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

Seeking to reconcile the irreversibility of time--time's one-way ``arrow '' --with otherwise reversible laws of physics, science writer Highfield and University of Wales lecturer Coveney delve into biology, physics and mathematics. Their examination of time's place in the world of quantum mechanics, in particular, requires many diversions into recent theory and is presented so well that their solution to the paradox--plucked like a rabbit from the hat of chaos theory--suffers for lack of similarly strong proofs. The bold reinterpretations of relativity, dynamics theory and quantum mechanics, all in the spirit of intuitive modern science, are nonetheless stimulating and offer a more complex view of time than Stephen Hawking ' s A Brief History of Time, as well as an interesting proposal for its future. (June)