Scientific Reception
In 1928, Sir Arthur Eddington wrote a letter to Dunne, a portion of which was reprinted in the 1929 and later editions of An Experiment With Time, in which he said:
| “ | I agree with you about 'serialism'; the 'going on of time' is not in Minkowski's world as it stands. My own feeling is that the 'becoming' is really there in the physical world, but is not formulated in the description of it in classical physics (and is, in fact, useless to a scheme of laws which is fully deterministic). | ” |
Some psychical researchers such as George N. M. Tyrrell and C. D. Broad have pointed out problems with Dunne's theory of time. As Tyrell explained:
| “ | Mr. J. W. Dunne, in his book, An Experiment with Time, introduces a multidimensional scheme in an attempt to explain precognition and he has further developed this scheme in later publications. But, as Professor Broad has shown, these unlimited dimensions are unnecessary, and unless I have misunderstood Mr. Dunne's argument, they resolve themselves into space-dimensions, and the true problem of time — the problem of becoming, or the passage of events from future through present to past, is not explained by them but is still left on the author's hands at the end. | ” |
In an article in the New Scientist in 1983 it was reported that Dunne had written a book just before his death admitting that he was a medium and a believer in spiritualism, the article reports that Dunne had deliberately chosen to leave this out of his An Experiment with Time book as he judged that it would have affected the reception of his theory.
In a review for the New Scientist John Gribbin described An Experiment with Time as a "definitive classic". Paul Davies in his book About Time: Einstein's Unfinished Revolution (2006) wrote that Dunne was an entertaining writer but there is no scientific evidence for more than one time and that Dunne's argument seems ad hoc.
In his book Is There Life After Death? (2006), British writer Anthony Peake wrote that some of Dunne's ideas are valid and attempts to update the ideas of Dunne in the light of the latest theories of quantum physics, neurology and consciousness studies.
Read more about this topic: An Experiment With Time
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