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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.
List of contents
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
About the author
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.
Summary
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.
