of time on a concrete example of a case where one twin rockets into space and returns, younger than the other. I reviewed the simple math in detail, but was still confused. I think the problem is that as part of the example you need to separate the delay effect (the light coming from a star left years ago), from the time dilation effect (due to relativity), and Davies never bothers to show how this is done.
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Title: How to Build a Time Machine by P. C. W. Davies ISBN: 0670030635 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: 28 February, 2002 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Time Travel in Einstein's Universe: The Physical Possibilities of Travel Through Time by J. Richard Gott ISBN: 0395955637 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 21 May, 2001 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Superstrings : A Theory of Everything? by P. C. W. Davies, Julian R. Brown ISBN: 052143775X Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 31 July, 1992 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
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Title: Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy by Kip S. Thorne, Frederick Seitz, Stephen Hawking ISBN: 0393312763 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: January, 1995 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: The Ghost in the Atom : A Discussion of the Mysteries of Quantum Physics by P. C. W. Davies, Julian R. Brown ISBN: 0521457289 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 30 July, 1993 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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