Reddit mentions: The best physics of entropy books

No problem!

Philosophy of time is an enormous area!

Not only are there many distinct positions that attempt to address the scientific and philosophical questions in different ways, there are different positions regarding the very method by which we should attempt to answer these questions! Some of these certainly overlap.

What do I mean by this?

Putting it roughly:

There are those who tend to think that we should use science to answer these questions about time. All we should care about is what observations are made; we should only care about the empirical data. These people might point to the great success of our best scientific theories that refer to 'time', such as those in physics, including; Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Entropy (The Arrow of Time), and even Quantum Theory, but also those in neuroscience and psychology, where our perception of time becomes relevant (such as the Inference Model of Time and the Strength Model of Time). So we have notions of physical/objective time, and subjective/mental time. We may talk about time slowing down around a massive body such as a black hole, or time slowing down when a work-shift is boring or when we're experiencing a traumatic event.

But there are also those who tend to think that we should use not just science, but also uniquely philosophical methods as well. Conceptual analysis is one such method; one that involves thinking very carefully about our concepts. This method is a distinctically a priori method (A priori is just philosophical jargon meaning; "Can be known without experience," for example, the statement "All triangles have three sides"). These people think we can learn a great deal about time by reflecting on our concepts about time, our intuitions about time, and the laws of thought (or logic) and how they relate to time. This philosophical approach to answering questions about time is distinctively metaphysical opposed to the former physical and cognitive theories about time.

Of course there are many who may see the use in all of these different approaches!

Recommendations:

Physics:

Hawking, S 1988, A Brief History of Time: From The Big Bang to Black Holes, Bantam Books, Toronto; New York. [Chapters 2, 9 & 10. Absolute Classic, little dated but still great read]

Gardner, M 1988, Time Travel and Other Mathematical Bewilderments, W.H. Freeman, UK. [Chapter 1]

Greene, B 2010, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, W. W. Norton, New York. [Chapter 2 is a great introduction for Special Relativity]

Physics and Metaphysics:

Dainton, B 2010, Time and Space, 2nd edn, McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal; Ithaca N.Y. [Chapters 1-8, 18, 19 & 21. This book is incredible in scope, it even has a chapter on String Theory, and it really acknowledges the intimate connection between space and time given to us by physics]

Metaphyics:

Hawley, K 2015, Temporal Parts, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/temporal-parts/>. [Discussion of Perdurantism, the view that objects last over time without being wholly present at every time at which they exist.]

Markosian, N 2014, Time, The Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2016/entries/time/>.

Hunter, J 2016, Time Travel, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
<http://www.iep.utm.edu/timetrav/>.

Callender, C & Edney, R 2014, Introducing Time: A Graphic Guide, Icon Books Limited, UK. [Great book if you want something a bit less wordy and fun, but still very informative, having comprehensive coverage. It also has many nice illustrations and is cheap!]

Curtis, B & Robson, J 2016, A Critical Introduction to the Metaphysics of Time, Bloomsbury Publishing, UK. [Very good recent publication that comes from a great series of books in metaphysics]

Ney, A 2014, Metaphysics: An Introduction, Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, London; New York. [Chapters 5 & 6 (Chapter 4 looks at critiques of Metaphysics in general as a way of answer questions and Chapter 9 looks at Free-will/Determinism/Compatiblism)]

More advanced temporal Metaphysics:

Sider, T 2001, Four-Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time, Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, Oxford New York. [Great book defending what Sider calls "Four-Dimensionalism" (this is confusing given how others have used the same term differently) but by it he means Perdurantism, the view that objects last over time without being wholly present at every time at which they exist.]

Hawley, K 2004, How Things Persist, Clarendon Press, UK. [Another great book: It's extremely similar to the one above in terms of the both content and conclusions reached]

Some good Time travel movies:

Interstellar (2014)

Timecrimes (2007)

Looper (2012)

Primer (2004) [Time Travel on drugs]

12 Monkeys (1995)

Donnie Darko (2001)

The Terminator (1984)

Groundhog Day (1993)

Predestination (2014)

Back To the Future (1-3) (1985-1990)

Source Code (2011)

Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

if you really want to understand entropy, don't bother studying physics. information theory will give you a much better understanding -- i'd recommend Cover & Thomas's book, really just the first few chapters, up to the stuff on high-probability sets and the typical set. there's very little intuition to be gained from the "concrete" definitions of entropy in physics.

and if anyone says that entropy is a measure of "disorder", ask them to define order. if they say something about the number of "microstates", ask them why they chose a particular course-graining (that definition only holds for discrete systems, not a system with an energy dependence on a continuous parameter).

Zurek, in his foreward to complexity, entropy, and the physics of information, states:
> Since the introduction of Maxwell's Demon and, particularly, since the celebrated paper of Szilard and even earlier discussions of Smoluchowski, the operational equivalence of the gain of information and the decrease of entropy has been widely appreciated. Yet, the notion that a subjective quantity such as information could influence "objective" thermodynamic properties of the system remains highly controversial.
> It is, however, difficult to deny that the process of information gain can be directly tied to the ability to extract useful work. Thus, questions concerning thermodynamics, the second law, and the arrow of time have become intertwined with a half-century-old puzzle, that of the problem of measurement in quantum physics.

in the twenty years since that was published, much work has been done and an operational definition of entropy as the kolmogorov-chaitin complexity of a system seems to be fairly well accepted among those who actually care about having physics on a firm basis. only trouble is that k-c complexity is not computable...

>^(~)^(Chaos)^(.)

Entropy: Jeremy Rifkin

The Tao of Physics: Fritjof Capra

These two help with a bit of a framework to ford the physicl/metaphysical gulf.