Timeless Reality

Symetry, Simplicity, and Multiple Universes

Victor J. Stenger

• Publisher: Prometheus
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781615922284
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Quantum Theory

Quantum physics has many extraordinary implications. One of the most extraordinary is that events at the atomic and subatomic level seem to depend on the future as well as the past. Is time really reversible?Physicist Victor J. Stenger says yes. Contrary to our most basic assumptions about the inevitable flow of time from past to future, the underlying reality of all phenomena may have no beginning and no end, and not be governed by an "arrow of time." Though aware of the possibility, physicists have generally been reluctant to accept the reversibility of time as reality because of the implied causal paradoxes: If time travel to the past were possible, then you could go back and kill your grandfather before he met your grandmother! However, Stenger shows that this paradox does not apply for quantum phenomena.Many people believe that the laws of nature represent a deep, Platonic reality that goes beyond the material objects that are observed by eye and by advanced scientific instruments. Stenger maintains that reality may be simpler and less mysterious than most think. The quantum world only appears mysterious when forced to obey rules of everyday human experience. Stenger convincingly argues that, based on established principles of simplicity and symmetry, at its deepest level reality is literally timeless. Within this reality it is possible that many universes exist with different structures and laws from our own.Stenger elucidates these complex subjects with great clarity and many helpful illustrations in a fascinating book that is understandable to the educated lay reader.

Table of contents

• Preface
• 1. Atoms and Forms
• 2. The Whole is Equal to the Sum of Its Particles
• 3. The Death of Absolute Now
• 4. Three Arrows of Time
• 5. The Quantum Domain
• 6. Paradoxes and Interpretations
• 7. Taming Infinity
• 8. The Timeless Quantum
• 9. Modeling Matter
• 10. Dreams of Fields
• 11. Particle Reality
• 12. Global Simplicity and Local Complexity
• 13. The Natural and the Supernatural
• 14. Truth or Consequences
• 15. Einstein’s Building Blocks
• Glossary
• Bibliography