The concept of time

Ben Wilbrink

This page collects some literature on the concept of time, some annotations on it, and connecting bits and pieces of text.

The idea is to use the concept of time as an example of the endless possibilities to give meaning to such important concepts in our daily life, school work, or scientific endeavors. As such, the page will be useful to the readers of my 'Test item design', the first page of that online project is here. Serendipity is the method followed to gather some of the literature. The books will mostly be the ones that I have been able to acquire. I will try to gather online resources related to the issues I will mention in connection to any specific book.

There are many books on many important concepts. Max Jammer is without doubt one of the most interesting authors in this special field, having written two books on the concept of mass, and one on the concept of space. I will mention more of such books or articles as soon as I come across them - which will be soon, without any doubt.

Lee Smolin (january 2004). Atoms of space and time. Scientific American january 56-65.

"We perceive soace and time to be continuous, but if the amazing theory of loop quantum gravity is correct, they actually come in discrete pieces."

Richard Sorabji (1983). Time, Creation and the Continuum: Theories in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. University of Chicago Press.

contents
[Nog niet gezien. UB Leiden Universiteitsbibliotheek (SZ):ÊStudiezaal WijsbegeerteÊ-ÊS.WYSB 60 0851. Er is een nieuwe uitgave 2006, is dat ook een herziene uitgave?]
" Richard Sorabji here takes time as his central theme, exploring fundamental questions about its nature: Is it real or an aspect of consciousness? Did it begin along with the universe? Can anything escape from it? Does it come in atomic chunks? In addressing these and myriad other issues, Sorabji engages in an illuminating discussion of early thought about time, ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Islamic, Christian, and Jewish medieval thinkers. Sorabji argues that the thought of these often negelected philosophers about the subject is, in many cases, more complete than that of their more recent counterparts."

Dennis Overbye (May 22, 2001). Before the Big Bang, There Was . . . What? New York Times html

"ne of the earliest attempts to imagine the nothingness that is the source of everything came in 1965 when Dr. John Wheeler and Dr. Bryce DeWitt, now at the University of Texas, wrote down an equation pdf that combined general relativity and quantum theory. Physicists have been arguing about it ever since."
"Yet another puzzle about the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is that it makes no mention of time. In superspace everything happens at once and forever, leading some physicists to question the role of time in the fundamental laws of nature. In his book "The End of Time," published to coincide with the millennium, Dr. Julian Barbour, an independent physicist and Einstein scholar in England, argues that the universe consists of a stack of moments, like the cards in a deck, that can be shuffled and reshuffled arbitrarily to give the illusion of time and history."
"Dr. Carlo Rovelli, a quantum gravity theorist at the University of Pittsburgh, pointed out that the Wheeler- DeWitt equation doesn't mention space either, suggesting that both space and time might turn out to be artifacts of something deeper. "If we take general relativity seriously," he said, "we have to learn to do physics without time, without space, in the fundamental theory.""
"One of the keys to Dr. Hawking's approach is to replace time in his equations with a mathematical conceit called imaginary time; this technique is commonly used in calculations regarding black holes and in certain fields of particle physics, but its application to cosmology is controversial."

H. Groot (1958). Het mysterie van de tijd. Assen: Van Gorcum.

Haeften, Chris van (1999). Zijn en tijd in de filosofie van A.N. Whitehead. proefschrift Vrije Universiteit.

Mostert, Marco, Janneke Raaijmakers, en Peter Verbist (2003). Eeuwig gaat voor ogenblik. Tijd en de Middeleeuwen. Madoc, Tijdschrift over de Middeleeuwen, themanummer jaargang 17 nr 4. Hilversum: Verloren.

Lettinck, Nico (1983). Geschiedbeschouwing en beleving van de eigen tijd in de eerste helft van de twaalfde eeuw. proefschrift Vrije Universiteit

Gumbert-Hepp, M. (1987). Computus magistri Jacobi. Een schoolboek voor tijdrekenkunde uit 1436. Hilversum: Verloren.

Draaisma, D. (1990). Het verborgen raderwerk. Over tijd, machines en bewustzijn. Baarn: Ambo.

Moore, W. E. (1963). Man, time, & society. New York: Wiley.

Huang, Chun-shieh, and Erik Zürcher (Eds) (1995). Time & space in Chinese culture. Brill (meen ik)

Le Goff, J. (1980). Time, work, & culture in the middle ages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ariew, R. (Ed.) (1985). Pierre Duhem: Medieval cosmology; theories of infinity, place, time, void, and the plurality of worlds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Borst, A. (1993). The ordering of time. From the ancient computus to the modern computer. Cambridge: Polity Press. (1990, Computus: Zeit und Zahl in der Geschichte Europas. Verlag Klaus Wagenbach).

Wijk, W. E. van (1936). Le nombre dÕor. Žtude de chronologie technique suivie du texte de la Massa compoti dÕAlexandre de Villedieu avec traduction et commentaire. La Haye: Martnus Nijhoff.

