3From the Clockwork World Viewto Irreversibility (and Back?)
3.1 Cyclic Universe Versus Linear Time Concept:the Metaphysical Perspective
3.1.1 Cyclic Universe
The concept of an “eternal recurrence” may have always existed, and wasformulated in ancient Egypt. Recurrence was taught by the Pythagoreans:“If one were to believe the Pythagoreans, with the result that the same individualthings will recur, then I shall be talking to you again sitting as you are now,with this pointer in my hand, and everything else will be just as it is now.”(Eudemus, Frag. 272 in [279]). The main idea is that the universe does nothave a final state and exhibits a periodic motion. Classical Greek and Romanart and literature does not have much awareness of the past and future. Theyemphasize the existence of eternal, time-independent values.Buddhism has the notion called “sa.msaara”, the famed spinning of theWheel of Life or Birth-Death Cycle of Being, illustrated by Fig. 3.1.The ancient Hindu religion also had a cyclic time concept, and a sophisti-cated cosmology containing steps of endlessly repeating creation and reabsorp-tion of the world. One of the attractive properties of the cyclic time concept,or the notion of “eternal recurrence”, is that there is no need to explain thebeginning.This idea seems to occur in the Old Testament. The writer of Ecclesiastes1:9 says:“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that whichis done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”
58 3 From the Clockwork World View to Irreversibility
Fig. 3.1.
Wheel of life expresses the cyclic view of time and life of Buddhism. Basedon
http://downloads.wisdompubs.org/website downloads/WheelofLife.jpg.
.
The eternal recurrence claims that history repeats itself, and it has beenone of Nietzsche’s most important thoughts. He argued that the universedoes not have a final state (goal); if there were such a final state it wouldhave reached it already. Interestingly, while Nietzsche analyzed the eternal re-currence in metaphysical context, the French mathematician Henri Poincar´eproved a theorem on dynamical systems, called the“recurrence theorem”. Thetheorem states that under certain conditions the state of a dynamical systemgoes arbitrarily close to its initial state. (Stephen Brush, an excellent historianof science addressed the hidden relationship between Nietzsche and Poincar´e.[80, 81].) The recurrence paradox (it is a paradox) seemed to be in contradic-tion with the principle of irreversibility, see Sect. 3.3.3.Nietzsche about Pythagoreans:At bottom, indeed, that which was once possible could present itself as a possibility for a second time only if the Pythagoreans were right inbelieving that when the constellation of the heavenly bodies is repeatedthe same things, down to the smallest event, must also be repeatedon earth: so that whenever the stars stand in a certain relation toone another a Stoic again joins with an Epicurean to murder Caesar,and when they stand in another relation Columbus will again discoverAmerica.
3.1 Cyclic Universe versus Linear Time Concepts 59
Nietzsche learned physics to support his metaphysical statement by phys-ical arguments. If the number of energy centers are finite, even in the infinitetime and space, then the same configuration should repeat again and again, hestated. While Nietzsche believed that his arguments were against the mech-anistic world view, I think Brush is right and Nietzsche’s effort should beinterpreted as the qualitative anticipation of Poincar´e’s recurrence theorem.The preeminent Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was fas-cinated by the notion of cyclic time:“I eternally return to the theory of Eter-nal Recurrence” [67]. He was, however, well informed about the revolutionin mathematics, and explains how George Cantor’s set theory destroys thebasis of Nietzsche theorem. Cantor, Borges’s Cantor, states that the numberof points in the Universe are entirely infinite, even as the number of pointsin a single meter, or in a fragment of meter. The eternal recurrence has onlya small probability and this probability tends to zero.
1
As it was mentioned earlier, the most attractive feature of cyclic universemodels is that they don’t have to explain the beginning. There is a recent ex-citement and debate among the leading cosmologists about the cyclic universeconcept suggested several years ago, as it will be discussed in Sect. 3.8.
3.1.2 Linear Time Concepts
Linear time concepts are based on the view that there is a beginning followedby some other events and there is an end. Past, present and future.Zarathustra from ancient Persia may have initiated the appearance of thelinear time concept in the Western thinking. Judaism declared linear timeconcepts and created
historical thinking
: events can be ordered in sequence,from the beginning
2
via the middle to the end. Christianity and Islam inheritedthis view.Our everyday perspective of time, i.e., remembering the past end expectingthe future is expressed in Fig. 3.2.Linear time concepts have been reflected in the notion of an
arrow of time
. Macroscopic physical processes are irreversible, and this irreversibilityis manifested by the
thermodynamic arrow of time
. Later in this chapter weshall discuss how the founders of the laws of thermodynamics, mostly Ludwig
1
In a much more mythological way, Mircea Eliade analyzed the concept of eternalrecurrence in terms of history of religion [149].
2
“In the beginning gods created the heaven and the earth” Genesis 1:1.
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