Samiksha Jaiswal (Editor)

The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time

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Country
  
United States

Publication date
  
December 8, 2014

Pages
  
566 pp.

Genre
  
Non-fiction

3.7/5
Goodreads

Language
  
English

Media type
  
Print

Originally published
  
8 December 2014

The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time t1gstaticcomimagesqtbnANd9GcTVduxmhesam03EMZ

Subject
  
Physics, cosmology, philosophy of time

Authors
  
Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Lee Smolin

Preceded by
  
Time Reborn (by Smolin), The Religion of the Future (by Unger)

Similar
  
Lee Smolin books, Non-fiction books

The singular universe and the reality of time


The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time: A Proposal in Natural Philosophy is a non-fiction book by the American theoretical physicist Lee Smolin and the Brazilian philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger. The book was initially published by Cambridge University Press on December 8, 2014.

Contents

Synopsis

The book discusses a number of philosophical and physical ideas on the true role of time in the Universe. The text is roughly divided into two halves, the first one written by Unger, and the second by Smolin, both developing the same themes in different ways, with Smolin being more focused on the physics.

Reviews

You might expect a book co-authored by Smolin and Unger to be an exchange about science and human values—something, perhaps, in the region of the 1930 dialogue between Einstein and the polymath Rabindranath Tagore. But The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time is not that kind of thing: it is a big and daunting book, harder to read than recent works by either author. The first section, by Unger, includes among other things an exploration of the global, irreversible and continuous attributes of time, followed by an analysis of proto-ontological assumptions. The second section, by Smolin, contains an approach to solving the meta-law dilemma, outlining linear cyclic models, branching models and branching cyclic cosmologies before it dives into cosmological natural selection, pluralistic cosmological scenarios and the principle of precedence.

—The Guardian

I found the long section by Unger rather hard going and not very rewarding... Smolin gives a discussion of mathematics itself which I think few mathematicians would recognize

- Peter Woit

References

The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time Wikipedia