Abstract
One of the most interesting, but also most perplexing, features of modern physical science is its tendency to repeatedly reconstruct itself. This unending activity of reconstruction is not just a matter of superficial technical adjustments necessitated by progress in the development of science’s abstractive procedures. What is at stake in any instance of reconstruction is the primary ground of experience itself. Copernicus, Newton, or Einstein (choosing three of many possible examples) each represent, in their work, a new attempt to shed light on this ground, to bring it into view from a different perspective. Our interest is not so much in what physicists make of this empirical ground, and how they use it, as in what is actually meant by the act of putting this ground to the test.
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Notes
A. Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory,15th ed., trans. R.W. Lawson (London: Methuen, 1955), p. 150.
S.W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time (London: Bantam Books, 1988), p. 18 Quoted hereafter as BHT.
H. Minkowski, “Space and Tune”, in A. Einstein et.al., The Principle of Relativity, trans. W. Perrett and G.B. Jeffery (London: Methuen, 1923), p. 76.
E. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 112. Quoted hereafter as Crisis.
. A.S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), xi-xix. Quoted hereafter as NPW.
. I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N.K. Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), B xvi sq. Quoted hereafter as CPR.
See for instance K. Hübner, Critique of Scientific Reason. trans. P.R. Dixon and H.M. Dixon (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983), pp. 143–4.
The following development is based on H. Weyl, Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science. trans. O. Helmer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), pp. 210–11.
The details are worked out in J. Earman, A Primer on Determinism (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1986).
See for instance S. Goldberg, Understanding Relativity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 84–5.
Einstein, Relativity, p. 18.
See E. Harrison. Cosmology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 240.
The technical accounts of this work are presented by Hawking and Ellis in The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). See also R Geroch and G. Horowitz, “Global structure of space-times”, and R. Penrose, “Singularities and time-asymmetry”, in S. Hawking and W. Israel, eds, General Relativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
Recently, the so-called plasma cosmology has been developed, which denies any privilege to the gravity-dominated big bang cosmology and proposes a model without any beginning.
J. Earman and J. Norton, “What price spacetime substantivalism: The hole story”, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 38 (1987), pp. 515–525.
See P. Kerszberg, The Invented Universe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
Cf the discussion in L. Sklar, “Prospects for a causal theory of spacetime”, in Philosophy and Spacetime Physics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 285–86.
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Kerszberg, P. (1994). Being and Knowing in Modern Physical Science. In: Stapleton, T.J. (eds) The Question of Hermeneutics. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 17. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1160-7_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1160-7_14
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