Time and Chance

This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation (very briefly) is that it is a consequence of almost every one of those fundamental scientific pictures--and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense--that whatever can happen can just as naturally happen backwards.

Albert provides an unprecedentedly clear, lively, and systematic new account--in the context of a Newtonian-Mechanical picture of the world--of the ultimate origins of the statistical regularities we see around us, of the temporal irreversibility of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, of the asymmetries in our epistemic access to the past and the future, and of our conviction that by acting now we can affect the future but not the past. Then, in the final section of the book, he generalizes the Newtonian picture to the quantum-mechanical case and (most interestingly) suggests a very deep potential connection between the problem of the direction of time and the quantum-mechanical measurement problem.

The book aims to be both an original contribution to the present scientific and philosophical understanding of these matters at the most advanced level, and something in the nature of an elementary textbook on the subject accessible to interested high-school students.

I just say give it a shot. It's at least worth that much, and if you do "get it," you will be all the wiser. Good luck!

Adding to this confusion, Albert repeatedly makes distracting use of parentheses in numerous attempts to develop main ideas instead of correctly using parentheses to make brief, nonessential comments. This semantic nightmare, however, does not end here, as Albert, in page after page, then incorporates numerous, ridiculously long footnotes, which like his "parenthetical" comments are also used to develop main ideas and are so needlessly complicated as to loose any cohesive significance. The net effect of all of this is to drown whatever semblance of order or meaning Albert is attempting to convey under a cacophony of jangled ideas, which chaotically crash into one another instead of logically and succinctly flowing orderly and soundly from one notion to the other. The reader senses there is some overarching unifying thread, in which all the disparate ideas Albert greatly belabors in developing will come together. This intimation, then, pushes the reader on with a very taxed patience for that moment of a great enlightenment. The anticipation of that arrival, however, proves anticlimactic, as chapter after chapter ends as it begins: in a dissolution of fragmentary, Byzantine ideas and lost meanings. Indeed, there has not been such a level of impenetrable perplexity in literature since T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

The most intelligible portion of this book, ironically, is to be found-not in the book itself per se-but in the description of the book on the inside of the jacket cover. Essentially, this book serves to bring an awareness to what is a fascinating problem in physics: the attempt to reconcile the temporal invariance of physical laws with our perennial everyday sense of a unidirectional nature of time. In Newtonian dynamics, for example, the governing equations of motion equally apply to both the past and the future. There is nothing in Newton's equations (or indeed in other equations that describe other physical phenomena such as electromagnetism or quantum mechanics) that specifies a direction of time. The past, in otherworlds, is just as likely to be a so-called "arrow of time" as the future is. Yet we know that there is one direction to time. In particular, the Second Law of Thermodynamics shows that we live in a universe in which entropy is ever increasing. We age and never grow younger; dropped eggs, which then crack, never spontaneous reassemble; smoke fills a room and never flows toward a point; we recall the past and not the future; and we can affect the future but not the past. Despite these common, everyday understandings of the way the universe operates, physical law makes no such distinctions of the past and future. We are as likely to become younger as we are to age; broken eggs can suddenly reassemble; smoke can converge toward a point; we should be able to recall the future as well as the past; and we can affect the past as well as the future. This is the subject that Albert is attempting to present to his readers.

Moreover, Albert offers a solution to the above problem: the so-called Past-Hypothesis, which is at the heart of this book. The Past-Hypothesis posits that the universe began in a Big Bang, low-entropy state, in which the random nature of particle motion (later argued by Albert to be possibly quantum mechanical in origin) then guarantees that the universe will evolve toward ever growing entropy, thus specifying an "arrow" of time and accounting for the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Albert argues that the Past-Hypothesis is a basic facet of physical law, irreducible to nothing else or anything more basic. This view, however, is by no means universally accepted. There are many competing theories to this problem of time, including a very interesting one by Julian Barbour, who argues in The End of Time for a fascinating possibility that there is an underlying time-less structure to the universe.

Other than stating the problem well on the book jacket (which you can view and read here on Amazon.com), I am afraid that Time and Chance really has no other merit, which would make it a book worth purchasing. I truly hope that if Dr. Albert is reading this he will understand just how difficult it is to comprehend his book, in which the difficulty lies not in the subject matter but in his writing. There were many very bright and capable people in his class who often times simply had no idea (myself included) what it was he was trying to convey. The book is in dire need of heavy revision, and I hope that this is undertaken in the future. As it stands, the book is simply too poorly written to be worth the read other than if you are one of the unfortunate students enrolled in his Direction of Time course, in which case your grade depends on you desperately trying to elucidate and understand this book.