Travels in Four Dimensions The Enigmas of Space and Time

by Le Poidevin, Robin

• ISBN13: 9780198752547
• ISBN10: 0198752547
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-08-07
• Publisher: Clarendon Press

Summary

Space and time are the most fundamental features of our experience of the world, and yet they are also the most perplexing. Does time really flow, or is that simply an illusion? Did time have a beginning? What does it mean to say that time has a direction? Does space have boundaries, or is it infinite? Is change really possible? Could space and time exist in the absence of any objects or events? What, in the end, are space and time? Do they really exist, or are they simply the constructions of our minds? Robin Le Poidevin provides a clear, witty, and stimulating introduction to these deep questions and many other mind-boggling puzzles and paradoxes. He gives a vivid sense of the difficulties raised by our ordinary ideas about space and time, but he also gives us the basis to think about these problems independently, avoiding large amounts of jargon and technicality. His book is an invitation to think philosophically rather than a sustained argument for particular conclusions, but Le Poidevin does advance and defend a number of controversial views. He argues, for example, that time does not actually flow, that it is possible for space and time to be both finite and yet be without boundaries, and that causation is the key to an understanding of one of the deepest mysteries of time: its direction. Drawing on a variety of vivid examples from science, history, and literature, Travels in Four Dimensions brings to life some of the most profound questions imaginable.

Author Biography

Robin Le Poidevin is Professor of Metaphysics at the University of Leeds.

Table of Contents

The Measure of All Things	p. 1
Incident at Greenwich	p. 1
Metric, Convention, and Fact	p. 5
Time and the Laws of Nature	p. 8
Change	p. 13
Time as Change	p. 13
Time without Change?	p. 17
Everything Has a Reason	p. 24
A Box with No Sides?	p. 30
Where Two Worlds Meet	p. 30
Aristotle against the Void	p. 31
Jars, Pumps, and Barometers	p. 34
Lessons of the Vacuum	p. 36
The Redundancy of Space	p. 41
The Search for Absolute Motion	p. 44
Curves and Dimensions	p. 52
Euclid Displaced	p. 52
Space Makes Its Presence Felt	p. 57
The Lone Hand	p. 62
More than Three Dimensions?	p. 66
The Beginning and End of Time	p. 73
Echoes of Creation, Portents of Armageddon	p. 73
The Limits of Reason	p. 76
Can the Past be Infinite?	p. 79
The Great Circle	p. 83
The Edge of Space	p. 89
Archytas at the Edge	p. 89
Is There Space beyond the Universe?	p. 92
The Illusion of Infinity	p. 95
Infinity and Paradox	p. 101
Zeno: How the Tortoise Beat Achilles	p. 101
Two Responses to Zeno: Infinitesimals and Finitism	p. 104
Thomson's Lamp	p. 107
A Puzzle about Transition	p. 111
Democritus' Cone	p. 115
Atoms of Space and Time	p. 119
Does Time Pass?	p. 122
The Mystery of Passage	p. 122
McTaggart's Proof of the Unreality of Time	p. 127
First Response: Presentism	p. 135
Second Response: the B-Theory	p. 140
Why Is There Only One Present?	p. 143
The Cinematic Universe	p. 148
Muybridge's Horse and Zeno's Arrow	p. 148
No Motion at an Instant?	p. 150
No Motion in the Present?	p. 156
Zeno and the Presentist	p. 159
Interfering with History	p. 164
The Lost Days	p. 164
The Alterability of the Past	p. 167
Dilemmas of the Time-Traveller	p. 174
Causation in Reverse	p. 181
Other Times and Spaces	p. 185
Probability and the Multiverse	p. 185
Branching Space	p. 191
Objections and Consequences	p. 193
The Arrows of Time	p. 202
The Hidden Signpost	p. 202
Three Arrows, and Why Things Fall Apart	p. 206
The Mind's Past	p. 213
The Seeds of Time	p. 218
Parallel Causes	p. 221
Is Time Order Merely Local?	p. 223
Are Causes Simultaneous with Their Effects?	p. 226
A Sense of Direction in a Directionless World	p. 229
Concluding Thoughts	p. 234
Mr Dunne's Dream and Other Problems	p. 248
Further Reading	p. 255
Bibliography	p. 263
Index	p. 269
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