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The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time
Cosmology is in crisis. The more we discover, the more puzzling the universe appears to be. How and why are the laws of nature what they are? A philosopher and a physicist, world-renowned for their radical ideas in their fields, argue for a revolution. To keep cosmology scientific, we must replace the old view in which the universe is governed by immutable laws by a new one in which laws evolve. Then we can hope to explain them. The revolution that Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin propose relies on three central ideas. There is only one universe at a time. Time is everything in the structure and regularities of nature changes sooner or later. Mathematics, which has trouble with time, is not the oracle of nature and the prophet of science; it is simply a tool with great power and immense limitations. The argument is readily accessible to non-scientists as well as to the physicists and cosmologists whom it challenges.
566 pages, Paperback
Published December 16, 2021
3 people want to read
About the author
Roberto Mangabeira Unger
60 books102 followersRoberto Mangabeira Unger (born 24 March 1947) is a philosopher and politician. He has written notable works including Politics: A Work In Constructive Social Theory and The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time. He has developed his views and positions across many fields, including social, and political, and economic theory. In legal theory, he is best known for his work in the 1970s-1990s while at Harvard Law School as part of the Critical Legal Studies movement, which is held to have helped disrupt the methodological consensus in American law schools and which led to the writing of What Should Legal Analysis Become? His political activity helped the transition to democracy in Brazil in the aftermath of the military regime, and culminated with his appointment as Brazil's Minister of Strategic Affairs in 2007 and again in 2015. His late work in economics culminates in his characterization and program toward The Knowledge Economy. His work is seen to offer a vision of humanity and a program to empower individuals and change institutions.
At the core of his philosophy is a view of humanity as greater than the contexts in which it is placed. He sees each individual possessed with the capability to rise to a greater life. At the root of his social thought is the conviction that the social world is made and imagined. His work begins from the premise that no natural or necessary social, political, or economic arrangements underlie individual or social activity. Property rights, liberal democracy, wage labor—for Unger, these are all historical artifacts that have no necessary relation to the goals of free and prosperous human activity. For Unger, the market, the state, and human social organization should not be set in predetermined institutional arrangements, but need to be left open to experimentation and revision according to what works for the project of individual and collective empowerment. Doing so, he holds, will enable human liberation.
At the core of his philosophy is a view of humanity as greater than the contexts in which it is placed. He sees each individual possessed with the capability to rise to a greater life. At the root of his social thought is the conviction that the social world is made and imagined. His work begins from the premise that no natural or necessary social, political, or economic arrangements underlie individual or social activity. Property rights, liberal democracy, wage labor—for Unger, these are all historical artifacts that have no necessary relation to the goals of free and prosperous human activity. For Unger, the market, the state, and human social organization should not be set in predetermined institutional arrangements, but need to be left open to experimentation and revision according to what works for the project of individual and collective empowerment. Doing so, he holds, will enable human liberation.
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March 11, 2025
This book has given me more to think about in re physics and cosmology than almost everything else I've read in the past decade put together. If that's enough to spur you to read it, consider my job here done.
What we have here is not a theory as such, but an outline of a possible set of theories -- a prolegomena to a possible future cosmology, you could call it -- in which the dead ends of string theory and the untestable speculations of multiverses are replaced with a set of bold conjectures involving the primacy of time over space, the need to consider the universe as a singular phenomenon that is not explicable through theories used to describe any part of it, and all the implications of those two key assertions.
Among those implications is the idea that timeless laws of physics are chimeras; that the laws we take for granted now are the results of what are essentially evolutionary pressures within the universe. All the parameters of the universe that seem arbitrary, like the charge of the electron, are simply the result of historical processes -- like the "spandrels" in Stephen Jay Gould's discussions of evolution. What we should be looking for is not original causes, but the historical changes and their mechanisms, from which we are likely to derive far more useful insights.
I came to this book after reading much of Smolin's earlier work such as THE TROUBLE WITH PHYSICS and TIME REGAINED (which this book is an expansion on). I'm also now curious about Unger, whom I wasn't familiar with before this, but based on the evidence here he seems like one of the few modern philosophers actually worth bothering with.
What we have here is not a theory as such, but an outline of a possible set of theories -- a prolegomena to a possible future cosmology, you could call it -- in which the dead ends of string theory and the untestable speculations of multiverses are replaced with a set of bold conjectures involving the primacy of time over space, the need to consider the universe as a singular phenomenon that is not explicable through theories used to describe any part of it, and all the implications of those two key assertions.
Among those implications is the idea that timeless laws of physics are chimeras; that the laws we take for granted now are the results of what are essentially evolutionary pressures within the universe. All the parameters of the universe that seem arbitrary, like the charge of the electron, are simply the result of historical processes -- like the "spandrels" in Stephen Jay Gould's discussions of evolution. What we should be looking for is not original causes, but the historical changes and their mechanisms, from which we are likely to derive far more useful insights.
I came to this book after reading much of Smolin's earlier work such as THE TROUBLE WITH PHYSICS and TIME REGAINED (which this book is an expansion on). I'm also now curious about Unger, whom I wasn't familiar with before this, but based on the evidence here he seems like one of the few modern philosophers actually worth bothering with.
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