On Time Causality and the Quantum Gravity Conflict : Causality and the Quantum Gravity Conflict - Jan Zaanen

On Time Causality and the Quantum Gravity Conflict

Causality and the Quantum Gravity Conflict

By: Jan Zaanen

Hardcover | 31 October 2024

At a Glance

Hardcover


$66.90

or 4 interest-free payments of $16.73 with

 or 

Aims to ship in 10 to 15 business days

This text revolves around a new and unusual view on the most fundamental puzzle of physics. It focusses on the key aspect that makes the role of the time dimension fundamentally different: causality. It deals on the one hand with general relativity, and on the other hand with quantum theory. The implicit and intuitive way by which causality is usually taken for granted is just made explicit and less self-evident, shedding a new light on the gravity-quantum conflict. The case is made that gravity is a necessary condition for a causal universe. But upon turning to the "pure" unitary quantum physics explaining the nature of matter one is dealing with the strictly a-causal time expressed through the thermal quantum field theory machinery. When this a-causal microscopic and causal macroscopic world meet, one encounters the wavefunction collapse, that itself may be rooted in the quantum-gravity conflict.

Modern ideas are discussed resting on eigenstate thermalization showing how this may lie eventually at the origin of irreversible thermodynamics, with its famous second law setting also a direction of time. The case is anchored in the sophisticated modern mathematical machinery of both general relativity and quantum physics which is normally barely disseminated beyond the theoretical physics floors.

The book is unique in the regard that the consequences of this machinery - Riemannian geometry and Penrose diagrams, thermal quantum fields, quantum non-equilibrium and so forth -- are explained in an original, descriptive language conveying the conceptual consequences while avoiding mathematical technicalities.

Industry Reviews
This book contains a cogent presentation on the principle of time in physics. It traces time as it appears in quantum mechanics and general relativity and weaves the story of time as it unfolds 3 separate branches of physics, non-equilibrium thermodynamics being the third one. * Philip Phillips, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign *
Scientists have struggled with the role of time for as long as science exists, and this book provides a welcome fresh twist on the story by staging the problem in terms of causality. * Jasper van Wezel, University of Amsterdam *
Zaanen has a wonderfully engaging writing style, and the reader is quickly drawn into his swirling orbit of ideas, intrigued, confused, enthralled, but never bored. ... Zaanen's book is at its best presenting numerous topics in current theoretical physics research for a general audience, most of which have never really been presented in this manner before: Feynman path integrals, imaginary time, Riemannian geometry, general relativity, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, unitarity, black holes. * Subir Sachdev, Harvard University *

More in Philosophy of Science

Meditations : The Philosophy Classic - Marcus Aurelius

RRP $24.95

$23.75

Science and Representative Democracy : Experts and Citizens - Mauro Dorato
Godel, Escher, Bach : An Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas R. Hofstadter

RRP $39.99

$35.35

12%
OFF
Living on Earth - Peter Godfrey-Smith

RRP $34.99

$31.75

I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas Hofstadter

RRP $34.99

$28.25

19%
OFF
Man-Made : How the bias of the past is being built into the future - Tracey Spicer
Deep Utopia - Nick Bostrom

Hardcover

RRP $59.99

$28.90

52%
OFF
The Demon-Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan
AI: Game On : How to decide who or what decides - Tim Trumper

RRP $29.99

$25.50

15%
OFF
Kinship : Belonging in a World of Relations, 5-Volume Set - Gavin Van Horn
The World As I See It - Albert Einstein

$22.35

Women in Physics : Iph001 - Cathy Foley

$133.25

Aesthetics of Weather - Madalina Diaconu

RRP $170.00

$125.75

26%
OFF
Bergson's Scientific Metaphysics : Matter and Memory Today - Yasushi Hirai
Science and Literature in Cormac McCarthy's Expanding Worlds - Bryan Giemza