Physics and the Ultimate Significance of Time: Bohm, Prigogine, and Process Philosophy - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 088706115X ISBN 13: 9780887061158

Publisher: State University of New York Press, 1985

Synopsis

Challenges the conventional view of the nature of time.

Physics and the Ultimate Significance of Time challenges the conventional view of the nature of time. The dominant twentieth-century view, supported by Einstein and many of the founders of quantum theory, implies that time is ultimately unreal. Several new schools of thought reject the notion that physics is temporally symmetrical, and that time could just as easily run backwards. Combating this conventional view of time, this book offers three new viewpoints and explores their apparent differences.

Nobel prize winner Ilya Prigogine argues that irreversibility and asymmetry are more fundamental than reversibility and symmetry. David Bohm notes that while conventional notions about physics and the worldview it suggests have been based upon exclusive attention to the ‘explicate order,’ quite another view results when primary attention is focused on the ‘implicate order.’ And the growing school of process philosophy based on Alfred North Whitehead’s work holds that irreversible temporal relations characterize the most ‘elementary’ components of the world, implying the heretical view that time exists for a single electron or atom.

About this title

About the Author

David Ray Griffin is Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the School of Theology at Claremont and Claremont Graduate School and Executive Director of the Center for Process Studies.

Edition details

• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Publication date: 1985
• ISBN 10: 088706115X
• ISBN 13: 9780887061158
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 338
• Editor: Griffin David Ray