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Zusatztext There is a great deal of factual information, systematically and concisely presented and appropriately referenced a valuable addition to the literature on the Science of Time taken in the general sense. It deserves a place in any theoretical physics library. I expect it to provoke and stimulate much thought. Informationen zum Autor George Jaroszkiewicz is Associate Professor at the School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Nottingham, UK. He previously held positions as a Postdocotral Research Fellow at the University of Kent, Cantery, UK, and at the University of Oxford, UK. Klappentext This book reviews a great range of Images of Time, that is, theories of time, from a diversity of perspectives: historical, religious, biological, mathematical and scientific. It trains the reader to develop a critical ability to distinguish those Images of Time that are metaphysical and those that could in principle be put to empirical test. Zusammenfassung Have you ever wondered about Time: what it is or how to discuss it? If you have, then you may have been bewildered by the many different views and opinions in many diverse fields to be found, such as physics, mathematics, philosophy, religion, history, and science fiction novels and films. This book will help you unravel fact from fiction. It provides a broad survey of many of these views, these images of time, covering historical, cultural, philosophical, biological, mathematical and physical images of time, including classical and quantum mechanics, special and general relativity and cosmology.This book gives you more than just a review of such images. It provides the reader a basis for judging the scientific soundness of these various images. It develops the reader's critical ability to distinguish Images of Time in terms of its contextual completeness. Differentiating between metaphysical images (which cannot be scientifically validated) and those that could, in principle, be put to empirical test. Showing that mathematical and classical mechanical images are more complete, and genuine quantum mechanics based images have the greatest degree of contextual completeness. Through the use of a simple algorithm, the reader can decide the classification of any of the images of time discussed in this book. These distinctions are of particular importance in this day and age, when we are flooded by a plethora of competing Images of Time. Many of these have no scientific basis or empirical support or content. This book will be of value not only to philosophers, scientists and students, but also to the general reader interested in this fundamental topic, because it introduces a method of distinguishing between science fiction and science fact. Inhaltsverzeichnis 1: Introduction 2: Observers and time 3: Subjective images of time 4: Cultural images of time 5: Literary images of time 6: Objective images of time 7: Mathematical images of time 8: Illusionary images of time 9: Causal images of time 10: Physics and time 11: Biological time 12: The dimensions of time 13: The architecture of time 14: Absolute time 15: The reparametrization of time 16: Origins of relativity 17: Special relativity 18: Generalized transformations 19: General relativistic time 20: Time travel 21: Imaginary time 22: Irreversible time 23: Discrete time 24: Time and quanta 25: Temporal correlations 26: Time reversal 27: Quantized spacetime 28: Epilogue Appendix Bibliography Index ...
