SPS Forum

You can view the essays here

The contest has ended already, and guess what: Sean Carroll got second prize! All the more reason to buy his textbook


EDIT: I have renamed this thread. Since the Time Essay contest is obsolete, though I still find various interesting essays from different places. So I shall reserve this thread for semi-technical essays in general.

I guess those who are interested in new topics would want to read this, but we will be bored if we keep reading the layman articles ("stars explode when they grow old", "black hole sucks things", etc.), which seldom offers anything new..

So the essays I will post here are slightly beyond layman level, but still below technical level. So those are commonly readable by scientist who are interested in topics from outside their field (Read: SPS ). Examples are those already posted regarding the Essay Contest about time. Maybe I will include some scientists' blog posts as well, since they really are usually intelligent and readable articles at the same time.

What book?

Is there anyway to see the essays?

This book

As for the essays, you can search his name in ArXiv. He uploaded his essay there...

Ok, thank you!

For those still interested in the philosophy of time, a new paper appeared in ArXiv today:
http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.2330

Seems like people are still regularly updating their essay entries:
On the global existence of time
http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.0904

Wow... that's interesting...

But somehow, after reading everything I've read on about time, I still don't know what to think of it. Seems like it's getting more and more abstract everytime I think about it... Not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing...

I have renamed this thread, c.f. the quotes / edited first post above.

I'll start by posting a guest blog post from a string theorist Clifford Johnson:
http://asymptotia.com/2009/09/22/len-ad ... cal-logic/

This may be of interest to Hariom and co. - The nature of God and chronology protection conjecture!

Can God find a place in physics? St. Augustine's philosophy meets general relativity

http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.3876

Abstract:
In this speculative work I investigate whether God may find a place in theoretical physics. The comparison between some aspects of the nature of God, as deduced by the philosopher St. Augustine, and general relativity, suggests to identify God with a chronology violating region of spacetime. From this conclusion some physical suggestions can be drawn. Among them novel solutions to the homogeneity and entropy problems of cosmology.