Time, irreversibility and structure
pp. 561-593
in: Jagdish Mehra (ed), The physicist's conception of nature, Berlin, Springer, 1973Abstract
The legacy of Newtonian mechanics is a concept of a world in which time is essentially a parameter associated with motion 1. As early as 1796, Lagrange called mechanics a four-dimensional geometry2. The two great revolutions we have witnessed in physics during this century, relativity and quantum mechanics, have kept unmodified this character of Newton's world model.