Time and Chance

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating Subject But Horribly Unintelligible Writing
Review: Formally trained in academia as a physicist, David Albert made the switch over to philosophy to address foundational issues in physics, most notably those dealing with time and an outstanding problem in quantum mechanics known as the measurement problem. Although the endeavors of Albert are noble and worthwhile, I am afraid that he is lacking in competency as a writer to communicate his ideas in any sensible, intelligible fashion. As a former student of his, I can personally attest to how frustrating his writing and teaching style, kindly referred to by some as "unique," can be. Needlessly obtuse, ever obscure, Albert writes in such a manner that his prose can truly serve as a wonderful negative example of how not to write. Virtually every conceivable error in basic grammar and syntax is committed. Endlessly long sentences, riddled with comma splices and run on sentences, are grossly accompanied by a monstrous convolution of nestled subordinate clauses, which topple over one another and collapse any unifying logic.

Adding to this confusion, Albert repeatedly makes distracting use of parentheses in numerous attempts to develop main ideas instead of correctly using parentheses to make brief, nonessential comments. This semantic nightmare, however, does not end here, as Albert, in page after page, then incorporates numerous, ridiculously long footnotes, which like his "parenthetical" comments are also used to develop main ideas and are so needlessly complicated as to loose any cohesive significance. The net effect of all of this is to drown whatever semblance of order or meaning Albert is attempting to convey under a cacophony of jangled ideas, which chaotically crash into one another instead of logically and succinctly flowing orderly and soundly from one notion to the other. The reader senses there is some overarching unifying thread, in which all the disparate ideas Albert greatly belabors in developing will come together. This intimation, then, pushes the reader on with a very taxed patience for that moment of a great enlightenment. The anticipation of that arrival, however, proves anticlimactic, as chapter after chapter ends as it begins: in a dissolution of fragmentary, Byzantine ideas and lost meanings. Indeed, there has not been such a level of impenetrable perplexity in literature since T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

The most intelligible portion of this book, ironically, is to be found-not in the book itself per se-but in the description of the book on the inside of the jacket cover. Essentially, this book serves to bring an awareness to what is a fascinating problem in physics: the attempt to reconcile the temporal invariance of physical laws with our perennial everyday sense of a unidirectional nature of time. In Newtonian dynamics, for example, the governing equations of motion equally apply to both the past and the future. There is nothing in Newton's equations (or indeed in other equations that describe other physical phenomena such as electromagnetism or quantum mechanics) that specifies a direction of time. The past, in otherworlds, is just as likely to be a so-called "arrow of time" as the future is. Yet we know that there is one direction to time. In particular, the Second Law of Thermodynamics shows that we live in a universe in which entropy is ever increasing. We age and never grow younger; dropped eggs, which then crack, never spontaneous reassemble; smoke fills a room and never flows toward a point; we recall the past and not the future; and we can affect the future but not the past. Despite these common, everyday understandings of the way the universe operates, physical law makes no such distinctions of the past and future. We are as likely to become younger as we are to age; broken eggs can suddenly reassemble; smoke can converge toward a point; we should be able to recall the future as well as the past; and we can affect the past as well as the future. This is the subject that Albert is attempting to present to his readers.

Moreover, Albert offers a solution to the above problem: the so-called Past-Hypothesis, which is at the heart of this book. The Past-Hypothesis posits that the universe began in a Big Bang, low-entropy state, in which the random nature of particle motion (later argued by Albert to be possibly quantum mechanical in origin) then guarantees that the universe will evolve toward ever growing entropy, thus specifying an "arrow" of time and accounting for the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Albert argues that the Past-Hypothesis is a basic facet of physical law, irreducible to nothing else or anything more basic. This view, however, is by no means universally accepted. There are many competing theories to this problem of time, including a very interesting one by Julian Barbour, who argues in The End of Time for a fascinating possibility that there is an underlying time-less structure to the universe.

Other than stating the problem well on the book jacket (which you can view and read here on Amazon.com), I am afraid that Time and Chance really has no other merit, which would make it a book worth purchasing. I truly hope that if Dr. Albert is reading this he will understand just how difficult it is to comprehend his book, in which the difficulty lies not in the subject matter but in his writing. There were many very bright and capable people in his class who often times simply had no idea (myself included) what it was he was trying to convey. The book is in dire need of heavy revision, and I hope that this is undertaken in the future. As it stands, the book is simply too poorly written to be worth the read other than if you are one of the unfortunate students enrolled in his Direction of Time course, in which case your grade depends on you desperately trying to elucidate and understand this book.

Rating:
Summary: Definitely not for the layperson
Review: I was interested in this book because of its glowing review in Science magazine. While this may be an excellent book, I certainly couldn't tell after the first 45 pages. Major portions of the text consists of illegible footnotes. In spite of its folksy style, the author is obscure and impenetrable. It makes me wonder why, if he really has something to say, he can't explain it in a sensible fashion. While there might be people who get something from this book, a casual reader should expect some very tough going.

Rating:
Summary: Not THAT bad...
Review: I, and anyone who has read Albert's previous QM book, can readily agree with the other reviewers that his style is as queer as a four dollar bill, as off-putting as it is annoying. And yet, as I kept returning to Albert--this book in particular--all the while my outside reading on the subjects giving me a firmer rudimentary comprehension of the problems, I came to find that, slowly but surely, his work grew on me.
But as that's only my experience, I'll make sure prospective readers all understand just exactly what it is they're going to get themselves into with Albert:
1) Again, the style. He repeats phrases and words (e.g. "patently") often many times in the same sentence, which latter often read like Kant: a front clause and end clause that relate pretty obviously, but a whole middle ground that is prolix and confusing in providing the rationale for the relation. As I said, for me, the style grew on me, much as Kant's did, but it is challenging and perhaps needlessly difficult.
2) This is "patently" NOT a book for beginner's. On the other hand, it is patently not a book solely for experts either. I am no expert--not even close---and I would say I'm about one tier above begginer level, basically familiar with the relevant issues and concepts, but with no math and no formal training. The drawback of this is, of course, that issues presented much more clearly and gracefully elsewhere show up here as being complicated beyond belief. The "punchline" is (as Albert often says), that this IS complicated material, that it really isn't as simple as it's often presented, and Albert aims to give you the whole-hog, not an ice cream sundae version of it. With persistence and patience, you will get it, I swear. And just to re-iterate, you DO NOT need the math to get it, at least for this book. Most of the math is relegated to footnotes and for those who care about seeing demonstrations and proofs, which even without full understanding can be grasped from Albert's presentations of them.
3) He is repetitive, but I find this a good thing. Kant too was repetitive, but that actually helps me stay inside the frame and not get lost in the swift progress of the tour of these issues Albert is taking us through. You might hate it, so beware.
4) On the issues, Albert is fantastic, in my opinion. But when it comes to his own suggestions, and the last few chapters on QM, things get too obscure and presuppose too much on the reader's behalf (like having read his previous book). He tries, but he fails here. The good thing is, these last chapters are just icing. You'll get everything up to there, seriously, with patience and effort (although you may lose all patience, I don't deny).

I just say give it a shot. It's at least worth that much, and if you do "get it," you will be all the wiser. Good luck!