You support a principle of relativity. Why not a principle of absolutism? You support the abolition of a spatial aether. Why not support the existence of a non-spatial aether? You believe that things can be stationary. Why not that they must be in a state of absolute motion? You believe that space and time are the proper stage in which reality should unfold. Why not in a Singularity of non-space and non-time? Is that not a mind, even a "Mind of God?" Don't you want to hack the Mind of God? You think everything should be about particles in a void, as the ancient Atomists said. Why not waves in a Singularity? Waves are dimensionless "atoms" with an atomic number of zero. You think everything should be about matter, with atomic number of one and greater. Why are you so afraid of zero? Why does it torment you so? Why shouldn't everything start with light – massless, and maximally length contracted and time dilated? You think everything should be about science. Why not about mathematics? You think everything should be about the senses. Why not about reason and logic? Should the scientific method start with exercising the senses or exercising reason? What kind of "rational" subject begins by claiming that something else – sensing – is more important than reasoning? Welcome to science! Science told you a story about sensory stuff. And you believed it. Why shouldn't concepts be truer than percepts? Why shouldn't mind be truer than matter? Why shouldn't reality be a self-solving intellect rather than a lurching, mindless body, blind and dumb? Why are you so scared of belonging to a smart universe? Why do you prefer reality to be stupid? What does that say about you? Why is eternal and necessary mind rejected in favor of temporal and contingent matter? Why is a priori thinking rejected in favor of a posteriori sensing? Why shouldn't light be the master of the show? The light of reason. Light is reason. It's the carrier of the cosmic intellect. Do you have good reasons for what you believe? Do you really even know what you believe? Why shouldn't mathematics have an ontology? Why shouldn't mathematics exist as light, as waves, as dimensionless sinusoids with zero mass and atomic number zero? Why are you so horrified by reality being made of mathematics, existing as light? There is only one subject that has the capacity to provide a definitive answer to existence. That's mathematics. All the rest is shinola.

Presenting a collection of original essays from a team of international philosophers and physicists, this volume reassesses the contemporary paradigm of the relativistic concept of time. There is no other book like this currently available.

Kurt Gödel was an intellectual giant. His Incompleteness Theorem turned not only mathematics but also the whole world of science and philosophy on its head. Shattering hopes that logic would, in the end, allow us a complete understanding of the universe, Gödel's theorem also raised many provocative questions: What are the limits of rational thought? Can we ever fully understand the machines we build? Or the inner workings of our own minds? How should mathematicians proceed in the absence of complete certainty about their results? Equally legendary were Gödel's eccentricities, his close friendship with Albert Einstein, and his paranoid fear of germs that eventually led to his death from self-starvation. Now, in the first book for a general audience on this strange and brilliant thinker, John Casti and Werner DePauli bring the legend to life.

This book contains selected papers from the First International Conference on the Ontology of Spacetime. Its fourteen chapters address two main questions: first, what is the current status of the substantivalism/relationalism debate, and second, what about the prospects of presentism and becoming within present-day physics and its philosophy? The overall tenor of the four chapters of the book's first part is that the prospects of spacetime substantivalism are bleak, although different possible positions remain with respect to the ontological status of spacetime. Part II and Part III of the book are devoted to presentism, eternalism, and becoming, from two different perspectives. In the six chapters of Part II it is argued, in different ways, that relativity theory does not have essential consequences for these issues. It certainly is true that the structure of time is different, according to relativity theory, from the one in classical theory. But that does not mean that a decision is forced between presentism and eternalism, or that becoming has proved to be an impossible concept. It may even be asked whether presentism and eternalism really offer different ontological perspectives at all. The writers of the last four chapters, in Part III, disagree. They argue that relativity theory is incompatible with becoming and presentism. Several of them come up with proposals to go beyond relativity, in order to restore the prospects of presentism.· Space and time in present-day physics and philosophy · Introduction from scratch of the debates surrounding time · Broad spectrum of approaches, coherently represented

There's a new kid on the block, a subject that can revolutionize humanity's understanding of reality, while being completely rational and logical, and scrupulously avoiding faith and mysticism. It's the long-awaited replacement for science. Only one subject can take over from science and that is the subject that is already at the core of science and gives it all of its power and success, namely mathematics. Come inside and discover the extraordinary world of ontological mathematics. Mathematics is not an unreal abstraction. It's real and concrete.

These fourteen essays by leading historians and philosophers of science introduce the reader to the work of Albert Einstein. Following an introduction that places Einstein's work in the context of his life and times, the essays explain his main contributions to physics in terms that are accessible to a general audience, including special and general relativity, quantum physics, statistical physics, and unified field theory. The closing essays explore the relation between Einstein's work and twentieth-century philosophy, as well as his political writings.

It is a widely known but little considered fact that Albert Einstein and Kurt Godel were best friends for the last decade and a half of Einstein's life. The two walked home together from Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study every day; they shared ideas about physics, philosophy, politics, and the lost world of German science in which they had grown up. By 1949, Godel had produced a remarkable proof: In any universe described by the Theory of Relativity, time cannot exist . Einstein endorsed this result-reluctantly, since it decisively overthrew the classical world-view to which he was committed. But he could find no way to refute it, and in the half-century since then, neither has anyone else. Even more remarkable than this stunning discovery, however, was what happened afterward: nothing. Cosmologists and philosophers alike have proceeded with their work as if Godel's proof never existed -one of the greatest scandals of modern intellectual history. A World Without Time is a sweeping, ambitious book, and yet poignant and intimate. It tells the story of two magnificent minds put on the shelf by the scientific fashions of their day, and attempts to rescue from undeserved obscurity the brilliant work they did together.