Images of Time – Mind, Science, Reality

A fascinating and wide-ranging study of time, drawing on physics, mathematics, philosophy, religion, history, science fiction and even films. A leitmotif throughout the book is the Royal Society maxim 'nullius in verba' - do not take anyone's word for it and test things for yourself. For the author, this involves avoiding metaphysics and focusing on empirical content, although metaphysical assumptions are themselves unavoidable. The main themes are concepts of time, classical time and quantum time. The author begins with a number of stimulating definitions, none of which is complete in itself and which are informed by paradigms, as he explains. The first chapter also explains many versions of the arrow of time, including thermodynamic, psychological, evolutionary and causal. On the other hand, time is in a sense cyclical, as Mircea Eliade elaborates. The relationship of observers to time involves contextuality, and the author quotes Heisenberg's warning that human language enables the construction of sentences without any content. Interestingly, he quotes Teilhard to the effect that the universe we know is a joint product of the observer and the observed.

He goes on to quote another insight from Teilhard (with approval) that our interpretation of the universe is not satisfying unless it covers the interior as well as the exterior of things, mind as well as matter. Many theories of everything focus only on the outside. The range of the book is such that nothing is omitted, even if it is treated in short order. There is a history of subjective images of time, cultural and literary images, objective and mathematical images, illusionary and causal images, then time in physics and biology, the dimensions and architectural time with themes developed from classical physics, relativity and quantum theory. These include time travel, imaginary time, irreversible time and quantised space-time. At times the treatment is quite mathematical and technical but the narrative remains very clear. The author distinguishes carefully between conjecture and empiricism and I enjoyed his observation in the epilogue of a growing realisation that thinkers of the past were easily as good as we are - including Aristotle. This is a comprehensive and highly readable account.