Time is fascinating and important to everyone. This book does two things: it reviews a great range of images of time, that is, theories of time, from a diversity of perspectives: historical, religious, biological, mathematical, and scientific. In addition to a wide-ranging discussion of many aspects of time, the book shows how a spreadsheet can be used easily to explore various aspects of time such as time travel and light cones in relativity. But it goes further. It introduces the concept (...) of generalized proposition, which can be used by the reader to distinguish those images of time that are metaphysical (which means they cannot be scientifically validated) and those that could in principle be put to empirical test. This is of particular importance in this day and age, when we are flooded by a plethora of competing images of time. Many of these have no scientific basis, empirical support, or content but are presented as if they do. (shrink)

Science is at a cross-roads. For several decades, the Standard Model of particle physics has managed to fit vast amounts of particle scattering data remarkably well, but many questions remain. During those decades, some sophisticated theoretical hypotheses such as string theory, quantum gravity, and quantum cosmology have been proposed and studied intensively, in an effort to break the log-jam of the Standard Model. None of those hypotheses have succeeded to date. Of greater concern is the increasing tendency by some practitioners (...) in those fields to downplay the empirical principles of science. In response, this book is a restatement of those principles, covering numerous aspects of observation. A particular focus is on contextuality versus realism, the two fundamentally contrasting ideologies that underpin modern physics. (shrink)