This book is intended as an introduction to the philosophical problems of space and time, suitable for any reader who has an interest in the nature of the universe and who has a secondary-school knowledge of physics and mathematics. In particular, it is hoped that the book may find a use in philosophy departments and physics departments within universities and other tertiary institutions. The attempt is always to introduce the problems from a twentieth-century point of view. It is preferable to introduce the history of the topic if and when that history becomes relevant to the development and solution of the problems, rather than to introduce a problem that was of importance in some previous age and to trace the development of it down the years.

Following one of the most inspiring and fascinating stories linked to the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, this book centres on the life and achievements of John Harrison - designer and builder of the first accurate marine chronometers. Inspired by the official prize offered in 1714 to anyone who could solve the problem of finding longitudinal position at sea, Harrison produced his four famous 'H' timepieces. In doing so, he helped revolutionise sea travel, saving many thousands of lives. John Harrison and the Quest for Longitude is the intriguing account of one man driven by the need to solve one of the greatest practical problems of his time.

You are reading the word "now" right now. But what does that mean? "Now" has bedeviled philosophers, priests, and modern-day physicists from Augustine to Einstein and beyond. In Now, eminent physicist Richard A. Muller takes up the challenge. He begins with remarkably clear explanations of relativity, entropy, entanglement, the Big Bang, and more, setting the stage for his own revolutionary theory of time, one that makes testable predictions. Muller's monumental work will spark major debate about the most fundamental assumptions of our universe, and may crack one of physics' longest-standing enigmas.

In 1942, the logician Kurt Godel and Albert Einstein became close friends; they walked to and from their offices every day, exchanging ideas about science, philosophy, politics, and the lost world of German science. By 1949, Godel had produced a remarkable proof: "In any universe described by the Theory of Relativity, time cannot exist," Einstein endorsed this result reluctantly but he could find no way to refute it, since then, neither has anyone else. Yet cosmologists and philosophers alike have proceeded as if this discovery was never made. In "A World Without Time," Palle Yourgrau sets out to restore Godel to his rightful place in history, telling the story of two magnificent minds put on the shelf by the scientific fashions of their day, and attempts to rescue the brilliant work they did together.

Time is relative, situation-dependent, location- and culturally-dependent, and very much subjective. Yet we treat it as if it were objective. We share standardized time, and we are dependent on it for almost everything we do. When it comes to waking up, business meetings, transportation, finding your way via GPS, seeing friends, watching a show, we are all dependent on a standardized notion of time and time measurement. The future gives us hope and deadlines drive innovation and productivity. Time drives us forward and we talk about time - all the time! The word "time" is the most used noun in English, followed by "year" in third place and "day" in fifth. We are obsessed with it, for a lot of very good and practical reasons. The book looks at time through different perspectives (ranging from physics, history, philosophy, anthropology to art, business & politics, biology and psychology). The author's aim is to bring us closer to the nature and our experience of time by looking at it from different lenses to improve our understanding of what time is and what it is not - and to use that knowledge to improve how we organize ourselves around time. It's by better understanding time's nature and experience that we can keep the positive and productive elements of time and get rid of the unhealthy time practices in our lives.

This book brings together papers from a conference that took place in the city of L'Aquila, 4-6 April 2019, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the earthquake that struck on 6 April 2009. Philosophers and scientists from diverse fields of research debated the problem that, on 6 April 1922, divided Einstein and Bergson: the nature of time. For Einstein, scientific time is the only time that matters and the only time we can rely on. Bergson, however, believes that scientific time is derived by abstraction, even in the sense of extraction, from a more fundamental time. The plurality of times envisaged by the theory of Relativity does not, for him, contradict the philosophical intuition of the existence of a single time. But how do things stand today? What can we say about the relationship between the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of time in the light of contemporary science? What do quantum mechanics, biology and neuroscience teach us about the nature of time? The essays collected here take up the question that pitted Einstein against Bergson, science against philosophy, in an attempt to reverse the outcome of their monologue in two voices, with a multilogue in several voices.

