Dreistein enträtselt die Zeit

Dreistein unravells the time – clock time ticks, but natural time works

Have you ever wondered why physics claims that time is an illusion or even reversible? Tributsch has been tracking down the paradoxes of physics since his student days.

The book deals with time, which is considered one of the great unsolved mysteries. The author reminds us that prehistoric people worshipped the sun as the source of time, with its energy triggering action, and saw themselves as part of this natural time. At the same time, they used the periodic movements of the sun with the wandering shadows to measure the passage of time. However, about three hundred years ago, Isaac Newton decided to use only this shadow time as a clock in the background – a time that merely conveys information and stands outside of natural events. Since then, physics has been working with this clock time, the shadow time, in its theories.

Helmut Tributsch comes to the important conclusion that the many paradoxes and dead ends in logic that physics has been claiming since the last century are consequences of a misunderstood time. The current world view that physics conveys to us is therefore fundamentally wrong in essential points. Natural time, according to the author, is not an illusion, but an information system that implements effect. The beginning of the universe was not a random explosion, but information. Furthermore, evolution is not a product of pure chance, but purposeful. This insight requires a scientific renewal, a new zeitgeist.

This new zeitgeist, called Dreistein, is symbolised as a caricature of an hourglass that implements an effect, which accompanies the book and its explanations with a touch of humour.

About the author:

Helmut Tributsch is a physicist and professor emeritus of physical chemistry. He taught at the Institute for Physical and Theoretical Chemistry at the Free University of Berlin from 1982 to 2008 and was also head of the Solar Energy Department at the Helmholtz Centre for Materials and Energy (formerly the Hahn Meitner Institute). For ten years, he conducted research at foreign institutions, including as a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, as a Heisenberg Fellow at CNRS in Paris, and as Walter Schottky Professor at Stanford University. His main interests are the study of light as a source of sustainable energy and information, and in particular the biomimetics of energy systems. He is considered an experienced scientist and has published 450 scientific papers and twelve books. ScholarGPS evaluated 282 of his papers, which have been cited around 17,000 times, and calculated an h-index of 68. Helmut Tributsch lives on his mountain farm in the Friuli region. www.helmut-tributsch.com