Time and Space By Barry Dainton Review

All of this writing about time travel reminded me of a good book on philosophy of science by Barry Dainton. So here's a short review.

First of all I would like to say that I really love these philosophy of science books, as you almost don't have to know any university level physics or mathematics to enjoy them. On the same time they usually give you an introduction to science concepts required to understand the book. So these philosophy of science books really seem a great choice for laymen, who hate math equations.

Source

Time and Space is a book about the philosophy of time and space, also it contains a fair share of science for science lovers. The book was first published in 2001 and the 2nd edition in 2010. Its author, Barry Dainton is a professor of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool. He is also an author of two other great books The Phenomenal Self and Stream of Consciousness.

Time and Space  contains 22 chapters covering the most important problems and advances in both physics and philosophy of science regarding space and time. These chapters include The Block Universe, Asymmetries Within Time, Time Travel, Time and Consciousness, General Relativity, String Theory and more

The author can explain concepts of philosophy and science in simple words, which makes this a good book for beginners. Also the book contains nice diagrams and pictures which help you visualising the concepts. Also, as I said, the book has no maths, which is good if you don't like equations. However, simple math concepts are explained through diagrams and pictures, which is great.

All in all, Space and Time, is a great book for philosophy and physics lovers. Even though the book, doesn't have a lot of real physics theory, it's a great starting point for beginners of general relativity and even some string theory.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoy my stuff, feel free to follow, comment and subscribe.


Also if you're too lazy to go to the library, you can buy the book here:

Read more »

Free Will?

So lately I've been reading this book called Asymmetries in Time by Paul Horwich. It's a book on philosophy of science, mostly grappling the problems regarding the nature of time. I don't really like philosophy of science books, because i find it strange when philosophers grapple such problems as the nature of time by only playing with words and concepts. I truly believe that such a problem as a nature of time can only be solved by scientists.

But anyway, back to my point, I stumbled upon a chapter about a philosophical theory called fatalism. From what I understand this theory states this: since every event that will happen in the future depends on the past events (a chain of past events, which cause the future events) and we cannot change the past, the future is fixed. In other words, everything in our universe is already predetermined. 

But aren't we making random and free decisions everyday? Well it's a hard question. But if you think about it for a while, you can come to conclusion that every event has a cause. That is, every action and even every thought has a cause and is predetermined by the past thoughts and actions. Actually, if a supercomputer of an amazing power would exist, we could calculate and predict our future thoughts and actions, that is, our future seems to be already predetermined.

So the big question is: are we really just simple puppet dolls, which have no free will, as our futures are fixed. Well if it is the case, then it seems scary and unpleasant - after all, everyone wants to rule his life.

The interesting thing is that we can't really determine everything with a perfect precision. That is, due to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the microscopic world of smallest particles is ruled only by probabilities. This opens some space for randomness in our universe. Actually some scientists even believe that a random quantum fluctuation could have caused the big bang.

So the important question is as follows: is our universe deterministic or is it random. In either way, it leaves little space to free will, as even if the world is random, we can't control this randomness.

So are we just simple puppet dolls, who have a predetermined destiny, or are we lost in an ocean of randomness? Or maybe all of this is wrong, and there is still place for our free choices in our universe. Nobody knows... And after all, would it be interesting if we knew?

Read more »