Physical Relativity explores the nature of the distinction at the heart of Einstein's 1905 formulation of his special theory of relativity: that between kinematics and dynamics. Einstein himself became increasingly uncomfortable with this distinction, and with the limitations of what he called the 'principle theory' approach inspired by the logic of thermodynamics. A handful of physicists and philosophers have over the last century likewise expressed doubts about Einstein's treatment of the relativistic behaviour of rigid bodies and clocks in motion in the kinematical part of his great paper, and suggested that the dynamical understanding of length contraction and time dilation intimated by the immediate precursors of Einstein is more fundamental. Harvey Brown both examines and extends these arguments (which support a more 'constructive' approach to relativistic effects in Einstein's terminology), after giving a careful analysis of key features of the pre-history of relativity theory. He argues furthermore that the geometrization of the theory by Minkowski in 1908 brought illumination, but not a causal explanation of relativistic effects. Finally, Brown tries to show that the dynamical interpretation of special relativity defended in the book is consistent with the role this theory must play as a limiting case of Einstein's 1915 theory of gravity: the general theory of relativity. Appearing in the centennial year of Einstein's celebrated paper on special relativity, Physical Relativity is an unusual, critical examination of the way Einstein formulated his theory. It also examines in detail certain specific historical and conceptual issues that have long given rise to debate in both special and general relativity theory, such as the conventionality of simultaneity, the principle of general covariance, and the consistency or otherwise of the special theory with quantum mechanics. Harvey Brown' s new interpretation of relativity theory will interest anyone working on these central topics in modern physics.

In contrast to other publications this work discusses Nanoscience strictly at the ultimate level where the properties of atomic matter emerge. The renowned author presents an interdisciplinary approach leading to the forefront of research of quantum-theoretical aspects of time, selforganizing nanoprocesses, brain functions, the matter-mind problem, behaviour research and philosophical questions.

Time, it has been said, is the enemy. In an era of harried lives, time seems increasingly precious as hours and days telescope and our lives often seem to be flitting past. And yet, at other times, the minutes drag on, each tick of the clock excruciatingly drawn out. What explains this seeming paradox? Based upon a full decade's empirical research, Michael G. Flaherty's new book offers remarkable insights on this most universal human experience. Flaherty surveys hundreds of individuals of all ages in an attempt to ascertain how such phenomena as suffering, violence, danger, boredom, exhilaration, concentration, shock, and novelty influence our perception of time. Their stories make for intriguing reading, by turns familiar and exotic, mundane and dramatic, horrific and funny. A qualitative and quantitative tour de force, A Watched Pot presents what may well be the first fully integrated theory of time and will be of interest to scientists, humanists, social scientists and the educated public alike. A Choice Outstanding Academic Book.

What can we learn about the world from engaging with fictional time-series? What should we make of stories involving time travellers who change the past, recurrence of a single day, foreknowledge of the future, the freezing or rewinding of time, or time-series which split into alternative courses of events? Do they show us radical alternative possibilities concerning the nature of time, or do they show that even the impossible can be represented in fiction? Neither, so this book argues. Defending the view that a fiction represents a single possible world, the authors show how apparent representations of radically different time-series can be explained in terms of how worlds are represented without there being any fictional world which has such a time-series. In this way, the book uses the complexities of fictional time to get to the core of the relation between truth in fiction and possibility. It provides a logic and metaphysics to deal with the fact that fictions can leave certain features of their fictional worlds indefinite, and draws comparisons and connections between fictional and scientific representations and hypotheses. Utilising the notion of a counterpart, the authors show how to understand claims concerning persistence of characters and their identity across fictions, and what it means for a fiction to be 'set' at an actual time. Consideration is given to motion in fiction, asking whether it is sometimes continuous and sometimes discrete, how to understand different rates of change, and whether fictional time itself can be said to flow.

