The Nature of Time

ISBN-13: 9780367477066 / Angielski / Miękka / 2022 / 168 str.

J. Woods Halley

Opis

This book covers contemporary and historical perceptions of time from scientific and intuitive vantages. Ancient and modern clocks, Augustinian ideas, the deterministic Newtonian universe, biological clocks, deep time, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, and relativity contribute to the exploration of time using established technologies and science.

Spis treści

1. Clocks: The Nature of Time Measurement  2. Issues in the Nature of Time  3. Thermodynamics, Irreversibility, and Time  4. Quantum Mechanics and Time  5. Relativity and Time  6. Afterword  Appendix 1.1 Some Atomic Physics of the Cesium Clock  Appendix 1.2 A Few Facts About Molecular Biology  Appendix 1.3 Determining the Age of the Earth  Appendix 1.4 Doppler Shifts  Appendix 1.5 Determination of Distances of Galaxies from Earth and Estimates of the Age of the Universe  Appendix 2.1 Defining the Instantaneous Present and Predicting the Future with Newtonian Physics  Appendix 3.1 Coarse Graining in Card Games  Appendix 5.1 Michelson Morley Experiment  Appendix 5.2 The ’G’ in the Lorentz Transformation  Appendix 5.3 Proper Time Intervals Are the Same in All Frames

O autorze

J. Woods Halley is a Professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. His research group studies electrochemical phenomena, including the origin of life, as well as low temperature phases of many-body systems, including superfluidity and superconductivity, using analytical theory and computer simulation. He was educated at the University of California, Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He has previously published books on the likelihood of extraterrestrial life and statistical mechanics.