Time and Chance Author:David Z Albert This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation (very briefly) is that it is a consequence of almost every one of... more » those fundamental scientific pictures—and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense—that whatever can happen can just as naturally happen backwards. "Albert is perfecting a style of foundational analysis that is uniquely his own … It has a surgical precision … and it is ruthless with pretensions. The foundations of thermodynamics is a topic that has accumulated a good deal of dead wood; this is a fire that will burn and burn." —Simon W. Saunders, Oxford University "As usual with Albert's work, the exposition is brisk and to the point, and exceptionally clear … The book will be an extremely valuable contribution to the literature on the subject of philosophical issues in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, a literature which has been thin on the ground but is now growing as it deserves to." —Lawrence Sklar, University of Michigan« less