ABSTRACT
If we take Price’s latest book on the arrow of time, for example, we observe that physicists and philosophers are still puzzled by the lack of consistency between physical theories – which are largely time symmetric – and physical phenomena involving radiation, thermodynamics and cosmology – which seem to be time asymmetric. ‘In all these cases, what is puzzling is why the physical world should be asymmetric in time at all, given that the underlying physical laws seem to be very largely symmetric’ (Price 1996: 6). In the words of Feynman, the American Nobel Prize winner for physics in 1965, ‘in all the laws of physics that we have found so far there does not seem to be any distinction between the past and the future. The moving picture should work the same going both ways, and the physicist who looks at it should not laugh’ (Feynman 1992: 109). As recognised by such famous scientists and philosophers as Prigogine, Penrose and Davies, Price’s thoughtful analysis of the time asymmetry problem in physics throws a new light on the controversial claim that time’s arrow could reverse, physical events being submitted to both forward and backward causation. Price’s suggestive thesis is that the past may depend on the future, and not only the future on the past as is usually claimed. His attempt to support the case for advanced action is thought provoking and cannot be discarded a priori. Why should we discard the possibility that what will happen in the future will modify what happens in the present? Of course, this sounds contrary to common sense and to our everyday perception of reality. Yet, as observed by Price, the temporal asymmetry inherent in human experience does not necessarily reflect the taxonomy of the objects in themselves.
