A Short History of Time [antikvár]

PrefaceThe title of this book may suggest a survey of problems in philosophy or physics: whether time can have a beginning or an end; whether the laws of space-time cease altogether to apply in black holes; whether it would ever be possible to reverse the flow and change the past - a favourite fantasy with people who imagine that they alone would have the privilege of doing so, and forget that in the new improved past their parents might never have met.These are indeed good questions, but no more my concern than the definition of time. About ad 268 the great Neoplaton-ist philosopher Plotinus observed that while we constantly talk about age and time as if we had a clear idea of what they were, when we investigate the question we find ourselves puzzled. The point was pithily restated some 130 years later by St Augustine: 'So what is time.? If no one asks me, I know; if I seek to explain it, I do not.'No pretence to greater wisdom is made in this book; whether time is a fourth dimension of the universe or a reified abstraction, whether it is continuous or atomistic, whether it can exist independently of motion to be measured, whether any meaning attaches to 'before' in the phrase 'before Creation' or 'before the Big Bang', are for others to determine. The same St Augustine, faced with the question what God was doing before he created the world, quoted, though he did not endorse, the jocular answer, 'Preparing hells for folk who invented clever conundrums like that'; I shall not take the chance that a true word was spoken in jest.Nor shall I consider whether time proceeds in a straight line or in cycles. Although it is not true that linear time was a Judaeo-Christian speciality, set against the cyclical time symbolised in late Graeco-Roman paganism as a serpent devouringIX