Don’t forget, today live on Science Friday we (that’s SciFri presenter Ira Flatow, producer Christie Taylor, Astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan, and myself) will be talking about Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” once more, and also discussing some of the physics discoveries that have happened since he wrote that book. We’ll be taking (I think) caller’s questions too! Also we’ve made recommendations for further reading to learn more about the topics discussed in Hawking’s book.
Join us!
-cvj
(P.S. The picture above was one I took when we recorded for the launch of the book club, back in July. I used the studios at Aspen Public Radio.)
Hi,
Thanks for listening. Discussions about the arrow of time are quite old, predating Hawking a lot. Famously, Arthur Eddington back in the 1920s connected it to the second law of thermodynamics, and the increase of entropy. (See “The Nature of the Physical World”, Eddington, Cambridge University Press, I think. I don’t know if it is easy to find.) The “time is not real” idea is somewhat separate, and that pops up from time to time – often in philosophy, sometimes in physics. Slightly different is that the “arrow” itself is not real, and just a result of perception… In any case, these are all interesting ideas, and I find none of them fully compelling. But I’m not an expert. Good reviews can be found in numerous books. Writers like Carlo Rovelli, Richard Muller, and Sean Carroll have written books on time in recent years, and I imagine they talk about aspects of the above there. I’ve not read those books, but they are all reputed to be good writers, so maybe you can start with one of them.
Cheers,
-cvj
I listened to the show and I liked it. Thank-you.
Hawking talked about the arrow of time. I have heard that time is not real. Am I conflating issues?
Are there any texts you could suggest that would be easily digestible for people like me.