Thomsen, C. W., & HollŠnder, H. (Her.) (1984). Augenblick und Zeitpunkt. Studien zur Zeitstruktur und Zeitmetaphorik in Kunst und Wissenschaften. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

Peter Galison (2003). Empires of time. Einstein's clocks, poincaré's maps. Norton.

Bede: the reckoning of time. Translated, with introduction, notes and commentary by Faith Wallis (1999). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Joseph Campbell (1957/1983). Man and time. Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks. Bollingen series XXX. Princeton University Press.

Natasa RakiŽ; (1997). Common sense, time and special relativity. Proefschrift Universiteit van Amsterdam.

E. W. Dolnikowski (1995). Thomas Bradwardine. A view of time and a vision of eternity in fourteenth-century thought. Leiden: Brill.

Fraser, J. T. (Ed.) The voices of time. A cooperative survey of man's views of time as expressed by the sciences and by the humanities. New York: George Braziller.

Hajime Nakamura: Time in Indian and Japanese thought, pp 77-91. "In Indian thought, time, like other phenomena, is conceived statically rather than dynamically." " This static conception of time permeates Indian thought. It could hardly fail to do so, for it is present in the very forms of language itself, conditioning all philosophical thinking. In the classical Indian languages, there are no words which corresponded to the concept 'to become.'" "On the whole, then, Western people comprehend action through its changing aspects, while Indians tend to comprehend it attributively. In particular, many Indians consider that action is an unchanging aspect, even an attribute, of existence. Westerners tend to regard action as an active phenomenon while Indians tend to look upon it statically."
Joseph Needham: Time and knowledge in China and the West, pp 92-135
Milic Capek: Time in relativity theory: Arguments for a philosophy of becoming, pp. 434- 454
Herbert Dingle: Time in relativity theory: Measurement or coordinate? pp. 455-472
E. J. Zimmerman: Time and quantum theory, pp. 479-499
Richard Schlegel: Time and thermodynamics, pp. 500-523
Satosi Watanabe: Time and the probabilistic world 527-563
C. J. Whitrow: Time and the universe, pp. 564-581

Fraser, J. T., N. Lawrence, and F. C. Haber, F. C. (Eds) (1986). Time, science, and society in China and the west. The study of time V. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Butterfield, J. (Ed.) (1999). The arguments of time. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Campbell, J. (1957/73). Man and time. Princeton UP.

Milic Capek (1991). The new aspects of time. Its continuity and novelties. Selected papers in the philosophy of science. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Milic Capek (Ed.) (1976). The concepts of space and time. Their structure and their development. Dordrecht/Boston: Reidel.

Roger Ariew (Ed.) (1985). Pierre Duhem: Medieval cosmology; theories of infinity, place, time, void, and the plurality of worlds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Earman, John C., Glymour, Clark N., & Stachel, John J. (Eds) (1977). Foundations of space-time theories. The Andover Conference. Minnesota Studies in Philosophy of Science, Volume VIII.

Price, H. (1996). Time's arrow and Archimedes' point. New directions for the physics of time. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hans Reichenbach (1956/1991). The direction of time. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Rescher, Nicholas (1981). Leibniz's metaphysics of nature. Dordrecht: Reidel.

Clark Blaise (2000). Time Lord. Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time. Weidenfeld & Nicholson.

Literature on specific concepts

Max Jammer (2000). Concepts of mass in contemporary physics and philosophy. Princeton University Press.

later developments in the 20th century, complements the earlier book.

Max Jammer (1961). Concepts of mass in classical and modern physics. Harvard University Press.

Max Jammer (1954/1993). Concepts of space. The history of theories of space in physics. Third, enlarged edition. New York: Dover.

The concept of space in antiquity - Judeo-Christian ideas about space - The emancipation of the space concept from Aristotelianism - The concept of absolute space - The concept of space in modern science - Recent developments in the philosophy of physical space

Milic Capek (Ed.) (1976). The concepts of space and time. Their structure and their development. Dordrecht/Boston: Reidel.

Contributions from Duhem, Koyré, Jammer, Descartes, Russell, Einstein, Bergson etc.

Bas C. van Fraassen (1989). Laws and symmetry. Oxford; Clarendon Press.

On the concept of laws of nature. Van Fraassen: There are none, we must not believe that there are.

Literature on concepts as such

Ladislav Tondl (1973). Scientific procedures. Dordddrecht: Reidel.

Part IV: Concepts of the language of science

Carl G. Hempel (1952). Fundamentals of concept formation in empirical science. London: The University of Chicago Press.

Peter Achinstein (1968). Concepts of science. A philosophical analysis. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press.

Stephen Toulmin (1972/1977). Human understanding. The collective use and evolution of concepts. Princeton University Press.

J. A. Fodor (1998). Concepts. Where cognitive science went wrong. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Christopher Peacocke (1992). A study of concepts. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

November 5, 2006 \ contact ben apenstaartje benwilbrink.nl

http://www.benwilbrink.nl/projecten/time.htm