1. a brief history of time
Unsurprisingly, this list should begin with a brief history of Stephen Hawking’s time. some may have refrained from reading it because of the overwhelming subject matter: his book may have sold 10 million copies, but hawking was well aware of its reputation as “the most popular book that was never read.”
Rest assured, a short history of time was written specifically for those of us who don’t know our quarks from our gluons. It briefly covers the origin, development, and future of the universe, but in a comprehensive, digestible, and most importantly, enthusiastic way. here is an excerpt:
You are reading: Books about time and space
even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. what is it that breathes fire into the equations and creates a universe for them to describe? science’s usual approach of building a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. why does the universe bother to exist?
2. the order of time
carlo rovelli is a theoretical physicist from axis-marseille university best known for his seven short lectures on physics. As a brief history of time, The Order of Time is designed for the layman, but Rovelli’s style differs significantly from Hawking’s. Rovelli writes in a lyrical, almost poetic style, complementing the heady physics of time with quotes from figures such as Shakespeare and the Greek philosopher Anaximander. It’s an enjoyable read, but the combination of hard science and philosophy lends itself particularly well to the audiobook version narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch. you can listen to a sample of the audiobook in the following video.
3. Einstein’s clocks, Poincaré’s maps: the empires of time
There are few concepts more crucial to our modern understanding of time than the theory of relativity, developed primarily by Albert Einstein. However, Einstein’s theory did not come out of nowhere; His contemporaries worked hard on relativity, including his rival, Jules Henri Poincaré.
Essentially, the theory of relativity showed that there was no such thing as universal time; time flows differently for different systems. In Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: The Empires of Time, author Peter Galison explores the extraordinary period in history when this theory was discovered. Instead of serving solely as a scientific exploration of time, Galison’s book has been described as “part history, part science, part adventure, part biography.”
4. your brain is a time machine
Part of what makes learning about the physics of time so fascinating is how wildly it differs from our intuitive understanding of time. Although we can perform experiments and analyzes to develop an objective conceptualization of time, we are still stuck in the way our soft brains like to perceive time. but to think that our “natural” view of time is less interesting would be a mistake.
See Also: Susan Stoker – Book Series In Order
physicists and philosophers defend the idea of eternalism: that there is no fundamental difference between the past, the present and the future. “There is absolutely nothing particularly special about the present: under eternism now is to time as here is to space,” neuroscientist dean buonomano writes in Your Brain Is a Time Machine. but in our perception, “now” is the most important aspect of time, the only accessible portion of it.
In his book, Buonomano explores the myriad ways our brains and bodies record time, how we travel through time in our own way, and how this biological sense of time collides with or connects with the physics of time.
5. slaughterhouse five
You don’t have to stick to hard science to build an understanding of time. indeed, doing so would provide a lopsided picture of time, missing the crucial fact that we are subjective individuals with unique points of view.
To learn more about this aspect of time, we have to turn to the literature: Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five traces the contours of how time affects us, our memory, and, above all, how trauma distorts our sense of it. .
billy pilgrim, the book’s antagonist, survives the bombing of dresden by hiding in a slaughterhouse, an event that vonnegut lived through for himself, only to later be unstuck in time, forced to witness the events of his life at random, without none control, again and again:
listen:
billy peregrino has taken off in time.
billy has gone to sleep senile widower and woke up on his wedding day. She has walked through one door in 1955 and out another in 1941. She has come back through that door to find herself in 1963. She has seen his birth and his death many times, she says, and makes random visits to all the events in between. /p>
6. the dialogues
One of the intractable problems of physics is how abstract it is. gaining a good understanding of science sometimes requires the use of visual aids. that’s why the dialogues made this list; Although it doesn’t specifically focus on time, it does cover the nature of time, along with many other science topics as shown through illustrated conversations.
7. from eternity to here
See Also: 264 Free Audiobooks of Popular Books Narrated on Youtube
From Eternity to Here by Sean Carroll focuses on a specific feature of time and offers a theory of how time works. Carroll’s book examines what physicists call the arrow of time, or the idea that time always seems to move in one direction: into the future, forward, not backward.
however, there is no real reason for this to be the case. why doesn’t time flow backwards? In his book, Carroll posits that it might be because the big bang was not the beginning of the universe, that conditions prior to the big bang have caused the arrow of time to flow forward. carroll explains this possibility in his ted talk in the following video:
8. a world without time
Einstein’s theory of relativity laid the foundation for our modern understanding of time, but for logician Kurt Gödel, a lifelong friend of Einstein’s, it also revealed a strange conclusion. Gödel argued that in any universe where the theory of relativity was true, time could not exist at all.
In a world without time, palle yougrau covers the friendship of einstein and gödel, the foundations of gödel’s timeless philosophy, and how modern cosmologists and philosophers seem to have completely forgotten about gödel.
9. the fabric of the cosmos
Physicist Brian Greene exposes the fundamental nature of the universe in this book, devoting one of its five parts to time and experience. In it, he explores the flow of time, how the laws of physics apply equally when time flows backwards and forwards, and the nature of time in the quantum realm.
greene also explores many other aspects of the universe, including some ideas that are controversial among scientists, making this valuable reading for those interested in more than just time. “Cosmology,” Greene writes, “is one of the oldest subjects that captivates our species. And no wonder. we are storytellers, and what could be greater than the story of creation?”
10. the direction of time
hans reichenbach was a 20th century philosopher of science and as such his perspective is a bit different from that of career physicists. In his work, The Direction of Time, Reichenbach analyzed the philosophical implications of the many interesting discoveries of the theorists of his day. In fact, Rovelli, author of The Order of Time, cited it as one of his favorite books on time. In a review of Time Management, Rovelli writes,
He was the first, to my knowledge, to fully understand the implications of the fact that entropy growth is the only law of physics that distinguishes the past from the future. this means that the existence of traces, memories, and causality are just byproducts of entropy growth. this is a shocking realization, which I think has not yet been fully digested.