Time, Light and the Dice of Creation

The laws of modern physics are seen as the bedrock of our understanding of the material world that surrounds us. The mathematics of Newton and Maxwell reliably describe behavior and events in the world and are the bases for our age of technology, from telephones to space travel. Yet the founders of modern scientific thought such as Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and Pauli struggled to pin down the paradoxical concepts they needed for the "workable" theories of the subatomic and quantum world and its mysteries. At the height of the debate over the nature of matter, Einstein famously objected, "God does not play dice." Starting from the significance of zero and one, with their contrasting Eastern and Western philosophies, Philip Franses unravels the knots that surround elusive concepts such as matter, chance, time, light, darkness, emptiness, and form. Exploring current models in science, he poses these questions: Does light travel in time, or is it time that travels in light? How can emptiness hold potential? Can chance create order? What does our own experience mean in all this? In this stimulating book, the author invites us on a journey and a life full of surprise and ambiguity, from paradoxes in physics to the meaning of time and the mythology of creation.