
Now
The Physics of Time - and the Ephemeral Moment That Einstein Could Not Explain
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Narrated by:
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Christopher Grove
About this listen
“Now” is a simple yet elusive concept. You are reading the word now right now. But what does that mean? What makes the ephemeral moment "now" so special? Its enigmatic character has bedeviled philosophers, priests, and modern-day physicists from Augustine to Einstein and beyond. Einstein showed that the flow of time is affected by both velocity and gravity, yet he despaired at his failure to explain the meaning of now. Equally puzzling: Why does time flow? Some physicists have given up trying to understand and call the flow of time an illusion, but the eminent experimentalist physicist Richard A. Muller protests. He says physics should explain reality, not deny it.
In Now, Muller does more than poke holes in past ideas; he crafts his own revolutionary theory, one that makes testable predictions. He begins by laying out - with the refreshing clarity that made Physics for Future Presidents so successful - a firm and remarkably clear explanation of the physics building blocks of his theory: relativity, entropy, entanglement, antimatter, and the big bang. With the stage then set, he reveals a startling way forward.
Muller points out that the standard big bang theory explains the ongoing expansion of the universe as the continuous creation of new space. He argues that time is also expanding and that the leading edge of the new time is what we experience as now. This thought-provoking vision has remarkable implications for some of our biggest questions, not only in physics but also in philosophy, including the ongoing debate about the reality of free will. Moreover, his theory is testable. Muller's monumental work will spark major debate about the most fundamental assumptions of our universe and may crack one of physics' longest-standing enigmas.
Includes a PDF of Images from the book.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2016 Richard A. Muller (P)2016 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Mind-blowing…[Muller] posits a theory that seems at once plausible and - surprisingly, for a book with equations - one worth not spoiling." (Time)
"[A] concise master class in understanding the essentials of physics." (Lisa Jardine-Wright, Science)
"Muller has taken a remarkably fresh and exciting approach to the analysis of time. With his usual clarity and wit, he proceeds from solidly established principles - each a fascinating story in its own right - but when he gets to the meaning of the flow of time and now, he forges a new path. I expect controversy!" (Saul Perlmutter, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics)
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By: David Axelrod
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How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch
- In Search of the Recipe for Our Universe, from the Origins of Atoms to the Big Bang
- By: Harry Cliff
- Narrated by: Harry Cliff
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Harry Cliff - a University of Cambridge particle physicist and researcher on the Large Hadron Collider - sets out in pursuit of answers. He ventures to the largest underground research facility in the world, deep beneath Italy's Gran Sasso mountains, where scientists gaze into the heart of the Sun using the most elusive of particles, the ghostly neutrino. He visits CERN in Switzerland to explore the "Antimatter Factory," where the stuff of science fiction is manufactured daily (and we're close to knowing whether it falls up).
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Excellent
- By Adrian on 01-06-23
By: Harry Cliff
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Storm in a Teacup
- The Physics of Everyday Life
- By: Helen Czerski
- Narrated by: Chloe Massey
- Length: 10 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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In Storm in a Teacup, Helen Czerski provides the tools to alter the way we see everything around us by linking ordinary objects and occurrences, like popcorn popping, coffee stains, and fridge magnets, to big ideas like climate change, the energy crisis, and innovative medical testing.
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Everyday Physics Thoroughly Explained
- By Amazon Customer on 01-19-17
By: Helen Czerski
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The Deep History of Ourselves
- The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains
- By: Joseph LeDoux
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Renowned neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux digs into the natural history of life on earth to provide a new perspective on the similarities between us and our ancestors in deep time. This pause-resisting survey of the whole of terrestrial evolution sheds new light on how nervous systems evolved in animals, how the brain developed, and what it means to be human. In The Deep History of Ourselves, LeDoux argues that the key to understanding human behavior lies in viewing evolution through the prism of the first living organisms.
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Oversold
- By Michael on 03-04-20
By: Joseph LeDoux
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Evolution for Everyone
- How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives
- By: David Sloan Wilson
- Narrated by: René Ruiz
- Length: 13 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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With stories that entertain as much as they inform, renowned evolutionist David Sloan Wilson outlines the basic principles of evolution and shows how, when properly understood, they can illuminate the length and breadth of creation, from the origin of life to the nature of religion.
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Everything evolves - really
- By Amazon Customer on 02-23-23
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Water
- A Biography
- By: Giulio Boccaletti
- Narrated by: Giulio Boccaletti
- Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Spanning millennia and continents, here is a stunningly revealing history of how the distribution of water has shaped human civilization. Giulio Boccaletti - honorary research associate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford - shrewdly combines environmental and social history, beginning with the earliest civilizations of sedentary farmers on the banks of the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates Rivers.
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Understand Built-Environment Governance~Know Water
- By Tom on 05-11-22
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The Big Picture
- On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself
- By: Sean Carroll
- Narrated by: Sean Carroll
- Length: 17 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Already internationally acclaimed for his elegant, lucid writing on the most challenging notions in modern physics, Sean Carroll is emerging as one of the greatest humanist thinkers of his generation as he brings his extraordinary intellect to bear not only on the Higgs boson and extra dimensions but now also on our deepest personal questions. Where are we? Who are we? Are our emotions, our beliefs, and our hopes and dreams ultimately meaningless out there in the void?
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ABSOLUTE MUST READ!
