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Books > Science & Mathematics > Physics > Relativity physics
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Objective Becoming (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,692
Discovery Miles 26 920
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Objective Becoming (Hardcover)
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What does the passage of time consist in? There are some suggestive
metaphors. aEvents approach us, pass us, and recede from us, like
sticks and leaves floating on the river of time.a aWe are moving
from the past into the future, like ships sailing into an unknown
ocean.a There is surely something right and deep about these
metaphors. But how close are they to the literal truth? In this
book Bradford Skow argues that they are far from the literal truth.
Skowas argument takes the form of a defense of the block universe
theory of time, a theory that, in many ways, treats time as a
dimension of reality that closely resembles the three dimensions of
space. Opposed to the block universe theory of time are theories
that take the metaphors more seriously: presentism, the moving
spotlight theory, the growing block theory, and the branching time
theory. These are theories of arobusta passage of time, or
aobjective becoming.a Skow argues that the best of these theories,
the block universe theoryas most worthy opponent, is the moving
spotlight theory, the theory that says that apresentnessa moves
along the series of times from the past into the future. Skow
defends the moving spotlight theory against the objection that it
is inconsistent, and the objection that it cannot answer the
question of how fast time passes. He also defends it against the
objection that it is incompatible with Einsteinas theory of
relativity. Skow proposes several ways in which the moving
spotlight theory may be made compatible with the theory of
relativity. Still, this book is ultimately a defense of the block
universe theory, not of the moving spotlight theory. Skow holds
that the best arguments against the block universe theory, and for
the moving spotlight theory, start from the idea that, somehow, the
passage of time is given to us in experience. Skow discusses
several different arguments that start from this idea, and argues
that they all fail.
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