Time and Chance

by David Z. Albert

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.

Genres: Philosophy, Physics, Science, Nonfiction

186 pages, Paperback

First published January 29, 2001

Reviews

[Eliot Long · Rating 4 out of 5]

A super thought-provoking and in-depth book about statistical mechanics and the arrow of time (and even a bit of quantum mechanics in the past chapter). This book might've been a bit advanced for me, and I know that some nuances/details went over my head, but if you're patient with it and are willing to go back and re-read some pages here and there, it's super rewarding. Albert gets pretty deep in the subject, so it's nice to have some prior knowledge of things like phase space and basic thermodynamics, and depending on your level of knowledge you might have to look some things up.

Difficulty at parts aside, Albert's style of discussion through propositions and refutations really helps to lead the reader through such a deep field. There aren't too many definitive answers, but that doesn't make the takeaways any less significant; you'll still understand the topic better even if there's no conclusive solution. Treat this book as a mix of philosophy and physics, since that's what it is at the core (the author is a philosophy professor).

Some difficulty does come from the author's confusing style of writing (lots of more or less unnecessary asides that interrupt the flow) but you can ignore them for the most part, though that was one of the book's biggest flaws.

[Erica]

so far, so good!

[Paul Sand · Rating 1 out of 5]

[Imported automatically from my blog. Some formatting there may not have translated here.]

I don't remember why I put this book on my get-at-library list. (I really should keep notes.) And (as it happens) my current mode of library-interaction (as it were) is to check a book's availability online (or get it through Interlibrary Loan), and my physical presence onsite (as it were) is a quick in-and-out. Browsing (as I might have done pre-Covid) is discouraged.

The above paragraph apes the style of the author of Time and Chance, David Z. Albert. Lots of random parenthetical asides that don't add much information, lots of random italics. The book reads as if it were a transcript of chatty oral presentations of a particularly animated and eccentric sort. And it can get pretty impenetrable at times, by which I mean nearly always. Here's a sample paragraph from page 62:

I’ve been talking about the postulate about statistics up to now as if it more or less amounted to a stipulation that what you ought to suppose, for purposes of predicting a system's future behavior, if you are given only the information that the system initially satisfies X, is that the system is as likely to be in any one of the microconditions compatible with X at the initial time in question as it is to be in any other one of the microconditions compatible with X at the initial time in question. That’s more or less what the postulate amounts to (I think) in the imaginations of most physicists. And that (to be sure) has a supremely innocent ring to it. It sounds very much—when you first hear it—as it is instructing you to do nothing more than attend very carefully to what you mean, to what you are saying, when you say that all you know of the system at the time in question is X. It sounds very much as if it is doing nothing more than reminding you that what you are saying when you say something like that is that X is the case at the time in question, and (moreover) that you have no more reason for believing that the system is in any particular one of` the microconditions compatible with X at the time in question than you have for believing that it is in any other particular one of the microconditions compatible with X at the time in question, that (insofar as you know, at the time in question) nothing favors any particular one of those microconditions over any particular other one of them, that (in other words) the probability of any particular one of those microconditions obtaining at the time in question, given the information you have, is equal to the probability of any particular other one of them obtaining at the time in question.

Five sentences, and that last one is a doozy. And to make matters worse, the very next paragraph begins: "This is all wrong, however." Darn!

I was very much in "I looked at every page" mode for large swaths of the book. I would flunk badly if quizzed on its details. It's a slim book, I tried to tackle a mere ten pages/day, but…

Anyway: Albert has his Ph.D. in theoretical physics but moved over to the philosophy department at Columbia. The book deals with time's arrow, or: exactly how do we distinguish the past from the future?

The problem being that many (but not all) of the physical laws of the universe are invariant under time-reversal. For example, if you had a movie of the planets revolving around the sun, then played that movie backward, the planets would still seem to be obeying, blissfully, the same Newtonian laws of motion. Similarly for gas molecules in a box: they bounce off each other, and the walls of the box, elastically, and they would appear to do the same thing in a time-reversed movie. You couldn't really tell whether you were watching the movie backwards or forwards.

Fine, but that's completely at odds with our everyday experience. We can nearly always tell when a movie's running backward: when we dominoes spontaneously rising into a complex pattern instead of falling, gases collapsing into a corner of a box instead of expanding to fill the available volume, stars sucking up light, instead of emitting it, etc. "That ain't right."

So the book immediately gets into matters of thermodynamics, entropy, and statistical mechanics. But Albert notes that the underpinnings of those fields and concepts are epistemologically shaky, and attempts to firm them up. And he may do so, but don't ask me.

In the latter parts of the book, he brings in quantum mechanics, which may help things. He discusses several interpretations, and holds up one for special attention: the Ghirardi–Rimini–Weber (GRW) theory. I think that's pretty obscure, but not obscure enough to lack a Wikipedia entry.

So: my bad. If I ever had the physics chops to follow Albert's argument, they're gone now. And in the future, I'll try to have a solid Plan B in place when getting a library book.

[zimu · Rating 5 out of 5]

The last time I read one of David's books cover to cover was in sophomore year of college– this was almost two years ago. His book Quantum Mechanics and Experience made me fall in love with the field and since then, despite talking to him almost every week, I had forgotten (at times) the way he wrote. But this book, as with all of his works really, is just written in such a way where one is reminded of his passion, warmth, and love for the subject. By the end of it, you really feel like you've just been told this super cool crazy thing by a really cool friend of yours and you can't wait to share it with everyone else– the excitement is infectious, to say the least. It's a privilege to read this sort of stuff, and an even bigger privilege to have become friends with him in the past few years.

[Parker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps the only thing I learned that I’m sure will stick with me (as it were) is Albert’s explanation of the Past Hypothesis. How, to make predictions about the future, the mathematical formalism of statistical mechanics requires the postulation that entropy was lowest at the beginning of time.

I wish it was explained in more detail the implications of the fact that entropy is one of many seemingly un-objective ways of organizing the world. This is on my mind after reading about thermal time in loop quantum gravity.

At times I found Albert to be too repetitive (so graspable that it was boring) and at other times I found Albert to fail to explain what was so novel or groundbreaking about his approach compared to the textbooks.

[Lauren Romo · Rating 2 out of 5]

God this book is terribly written. I don’t even know if it was edited or if someone was just listening to Albert ramble and copied down everything he said. You cannot go two words without some sort of useless parenthetical insertion. It actually upsets me because his ideas are so interesting but his writing is atrocious.

[Pierrot Seban · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite an extraordinary book. I don't share many of the author's premises, and I had to consciously remind myself of his methodological postulates regularly to begin to make sense of his arguments, but the book is extraordinarily efficient, rigorous and clear. As a newcomer in the field I am anxious to see what the reception and critics were.

[Muhammad Shemyal Nisar · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting but at the same time very dense book.

[lucas · Rating 4 out of 5]

albert's not easy to read, but he's an incredibly precise and original thinker with respect to both the arrow of time and his other work in quantum mechanics.

[Mark Moon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the clearest non-technical writing about time I've ever read.