Physics and the Ultimate Significance of Time challenges the conventional view of the nature of time. The dominant twentieth-century view, supported by Einstein and many of the founders of quantum theory, implies that time is ultimately unreal. Several new schools of thought reject the notion that physics is temporally symmetrical, and that time could just as easily run backwards. Combating this conventional view of time, this book offers three new viewpoints and explores their apparent differences.
Nobel prize winner Ilya Prigogine argues that irreversibility and asymmetry are more fundamental than reversibility and symmetry. David Bohm notes that while conventional notions about physics and the worldview it suggests have been based upon exclusive attention to the 'explicate order,' quite another view results when primary attention is focused on the 'implicate order.' And the growing school of process philosophy based on Alfred North Whitehead's work holds that irreversible temporal relations characterize the most 'elementary' components of the world, implying the heretical view that time exists for a single electron or atom.
David Ray Griffin is Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the School of Theology at Claremont and Claremont Graduate School and Executive Director of the Center for Process Studies.
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Table of Contents
Preface
1. Introduction: Time and the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness
David Ray Griffin
I Historical Backgrounds
2. Evolutionary Epistemology, Durational Metaphysics, and Theoretical Physics: Capek and the Bergsonian Tradition
Andrew G. Bjelland
3. Dynamic, Asymmetrical, Internal Relations: Some Questions for Andrew Bjelland
Pete A. Y. Gunter
4. Response to Pete Gunter
Andrew G. Bjelland
5. Time in the Earlier and Later Whitehead
Patrick Hurley
6. Contemporaneity, Knowledge, and God: A Comment on Hurley's Paper
Frederick Ferré
7. Time, Events, and Substance: Comments on Hurley and Whitehead
Peter Miller
8. Whitehead's Later View on Space-Time: A Response to Patrick Hurley
John B. Cobb, Jr.
II Bohm, Prigogine, and Process Philosophy
9. Bohm and Whitehead on Wholeness, Freedom, Causality, and Time
David Ray Griffin
10. Bohm and Time
John B. Cobb, Jr.
11. Bohm and Process Philosophy: A Response to Griffin and Cobb
Ian G. Barbour
12. Reply to Comments of John Cobb and David Griffin
David Bohm
13. Time, the Implicate Order and Pre-Space
DavidBohm
14. A Response to David Bohm's "Time, the Implicate Order and Pre-Space"
Robert John Russell
15. Time and Higher-Order Wholeness: A Response to David Bohm
Steven M. Rosen
16. An Example of Bohm's"Implicate Order"
Crockett L. Grabbe
17. Irreversibility and Space-Time Structure
Ilya Prigogine
18. Far-from-Equilibrium Thermodynamics and Process Thought
Joseph E. Earley
19. Some Questions for Ilya Prigogine
Pete A. Y. Gunter
20. Response to Pete Gunter
Ilya Prigogine
21. Comments on Ilya Prigogine's Program
David Bohm
22. Einstein Time and Process Time
Henry P. Stapp
23. Process Time and Static Time: A Response to Henry Stapp
Tim Eastman
24. Physics and Metaphysics: Henry Stapp on Time
William B. Jones
25. Comments on Henry Stapp's "Einstein Time and Process Time"
David Bohm
26. On "Becoming" as a Fifth Dimension
Peter Miller
27. A Short Comment on Henry Stapp's Contribution
Ilya Prigogine
III
Philosophical Overviews
28. The Unreality and Indeterminacy of the Future in the Light of Contemporary Physics
Milic Capek
29. On the Ultimate Significance of Time for Truth, Goodness, and the Sacred
Frederick Ferré
Notes on Contributors
Name Index
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