Submitted by Kate Goldyn
on
David Albert’s lecture The Difference Between the Past and the Future was presented to a standing room only audience on October 27, 2015. The first in the O’Hara Lecture Series in philosophy of physics, Professor Albert spoke on our ability to affect the future and not the past.
It seems to us that by acting now we can affect the future, but not the past. He described some recent work on the foundations of statistical mechanics which seeks to understand this phenomenon not as a part of the fundamental metaphysical structure of the world, but rather as a mechanical phenomenon of nature, such as the law of universal gravitation, or the second law of thermodynamics.
Please listen to the podcast of Professor Albert’s lecture here.