- By serine on 05-12-16
By: Sean Carroll
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Nobody's Normal
- How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness
- By: Roy Richard Grinker
- Narrated by: Lyle Blaker
- Length: 14 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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A compassionate and captivating examination of evolving attitudes toward mental illness throughout history and the fight to end the stigma. For centuries, scientists and society cast moral judgments on anyone deemed mentally ill, confining many to asylums. In Nobody’s Normal, anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker chronicles the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness stigma - from the 18th century, through America’s major wars, and into today’s high-tech economy.
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Educational Trudge
- By MFreddy25 on 08-31-21
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The Wizard and the Prophet
- Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World
- By: Charles C. Mann
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 18 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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In 40 years, Earth's population will reach 10 billion. Can our world support that? What kind of world will it be? Those answering these questions generally fall into two deeply divided groups - Wizards and Prophets, as Charles Mann calls them in this balanced, authoritative, nonpolemical new book. The Prophets, he explains, follow William Vogt, a founding environmentalist who believed that in using more than our planet has to give, our prosperity will lead us to ruin.
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Fantastic
- By BKATX on 01-26-18
By: Charles C. Mann
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Science in the Soul
- Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist
- By: Richard Dawkins
- Narrated by: Richard Dawkins, Lalla Ward, Gillian Somerscales
- Length: 14 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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For decades Richard Dawkins has been the world's most brilliant scientific communicator, consistently illuminating the wonders of nature and attacking faulty logic. Science in the Soul brings together 42 essays, polemics, and paeans - culled from personal papers, newspapers, lectures, and online salons - all written with Dawkins' characteristic erudition, remorseless wit, and unjaded awe of the natural world.
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Great writing; distracting reading
- By Chris DeMuth Jr on 08-09-17
By: Richard Dawkins
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She Has Her Mother's Laugh
- The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity
- By: Carl Zimmer
- Narrated by: Joe Ochman
- Length: 20 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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She Has Her Mother's Laugh presents a profoundly original perspective on what we pass along from generation to generation. Charles Darwin played a crucial part in turning heredity into a scientific question, and yet he failed spectacularly to answer it. The birth of genetics in the early 1900s seemed to do precisely that. Gradually, people translated their old notions about heredity into a language of genes. We need a new definition of what heredity is and, through Carl Zimmer's lucid exposition and storytelling, this resounding tour de force delivers it.
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Changed this strict genetic determinist's mind
- By Anonymous User on 06-11-18
By: Carl Zimmer
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The Future of Humanity
- Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny Beyond Earth
- By: Michio Kaku
- Narrated by: Feodor Chin
- Length: 12 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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The number-one best-selling author of The Future of the Mind traverses the frontiers of astrophysics, artificial intelligence, and technology to offer a stunning vision of man's future in space, from settling Mars to traveling to distant galaxies. Formerly the domain of fiction, moving human civilization to the stars is increasingly becoming a scientific possibility - and a necessity. Whether in the near future due to climate change and the depletion of finite resources or in the distant future due to catastrophic cosmological events, humans will one day need to leave Earth.
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Simply a compilation of many other books
- By Nat Smith on 02-25-18
By: Michio Kaku
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The Buried
- An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution
- By: Peter Hessler
- Narrated by: Peter Hessler
- Length: 16 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Drawn by a fascination with Egypt's rich history and culture, Peter Hessler moved with his wife and twin daughters to Cairo in 2011. He wanted to learn Arabic, explore Cairo's neighborhoods, and visit the legendary archaeological digs of Upper Egypt. After his years of covering China for The New Yorker, friends warned him Egypt would be a much quieter place. But not long before he arrived, the Egyptian Arab Spring had begun, and now the country was in chaos.
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A Fascinating, Funny, and Moving Account of Egypt
- By Jefferson on 07-23-19
By: Peter Hessler
Bewildering, mind blowing, ultimately enlightening
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The best I can say is that he is clever to a point with semantics but really doesn't open the doors to a great, or as he would say, a more correct interpretation of time. Because entropy is a fluid process that cannot define 'now' is no reason to toss entropy as a means of defining time as best we are able. Really, time is fluid and there is no now. Before you can say now, the time has past. There is not frozen moment of time.
The book is interesting but I would not say it's ground breaking.
No. Sorry, Just No
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Extremely informative....
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It might fizzle out somewhat in the end; but it's not because of topics irrelevant to physics. He ends up digging further into borderline-metaphysics than most of his intended audience might appreciate, assuming that audience to be science-minded people who only respect falsifiable hypotheses. But eventually physicists will have to explain the borderline physics that he mentions. Besides, he never suggests pursuing any studies that can't be tested and falsified, so it's not "spiritual clap-trap".
Great insights in real physics; some "metaphysics"
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Excellent and accessible review of modern physics
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Besides describing time expansion being similar to space expansion, it seemed to me that now is a topic for further study, waiting for someone to come along and figure it out.
No answers
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What did you love best about Now?
A great summary of the history as well as the latest thinking about time and physics. GreatBEST PHYSICS BOOK I HAVE READ
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Overly technical
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Unsurprisingly the overarching question of the time remained deprived of a compelling answer, and the proposed theory of its direction lacked some essential details, and neglected to fill in some fundamental gaps, e.g. if the creation of new spacetime puts a mandatory direction on time, then why does it not put a similar direction on space? If newly created space doesn't stop us from moving to and fro in each of its 3 dimension then why the newly created time doesn't allow that? The whole basic question of the direction of time remained unsatisfied IMO.
Some good science - some bad philosophy - ...
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Great book, but does not work well as an audio
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