Dan Falk's "In Search of Time"

I'm lukewarm about this book. I had high hopes when I started. He talked about a lot of very important thinkers that he had consulted and implied that he would go into some depth on the subject. Sadly, the book didn't live up to my expectations. It isn't a bad book. The writing style is OK, the detail is correct. It just doesn't go as far as I was led to believe.

I enjoyed the discussion of Fred Adams' The Five Ages of the Universe: (1) primordial era, (2) stelliferous era, (3) degnerate era, (4) black hole era, and (5) dark era.

I did enjoy the last chapter.

Julian Barbour: "Part of the problem of 'time,' he explains, is that our two best theories -- general relativity and quantum theory -- treat it very differently. 'It is like two children sort of quarreling ove a toy they want,' he says. 'But the trouble is, each wants something different.' He believes the only solution is to remove the toy. We have to abandon the notion of time. ... 'From the physicist's point of view, there isn't any sort of 'flowing' of time, and there isn't any sort of 'now' creeping up through the world,' Barbour says. 'The idea of a 'flowing time' is some sort of illusion that's create, somehow by our consciousness.'"

Patricia Churchland: "'The brain constructs a range of make-sense-of-the-world neurotools,' Churchland writes. 'One is the future, one is the past and one is the self.' She emphasizes that this does not make the self -- or the past or future -- unreal but she seems them as 'tools' that we use, rather than aspects of the world."

Lee Smolin: "For Smolin, time -- including that troublesome 'flow' -- is simply too real to dismiss as an illusion. And therefore Barbour's vision of a timeless world is one he cannot embrace." ... Nor is he satisfied with the snarky-sounding definition sometimes given by physicists -- that time is simply what clocks measure, nothing more. That may serve well enough as an operational definition, but it is also 'a kind of oerational cop-out,' he says. 'And I'm not an operationalist about these things.' For one thing, such a definition seems to ignore cause and effect, along with that oft-mentioned flow."

D. C. Williams: "... speakes of time as if it indeed very similar to space. To move through one is to move through the other; both, he insists, can be viewed simply as 'ordered extensions.' Any 'flow' one perceives is just that -- a perception -- and not something 'out there.'"

Kurt Gödel: "... Gödel went further than Einstein: like Parmenides and the philospher John McTaggart, he concluded that time itself cannot be real."

Albert Einstein: "Einstein never disposed of time outright -- but he still struggled with the notion of a time that doesn't flow; the removal of a 'universal clock' that labeled each 'now' in a distinct, unambiguous fashion; a universe in which every event has a past and future, but in whcher there is no 'absolute' past and future."

This chapter is tantalizing. It touches on a lot of important ideas. Maybe I expect too much, but I was hoping for more.