Quantcast
Channel: とね日記
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 976

The Order of Time: Carlo Rovelli(時間は存在しない)

$
0
0
The Order of Time: Carlo Rovelli」(Kindle版)(日本語版

内容紹介:
“Highly original. . . . Chapter by chapter, Rovelli shows how modern physics has annihilated common understandings of time. . . . the many other excellent explanations of science, the heart and humanity of the book, its poetry and its gentle tone raise it to the level and style of such great scientist-writers as Lewis Thomas and Rachel Carson.” —Alan Lightman, New York Times Book Review

“ An elegant grapple with one of physics’ deepest mysteries. . . .A masterly writer. . . . In this little gem of a book, Mr. Rovelli first demolishes our common-sense notion of time. . . .an ambitious book that illuminates a thorny question, that succeeds in being a pleasurable read.” —Wall Street Journal

“No one writes about the cosmos like theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli. . . Rovelli’s new story of time is elegant and lucidly told, whether he is revealing facts or indulging in romantic-philosophic speculation about the nature of time.” —The Washington Post

Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04558-7
physicsworld: https://physicsworld.com/a/carlo-rovelli-the-author-of-the-order-of-time-discusses-perhaps-the-greatest-mystery/

2018年5月8日刊行、256ページ。原書イタリア語版刊行は2017年4月。

著者について:
カルロ・ロヴェッリ Carlo Rovelli
ホームページ: http://www.cpt.univ-mrs.fr/~rovelli/
Twitter: @carlorovelli
Carlo Rovelli was born in Italy, is a US citizen and lives in France. His main activity is in theoretical physics, where he is known as one of the founders of loop quantum gravity. He has also interests in the history and philosophy of science. He has written "Quantum Gravity", a treatise on loop quantum gravity and, for the large public, "The First Scientist: Anaximander and his Legacy", which is primarily a reflection on the nature of science. The book is translated in five languages and has been awarded by the "Prix du Livre Haute Maurienne".
Rovelli has worked in various Universities in Italy, the US and France. He is currently head of the quantum gravity group at the Center For Theoretical Physics of the Aix-Marseille University. He is Honorary Professor of the Normal University of Beijing, and member of the International Academy for the Philosophy of Science.

ロヴェッリ博士の日本語著書を検索: 書籍版 Kindle版
ロヴェッリ博士の外国語著書を検索: 書籍版 Kindle版


理数系書籍のレビュー記事は本書で428冊目。


英語で読んだ理由

英語教育の危機 (ちくま新書):鳥飼玖美子」を読んで以来、個人的に外国語学習ブームが続いている。外国語を身に付けるには、とにかく反復練習、多読が大切だ。

本の電子書籍化が進み、昔と違って洋書の選択肢はとてつもなく増えたことに加え簡単に買うことができる。また翻訳書に比べて安価なのもありがたい。

翻訳された科学教養書、専門書を読むとき、たいてい原書をKindleで買ってしまう。読まないともったいないのだ。このような本は小説に比べて表現や語彙が限られているから、とても読み易い。おそらく英検2級レベルの語学力があれば読むことができる。

というわけで先日読んだばかりの「時間は存在しない: カルロ・ロヴェッリ」を英語で読んでみた。(原書はイタリア語)本書の詳しい解説は「日本語版の紹介記事」のほうに書いておいたので、そちらを参考にしていただきたい。今回は本書の内容を復習するためと、英語学習のために読んでみた。家で読むときは音読、外で読むときは黙読した。

本書は英文読解用としては中級レベルだ。原著者がそうなのか英訳した方がそうなのかはわからないが、これまでお目にかかったことがない(おそらく英検1級レベル以上の)英単語がときどきでてくる。また詩的、文学的な表現が多い章は日本語版で確認する必要がある。

とはいえ、物理学や数学にかかわる箇所は平易な英語で書かれているから、日本語版に立ち戻らなくても楽に読めるはずだ。外国語の読書は最初のうちなかなか進まないものだが、読み進むにつれてペースが上がっていく。同じような表現や語彙が繰り返しでてくるから「単語帳」を作らなくても記憶に残る。

ぜひ、この記事に含めた英語の紹介記事を読んで理解できるようならば、英語版をお読みになることをお勧めしたい。また、リスニングのトレーニング用には記事の後半に埋め込んだ動画をご覧になるとよいだろう。イタリア語訛りだから英語は聞きやすいはずだ。


本書の構成と紹介

構成と章立ては、次のとおりだ。

Perhaps Time Is the Greatest Mystery

Part I: THE CRUMBLING OF TIME

Chapter 1: Loss of Unity
Chapter 2: Loss of Direction
Chapter 3: The End of the Present
Chapter 4: Independence
Chapter 5: Quanta of Time

Part II: THE WORLD WITHOUT TIME

Chapter 6: The World Is Made of Events, Not Things
Chapter 7: The Inadequacy of Grammar
Chapter 8: Dynamics as Relation

Part III: THE SOURCE OF TIME

Chapter 9: Time Is Ignorance
Chapter 10: Perspective
Chapter 11: What Emerges from a Particularity
Chapter 12: The Scent of the Madeleine
Chapter 13: The Source of Time

The Sister of Sleep


Introduction: Perhaps Time is the Greatest Mystery

I stop and do nothing. Nothing Happens. I am thinking about nothing. I listen to the passing of time.

