Past and the Future

Hoffman SJ (1989) The past and the future — What lies ahead for exploration geochemistry and the AEG. foum Geochem Explor 34 103-113. 

There recently had been much discussion of fire and the role it must have played in forming the mental world of archaic human beings. Once, as we sat staring into the camp fire, Dennis had remarked to me that, "People have been looking into fires like this for thousands and thousands of years. The squeal of these coals is the release of ionized plasma and in the flickering waves of free electrons thus created, one can see into the past and the future. The fire is the place where the ideas come from."... 

Irreversible processes correspond to the time evolution in which the past and the future play different roles. In processes such as heat conduction, diffusion, and chemical reaction there is an arrow of time. As we have seen, the second law postulates the existence of entropy 5, whose time change can be written as a sum of two parts One is the flow of entropy deS and the other is the entropy production dtS, what Clausius called uncompensated heat, ... 

The experienced present of the second dimension includes portions of time that from our ordinary point of view are past and future. I have shown the boundaries of this second experienced present (the dotted line) tapering off toward the past and the future in an indefinite way. I suspect that they can also be moved according to how attention is focused. The overall height of this dimension is shown as quite low to represent the fact that the portions of awareness that are involved in psi phenomena are ordinarily very weak compared with ongoing brain experience in ordinary time. The still, small voice of psi is so quiet that it is generally inaudible and even when it speaks, we have to listen very carefully. 

The Markov assumption asserts that the past and the future are statistically independent when the present is known this means that... 

I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars. ... 

There is a certain point of the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and incommunicable, the high and low, cease being perceived as contradictions. 

Fig. 19.8. Example of a chain-grate stoker equipped with a fire-tube boiler. (Reprinted with permission from Schobert, H.H., Coal The Energy Source of the Past and the Future, American Chemical Society, Washington D.C., Copyright 1987, American Chemical Society.)...

Schobert, H. H., Coal The Energy Source of the Past and the Future, American Chemical Society, Washington, DC, 1987. 

The hydrogen atom has enabled physicists to measure time with unprecedented accuracy, but it has not brought us any closer to an understanding of what time really is. Perhaps physics will never unlock this mystery. Einstein recognized that for humans the present means something very different than the past and the future. This meaning, Einstein concluded, cannot be found in physics. 

Some restrictions are imposed when we start the application of limit theorems to the transformation of a stochastic model into its asymptotic form. The most important restriction is given by the rule where the past and future of the stochastic processes are mixed. In this rule it is considered that the probability that a fact or event C occurs will depend on the difference between the current process (P(C) = P(X(t)e A/V(X(t))) and the preceding process (P (C/e)). Indeed, if, for the values of the group (x,e), we compute = max[P (C/e) — P(C)], then we have a measure of the influence of the process history on the future of the process evolution. Here, t defines the beginning of a new random process evolution and tIt- gives the combination between the past and the future of the investigated process. If a Markov connection process is homogenous with respect to time, we have = 1 or Tt O after an exponential evolution. If Tt O when t increases, the influence of the history on the process evolution decreases rapidly and then we can apply the first type limit theorems to transform the model into an asymptotic... 

The 19th century left us with a conflicting heritage. Classical mechanics and even quantum mechanics and relativity are time-symmetrical theories. The past and the future play the same role in them. On the other hand, thermodynamics introduces entropy, and entropy is associated to the arrow of time. So we have two descriptions of nature. Simplifying somewhat, we may say that the first emphasizes being and the second becoming. This leads to many questions. What is the role of entropy and of distance to equilibrium in nature And a second question is, how does the time-symmetry breaking of entropy relate to the laws of physics ... 

Provide the enforcement agency the authority to impose cost and liabilities for principal responsible parties (PRPs) of the past and the future release of hazardous chemicals. 

The value of a book is not only in its contents but in the creative idea it further encourages. These are a few ideas about the past and the future that occur to me as stimulated by chapters in this book. The volume is a fine resource of references to the use of chemistry in materials and should, indeed, encourage thinking about such things. 

Does a relationship exist between the past and the future ... 

The neglect of the past and the future will be overcome by services from a growing number of profit-centered maintenance providers that clearly understand how to provide value-added maintenance service at a profit. Neglect of the past can also be overcome internally by the emergence of an internal CMO who can lead maintenance forwmd to profitabUity as if he or she owned the internal maintenance business. 

Y. Zhang, H. Chan, and K. W. Leon, Advanced materials and processing for drug delivery The past and the future. Advanced Drug Delivery Reviews, 65(1), 104-120, 2013. 

The book has 13 chapters, each prepared by a group of experts from different parts of the world. The first chapter, the introduction, provides the basic information. A review of the use of plastics in construction looking at its past and the future trends is covered in detail, in Chapter 2. 

D.A. Davli, G.W. Bacon, C.R. Osborne, The past and the future of nickel laterites . PDAC (Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada) International Convention, March 7-10, 2004, Canada, pp. 1-27. 

Conversely, CCS will anyway require energy and the amount will depend on the distance of the storage site from the source and the depth of the storage site. In this article, we wish discuss what has been possible in the past and the future expectations for CO2 conversion, also touching upon the short-term possibilities we have of maximizing the conversion of exhaust carbon into working carbon. ... 

When thinking about safety, there must necessarily be a symmetry between the past and the future, which means that future accidents must happen in the same way as past accidents. Or, to put it differently, the reasons why accidents happened in the past must be the same as the reasons why accidents will happen in the future. This does not mean that they are due to the same types of events or conditions, since socio-technical systems constantly change. But it is meant in the sense that the principle of explanation, e.g., the causality credo, must be valid for the future as well as for the past. If that were not the case, it would require that some mysterious force in the present - meaning right now - changed the way things work and the way things happen. Since this is clearly not sensible, the consequence is that there must be a symmetry between that past and the future - and, more specifically, that accident models and risk models should follow the same principles. 

Eighty, J.S. and J. M. Veranth, 1998, The Role of Research in Practical Incineration Systems-A Look at the Past and the Future, 27 Symposium International on Combustion, The Combustion Institute, Pittsburgh, PA. 

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