杏吧原创

I USED to think that thinking was harmless. Then I read The River of
Time. As is my habit with books, I read it from front to back. And, bizarre
as this may seem, I was playing my part in hastening the end of the Universe.
There is, says Igor Novikov in The River of Time (Cambridge, 拢25,
ISBN 0521461774) a 鈥減sychological arrow of time鈥�. This points to the future, as
defined by the thermodynamic arrow of time, because thought processes create
neural order at the expense of global disorder, hastening the chaotic 鈥渉eat
death鈥� of the Universe. Thinking, in short, reduces the life of the cosmos.

This and other insights into the nature of time pepper Novikov鈥檚 delightful
book. Time is not what it used to be: modern science has shown that it can be
slowed down by motion or gravity, that time loops (time machines) are not
forbidden by theory, that time actually turns into space (and vice versa) on
entering a black hole.

It鈥檚 all mind-boggling stuff. But Novikov, a brilliant Russian
astrophysicist, breaks up the brain-twisting theory with personal reminiscences
of his life. These include his traumatic memories of being 鈥渁 child of an enemy
of the people鈥� and his recollections of working as a scientist in the nightmare
world of Stalin.

What has helped Novikov more than anything is the international science
community. Novikov tells movingly of how his friend, the American physicist Kip
Thorne, organised scientists throughout the West to pay for his life-saving
heart surgery.

But time is what this book is mostly about. At the outset, Novikov admits
time is a mystery. And that鈥檚 the way it remains at the end.