This is time, familiar and intimate. We are taken by it. The rush of seconds, hours, years that hurls us toward life then drags us toward nothingness.... We inhabit time as fish live in water. Our being is being in time. Its solemn music nurtures us, opens the world to us, trou­bles us, frightens and lulls us. The universe unfolds into the future, dragged by time, and exists according to the order of time.

In Hindu mythology, the river of the cosmos is portrayed with the sacred image of Shiva dancing: his dance supports the coursing of the universe; it is itself the f lowing of time. What could be more universal and obvious than this flowing?

And yet things are somewhat more complicated than this. Reality is often very different from what it seems. The Earth appears to be flat but is in fact spherical. The sun seems to revolve in the sky when it is really we who are spinning. Neither is the structure of time what it seems to be: it is different from this uniform, universal flowing. I discovered this, to my utter astonishment, in the physics books I read as a university student: time works quite differently from the way it seems to.

In those same books I also discovered that we still don’t know how time actually works. The nature of time is perhaps the greatest remaining mystery. Curious threads connect it to those other great open mysteries: the nature of mind, the origin of the universe, the fate of black holes, the very functioning of life on Earth. Something essential continues to draw us back to the nature of time.

Wonder is the source of our desire for knowledge, and the discovery that time is not what we thought it was opens up a thousand questions. The nature of time has been at the center of my life’s work in theoretical physics. In the following pages, I give an account of what we have understood about time and the paths that are being followed in our search to understand it better, as well as an account of what we have yet to understand and what it seems to me that we are just beginning to glimpse.

Why do we remember the past and not the future? Do we exist in time, or does time exist in us? What does it really mean to say that time “passes”? What ties time to our nature as persons, to our subjectivity?

What am I listening to when I listen to the passing of time?

This book is divided into three unequal parts. In the first, I summarize what modern physics has understood about time. It is like holding a snowflake in your hands: gradually, as you study it, it melts between your fingers and vanishes. We conventionally think of time as something simple and fundamental that f lows uniformly, independently from everything else, from the past to the future, measured by clocks and watches. In the course of time, the events of the universe succeed each other in an orderly way: pasts, presents, futures. The past is fixed, the future open. . . . And yet all of this has turned out to be false.

One after another, the characteristic features of time have proved to be approximations, mistakes determined by our perspective, just like the flatness of the Earth or the revolving of the sun. The growth of our knowledge has led to a slow disintegration of our notion of time. What we call “time” is a complex collection of structures, of layers. Under increasing scrutiny, in ever greater depth, time has lost layers one after another, piece by piece. The first part of this book gives an account of this crumbling of time.

The second part describes what we have been left with: an empty, windswept landscape almost devoid of all trace of temporality. A strange, alien world that is nevertheless still the one to which we belong. It is like arriving in the high mountains, where there is nothing but snow, rocks, and sky. Or like it must have been for Armstrong and Aldrin when venturing onto the motionless sand of the moon. A world stripped to its essence, glittering with an arid and troubling beauty. The physics on which I work—quantum gravity—is an attempt to understand and lend coherent meaning to this extreme and beautiful landscape. To the world without time.

The third part of the book is the most difficult, but also the most vital and the one that most closely involves us. In a world without time, there must still be something that gives rise to the time that we are accustomed to, with its order, with its past that is different from the future, with its smooth f lowing. Somehow, our time must emerge around us, at least for us and at our scale.

This is the return journey, back toward the time lost in the first part of the book when pursuing the elementary grammar of the world. As in a crime novel, we are now going in search of a guilty party: the culprit who has created time. One by one, we discover the constituent parts of the time that is familiar to us—not, now, as elementary structures of reality, but rather as useful approximations for the clumsy and bungling mortal creatures we are: aspects of our perspective, and aspects, too, perhaps, that are decisive in determining what we are. Because the mystery of time is ultimately, perhaps, more about ourselves than about the cosmos. Perhaps, as in the first and greatest of all detective novels, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, the culprit turns out to be the detective.

Here, the book becomes a fiery magma of ideas, sometimes illuminating, sometimes confusing. If you decide to follow me, I will take you to where I believe our knowledge of time has reached: up to the brink of that vast nocturnal and star-studded ocean of all that we still don't know.


