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A review by hilaritas
Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe by Lee Smolin
3.0
I remain largely unconvinced by Smolin's reasoning but I did come to appreciate his project, less for the strength of its argument and more as an example of Smolin's "principle of the open future" that encourages developing a "diverse range of viewpoints and hypotheses" when rational argument alone can't solve a problem. I accept Smolin's book in the spirit of throwing out some wild ideas to see if anything sticks rather than as a closely reasoned and evidence-supported argument.
He appears to have an ax to grind with Platonism (although he weirdly attributes it more often to Aristotle by way of Christianity), and wants to emphasize the importance of time to support the possibility of change in order to support his political commitments. So he's basically reinvented Heraclitus as a physics theory. All well and good, I suppose, but I never quite understood how he's done anything more than push the metaphysical question back a step. If the universe did not begin in the Big Bang but instead has evolved (including the laws governing it) through a potentially infinite series of rebirths or birthing of new universes in black holes, you still have to account for why anything exists rather than nothing, and how that process began (and continues to occur). And how mathematics maps to the observable qualities of existence in a way that would permit such cosmological transformations to occur. So in that respect, his philosophical argument seemed a bit half-baked. At least he did acknowledge near the end that the deep metaphysical questions of why anything exists is beyond him.
I'm not an expert on physics despite an amateur interest in books like these, but I found the heavy-lifting portions of his physics proof to be largely opaque due to excessive jargon, seemingly jumpy logic, and good old-fashioned hand-waving away of the details that may support or refute his position. I will give credit that his motives for wanting to rescue time from theories of timeless transcendence appear noble, as he wants us to take more seriously our obligations to care for our environment, accept the gravity of moral choices, and to infuse meaning into existence. Which I guess forgives his shaggy and rambling epilogue where he opines on subjects far afield of his own expertise, like political theory, economics, and the hard problem of consciousness. It turns out his theory that time is real, man, can solve all problems in all areas of inquiry!
I'm glad I slogged through this even though I found it quite exhausting at times. Although it wasn't a first-rate pop science book, Smolin is ambitious and enthusiastic, which goes a long way. Further, and completely frivolously, I never stopped wondering which member of Suicide was his cousin.
He appears to have an ax to grind with Platonism (although he weirdly attributes it more often to Aristotle by way of Christianity), and wants to emphasize the importance of time to support the possibility of change in order to support his political commitments. So he's basically reinvented Heraclitus as a physics theory. All well and good, I suppose, but I never quite understood how he's done anything more than push the metaphysical question back a step. If the universe did not begin in the Big Bang but instead has evolved (including the laws governing it) through a potentially infinite series of rebirths or birthing of new universes in black holes, you still have to account for why anything exists rather than nothing, and how that process began (and continues to occur). And how mathematics maps to the observable qualities of existence in a way that would permit such cosmological transformations to occur. So in that respect, his philosophical argument seemed a bit half-baked. At least he did acknowledge near the end that the deep metaphysical questions of why anything exists is beyond him.
I'm not an expert on physics despite an amateur interest in books like these, but I found the heavy-lifting portions of his physics proof to be largely opaque due to excessive jargon, seemingly jumpy logic, and good old-fashioned hand-waving away of the details that may support or refute his position. I will give credit that his motives for wanting to rescue time from theories of timeless transcendence appear noble, as he wants us to take more seriously our obligations to care for our environment, accept the gravity of moral choices, and to infuse meaning into existence. Which I guess forgives his shaggy and rambling epilogue where he opines on subjects far afield of his own expertise, like political theory, economics, and the hard problem of consciousness. It turns out his theory that time is real, man, can solve all problems in all areas of inquiry!
I'm glad I slogged through this even though I found it quite exhausting at times. Although it wasn't a first-rate pop science book, Smolin is ambitious and enthusiastic, which goes a long way. Further, and completely frivolously, I never stopped wondering which member of Suicide was his cousin.