The Arrow of Time; A Voyage Through Science to Solve Time's Greatest Mystery

New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1991. First American Edition [stated]. First Printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. 24 cm. 378, [6] pages. Foreword by Ilya Prigogine. Illustrations (some in color). Notes. Bibliography. Glossary of Terms. Index. Peter Coveney is a Professor of Physical Chemistry, Honorary Professor of Computer Science, and the Director of the Centre for Computational Science (CCS) at University College London (UCL). He is also a Professor of Applied High Performance Computing at University of Amsterdam (UvA), Professor Adjunct in the Medical School at Yale University and Member of Academia Europaea. Coveney has a varied and active research portfolio, covering a wide range of disciplines and areas including: computational medicine and life sciences, condensed matter physics, computational chemistry and physics, and high performance computing, and has more than 400 publications in international scientific journals. He has also led several large scale international projects, most notably, the EPSRC RealityGrid e-Science Pilot Project and its extension project, and the EU FP7 Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) Network of Excellent. He is currently the Principle Investigator on several grants from the European Commission and other agencies, including the EU Horizon 2020 projects Verified Exascale Computing for Multiscale Applications, "VECMA" and Centre of Excellence in Computational Biomedicine, "CompBioMed2". The original CompBioMed initiative was launched after Coveney and his team challenged the EU following a rejected grant proposal. This led to him launching a critique of Big Data in Biology with Ed Dougherty of Texas A&M and Roger Highfield. Derived from a Kirkus review: It is the ambition of all research, the authors quote 19th- century scientist Willard Gibbs, ``to find the point of view from which the subject appears in its greatest simplicity.'' However, it is the ambition of these same authors) to demonstrate that simplicity doesn't get you very far in the real (macroscopic) world of time and space. Thus, the die is cast. The authors' aim in this not-so-easy treatise is to find objective bases for the irreversibility of time. Rather than discourse on varying interpretations of time in the manner of Stephen J. Gould in Time's Arrow, or assume the positivist stance of Stephen W. Hawking in A Short History of Time, the authors make a case for uncertainty and ``dynamical'' chaos. Their approach is historical, pointing out that Newton's laws of motion, Einstein's relativity theory, and quantum mechanics all treat time as symmetrical-time can move forward and backward in the equations. But we know otherwise and so did 19th-century formulators of the second law of thermodynamics-entropy increases and isolated systems move inexorably toward thermal equilibrium. It is only with Prigogine and colleagues, recent computer modeling, and theories of chaos and catastrophe that the authors arrive at a state of the science in which they believe time's arrow is objectively demonstrated. All this may not mean a lot to people who take life, death, and decay as a given. However, for the intellectually curious there is much food for thought. The authors provide some fascinating examples of biorhythms and patterning in chemical and biological clocks, and in self-organizing systems from slime molds to the mammalian embryo.