時間について博士が語る動画

ロヴェッリ博士のインタビューや講演の動画は、YouTubeにたくさん見つかる。このうち「時間について英語でお話しになっている動画」をピックアップした。ただし字幕はない。リスニングの練習用としてご覧になってもよいだろう。(ロヴェッリ博士の動画: YouTubeで検索

Carlo Rovelli on The Order of Time


The Physics and Philosophy of Time - with Carlo Rovelli


Q&A The Physics and Philosophy of Time - with Carlo Rovelli



著書と訳書(科学教養書)

本書の原書はイタリア語で書かれている。原書のほか英語版とフランス語版を載せておく。

時間は存在しない: カルロ・ロヴェッリ」(Kindle版)(紹介記事
L'ordine del tempo: Carlo Rovelli
The Order of Time: Carlo Rovelli」(Kindle版
L'ordre du temps: Carlo Rovelli
   


博士はこのほかにも何冊か一般向けの教養書をお書きになっている。現時点で日本語に翻訳されているものを外国語版とともに載せておこう。日本語版のタイトルは原書とまったく違うが、対応関係はこれで正しいことを確認した。

すごい物理学講義: カルロ・ロヴェッリ」(Kindle版
La realtà non è come ci appare: Carlo Rovelli
Reality Is Not What It Seems: Carlo Rovelli」(Kindle版
Par delà le visible La réalité du monde: Carlo Rovelli
   


世の中ががらりと変わって見える物理の本: カルロ・ロヴェッリ」(Kindle版
Sette brevi lezioni di fisica: Carlo Rovelli
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics: Carlo Rovelli」(Kindle版
Sept brèves leçons de physique: Carlo Rovelli
   


ループ量子重力の本

博士のご専門は量子重力理論のうちのひとつ、ループ量子重力理論だ。博士による入門者向け専門書(英語)、他の著者による教養書と入門者向け専門書を紹介しておこう。

Covariant Loop Quantum Gravity: Carlo Rovelli, Francesca Vidotto」(Kindle版
繰り返される宇宙: マーチン・ボジョワルド」(ドイツ語原書)(原書Kindle版
初級講座 ループ量子重力: R. ガムビーニ、J. プリン」(原書)(原書Kindle版
  


関連記事:

時間は存在しない: カルロ・ロヴェッリ
https://blog.goo.ne.jp/ktonegaw/e/55f4ffc2e5f45add46dea97086bb3aed

時:渡辺慧
https://blog.goo.ne.jp/ktonegaw/e/d149cf16bb9dd319f572e4228fdfe241

アラン・コンヌ博士の非可換幾何学とは?
https://blog.goo.ne.jp/ktonegaw/e/5f5fc6fd565dbd789d1129c23986c849

深層学習と時空:橋本幸士先生 #MathPower
https://blog.goo.ne.jp/ktonegaw/e/bf7e7e661246866943c765bdd371248f

ディープラーニングと物理学 原理がわかる、応用ができる:田中章詞、富谷昭夫、橋本幸士
https://blog.goo.ne.jp/ktonegaw/e/5edea35c359ead77cf30915e9dd28bce

明解量子重力理論入門:吉田伸夫
https://blog.goo.ne.jp/ktonegaw/e/e0ab2fd9fafe3568c24ed358dd4ea92c

量子重力には対称性はない ― 大栗機構長らが証明
https://blog.goo.ne.jp/ktonegaw/e/f3873800958a91cedc050075c14d303c


メルマガを書いています。(目次一覧


応援クリックをお願いします。
にほんブログ村 科学ブログ 物理学へ 人気ブログランキングへ 

 

 

The Order of Time: Carlo Rovelli」(Kindle版)(日本語版


Perhaps Time Is the Greatest Mystery

Part I: THE CRUMBLING OF TIME

Chapter 1: Loss of Unity
- The Slowing Down of Time
- Ten Thousand Dancing Shivas

Chapter 2: Loss of Direction
- Where Does the Eternal Current Come from?
- Heat
- Blur

Chapter 3: The End of the Present
- Speed Also Slows Down Time
- "Now" Means Nothing
- Temporal Structure Without the Present

Chapter 4: Independence
- What Happens when Nothing Happens?
- What is There, Where There is Nothing?
- The Dance of the Three Giants

Chapter 5: Quanta of Time
- Granuality
- Quantum Superpositions of Times
- Relations

Part II: THE WORLD WITHOUT TIME

Chapter 6: The World Is Made of Events, Not Things
Chapter 7: The Inadequacy of Grammar
Chapter 8: Dynamics as Relation
- Elementary Quantum Events and Spin Networks

Part III: THE SOURCE OF TIME

Chapter 9: Time Is Ignorance
- Thermal Time
- Quantum Time

Chapter 10: Perspective
- We are the Ones Turning
- Indexicality

Chapter 11: What Emerges from a Particularity
- It is Enthropy, not Energy, that Drives the World
- Trances and Causes

Chapter 12: The Scent of the Madeleine
Chapter 13: The Source of Time

The Sister of Sleep

Image Credits
Notes
Index
About the Author

Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 976

Trending Articles