The Fabric of Reality: Towards a Theory of Everything (Penguin Science)

by David Deutsch

our electric motors and dynamos in part to Faraday, and that the repercussions of his discovery are being felt to this day, we have in mind a picture of the repercussions beginning in 1831 and sweeping consecutively through all the moments of the rest of the nineteenth century, and then reaching the twentieth century and causing things like power stations to come into existence there. If we are not careful, we think of the twentieth century as initially ‘not yet affected’ by the momentous event of 1831, and then being ‘changed’ by the repercussions as they sweep past on their way to the twenty-first century and beyond. But usually we are careful, and we avoid that incoherent thought by never using the two parts of the common-sense theory of time simultaneously.