Academic: Space and time Ebooks

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The End of Timeby Julian Barbour
Oxford University Press, USA 2000; US$ 21.95
Richard Feynman once quipped that "Time is what happens when nothing else does." But Julian Barbour disagrees: if nothing happened, if nothing changed, then time would stop. For time is nothing but change. It is change that we perceive occurring all around us, not time. Put simply, time does not exist. In this highly provocative volume, Barbour presents the basic evidence for a timeless universe, and shows why we still experience the world as intensely temporal. It is a book that strikes at the heart of modern physics. It casts doubt on Einstein's greatest contribution, the spacetime continuum, but also points to the solution of one of the great paradoxes of modern science, the chasm between classical and quantum physics. Indeed,... more...
The Nature of Space and Time (New in Paper)by Stephen Hawking; Roger Penrose
Princeton University Press 2010; US$ 15.95
Einstein said that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. But was he right? Can the quantum theory of fields and Einstein's general theory of relativity, the two most accurate and successful theories in all of physics, be united in a single quantum theory of gravity? Can quantum and cosmos ever be combined? On this issue, two of the world's most famous physicists--Stephen Hawking ( A Brief History of Time ) and Roger Penrose ( The Emperor's New Mind and Shadows of the Mind )--disagree. Here they explain their positions in a work based on six lectures with a final debate, all originally presented at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. How could quantum... more...
Breaking the Time Barrierby Jenny Randles
Simon & Schuster 2005; US$ 11.99
IT WAS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME.... Once widely considered an impossibility--the stuff of science fiction novels--time travel may finally be achieved in the twenty-first century. In Breaking the Time Barrier, bestselling author Jenny Randles reveals the nature of recent, breakthrough experiments that are turning this fantasy into reality. The race to build the first time machine is a fascinating saga that began about a century ago, when scientists such as Marconi and Edison and Einstein carried out research aimed at producing a working time machine. Today, physicists are conducting remarkable experiments that involve slowing the passage of information, freezing light, and breaking the speed of light--and thus the time barrier. In the... more...
Relativity and the Nature of Spacetimeby Vesselin Petkov
Springer-Verlag Berlin and Heidelberg GmbH & Co. KG 2005; US$ 59.95
Shows that if the world and the physical objects were three-dimensional, none of the kinematic relativistic effects and the experimental evidence supporting them would be possible. The implications of this result for physics, philosophy, and our entire world view are discussed. more...
Understanding Space-Timeby Robert DiSalle
Cambridge University Press 2006; US$ 34.00
Presenting the history of space-time physics, from Newton to Einstein, as a philosophical as well as a scientific development, DiSalle shows how philosophical arguments and analyses impacted on these revolutionary changes in the history of physics. more...
Bangs, Crunches, Whimpers, and Shrieksby John Earman
Oxford University Press 1995; US$ 110.00
Explains the technical issues of general relativity theory and discusses how these issues bear upon philosophical problems about the nature of space and time, causality, and laws of nature. This book provides an overview of the technical literature as well as analytical commentary on its philosophical significance. more...
The Ontology of Spacetimeby Dennis Dieks
Elsevier 2006; US$ 165.00
This book contains selected papers from the First International Conference on the Ontology of Spacetime. Its fourteen chapters address two main questions: first, what is the current status of the substantivalism/relationalism debate, and second, what about the prospects of presentism and becoming within present-day physics and its philosophy? The overall tenor of the four chapters of the book?s first part is that the prospects of spacetime substantivalism are bleak, although different possible positions remain with respect to the ontological status of spacetime. Part II and Part III of the book are devoted to presentism, eternalism, and becoming, from two different perspectives. In the six chapters of Part II it is argued, in different ways,... more...
The Universe of Fluctuationsby B.G. Sidharth
Springer 2005; US$ 139.00
The failure of all attempts to unify gravitation with other fundamental interactions has lead to an abandonment of point particles and differentiable spacetime of General Relativity and Quantum Theory, including Quantum Field Theory. While Quantum Superstrings (or M-Theory) and other Quantum Gravity approaches work with a lattice like structure or extended objects, several unanswered questions remain. The book describes another approach in which oscillators at the Planck scale from a background Quantum Vacuum are fundamental. We describe how this leads to the formation of the elementary particles, and also a cosmology that correctly predicted an accelerating Universe with a small cosmological constant, apart from other things. In this context... more...
The Quantum Structure Of Space And Timeby David Gross; Marc Henneaux; Alexander Sevrin
World Scientific 2007; US$ 114.40
Ever since 1911, the Solvay Conferences have shaped modern physics. The 23rd edition, chaired by 2004 Nobel Laureate David Gross, did not break with that tradition. It gathered most of the leading figures working on the central problem of reconciling Einstein’s theory of gravity with quantum mechanics. These proceedings give a broad overview with unique insight into the most fundamental issues raised by this challenge for 21st century physics, by distinguished renowned scientists. The contributions cover: the status of quantum mechanics, spacetime singularities and breakdown of classical space and time, mathematical structures underlying the most promising attempts under current development, spacetime as an emergent concept, as well as... more...
Relativity and the Dimensionality of the Worldby Vesselin Petkov
Springer 2007; US$ 169.00
All physicists would agree that one of the most fundamental problems of the 21st century physics is the dimensionality of the world. In the four-dimensional world of Minkowski (or Minkowski spacetime) the most challenging problem is the nature of the temporal dimension. In Minkowski spacetime it is merely one of the four dimensions, which means that it is entirely given like the other three spacial dimensions. If the temporal dimension were not given in its entirety and only one constantly changing moment of it existed, Minkowski spacetime would be reduced to the ordinary three-dimensional space. But if the physical world, represented by Minkowski spacetime, is indeed four-dimensional with time being the fourth dimension, then such a world... more...

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The End of Timeby Julian Barbour

The Nature of Space and Time (New in Paper)by Stephen Hawking; Roger Penrose

Breaking the Time Barrierby Jenny Randles

Relativity and the Nature of Spacetimeby Vesselin Petkov

Understanding Space-Timeby Robert DiSalle

Bangs, Crunches, Whimpers, and Shrieksby John Earman

The Ontology of Spacetimeby Dennis Dieks

The Universe of Fluctuationsby B.G. Sidharth

The Quantum Structure Of Space And Timeby David Gross; Marc Henneaux; Alexander Sevrin

Relativity and the Dimensionality of the Worldby Vesselin Petkov