Why should there be anything at all? Why, in particular, should a material world exist? Bede Rundle advances clear, non-technical answers to these perplexing questions. If, as the theist maintains, God is a being who cannot but exist, his existence explains why there is something rather than nothing. However, this can also be explained on the basis of a weaker claim. Not that there is some particular being that has to be, but simply that there has to be something or other. Rundle proffers arguments for thinking that that is indeed how the question is to be put to rest. Traditionally, the existence of the physical universe is held to depend on God, but the theist faces a major difficulty in making clear how a being outside space and time, as God is customarily conceived to be, could stand in an intelligible relation to the world, whether as its creator or as the author of events within it. Rundle argues that a creator of physical reality is not required, since there is no alternative to its existence. There has to be something, and a physical universe is the only real possibility. He supports this claim by eliminating rival contenders; he dismisses the supernatural, and argues that, while other forms of being, notably the abstract and the mental, are not reducible to the physical, they presuppose its existence. The question whether ultimate explanations can ever be given is forever in the background, and the book concludes with an investigation of this issue and of the possibility that the universe could have existed for an infinite time. Other topics discussed include causality, space, verifiability, essence, existence, necessity, spirit, fine tuning, and laws of Nature. Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing offers an explanation of fundamental facts of existence in purely philosophical terms, without appeal either to theology or cosmology. It will provoke and intrigue anyone who wonders about these questions.

What is Time? Assuming no prior specialized knowledge by the reader, the book raises specific, hitherto overlooked questions about how time works, such as how and why anyone can be made to be, at the very same instant, simultaneous with events that are actually days apart. It examines abiding issues in the physics of time or at its periphery which still elude a full explanation such as delayed choice experiments, the brain's perception of time during saccadic masking, and more and suggests that these phenomena can only exist because they ultimately obey applicable mathematics, thereby agreeing with a modern view that the universe and everything within it, including the mind, are ultimately mathematical structures. It delves into how a number of conundrums, such as the weak Anthropic Principle, could be resolved, and how such resolutions could be tested experimentally. All its various threads converge towards a same new vision of the ultimate essence of time, seen as a side effect from a deeper reality.

This book traces the development of the Jewish calendar from its origin until it reached, in the tenth century CE, its present form. Drawing on a wide range of sources - literary, documentary and epigraphic; Jewish, Graeco-Roman and Christian - this is the first comprehensive book to have been written on this subject. The unification of the calendar is seen as an element in the unification of Jewish identity.

Can we see the future in our dreams? Does time flow in one direction? What is a 'meaningful coincidence'? Renowned esoteric writer Gary Lachman has been recording his own precognitive dreams for forty years. In this unique and intriguing book, Lachman recounts the discovery that he dreams 'ahead of time', and argues convincingly that this extraordinary ability is, in fact, shared by all of us. Dreaming Ahead of Time is a personal exploration of precognition, synchronicity and coincidence drawing on the work of thinkers including J.W. Dunne, J.B. Priestly and C.G. Jung. Lachman's description and analysis of his own experience introduces readers to the uncanny power of our dreaming minds, and reveals the illusion of our careful distinctions between past, present and future.

During times like these, who hasn't daydreamed about traveling forward or backward in time? In Time Travel: Ten Short Lessons, popular-science master Brian Clegg gives a grand tour of the essential lessons in this game-changing area of physics, from the imagination of novelists to current research. Einstein's special theory of relativity told us that time travel to the future was possible, and later his general theory of relativity showed us that loops in spacetime could exist, meaning that we might be able to bend time backward, too. But what are the practicalities of making time travel possible? What do we still need to know? How do we deal with paradoxical twists in time-and could quantum physics hold the answer? Packed full of easy-to-understand diagrams and fact boxes, these ten lessons cover all the basics, as well as the latest understanding and developments, to enlighten the nonscientist. About the series: The Pocket Einstein series is a collection of essential pocket-sized guides for anyone looking to understand a little more about some of the most important and fascinating areas of science in the twenty-first century. Broken down into ten simple lessons and written by leading experts in their field, discover the ten most important takeaways from those areas of science you've always wanted to know more about.

Routledge is now re-issuing this prestigious series of 204 volumes originally published between 1910 and 1965. The titles include works by key figures such asC.G. Jung, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Otto Rank, James Hillman, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney and Susan Isaacs. Each volume is available on its own, as part of a themed mini-set, or as part of a specially-priced 204-volume set. A brochure listing each title in the "International Library of Psychology" series is available upon request.