Abstract
In light of what we have seen in our previous chapter, what can be said of SR’s putative elimination of metaphysical time and space?
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References
Lawrence Sklar, “Time, Reality and Relativity,” in Reduction, Time and Reality,ed. Richard Healey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 141.
Ibid.
See the excellent survey in Frederick Suppe, “The Search for Philosophic Understanding of Scientific Theories,” in The Structure of Scientific Theories, 2d ed., ed. F. Suppe (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1977 ), pp. 3–118.
Tyler Burge, “Philosophy of Language and Mind,” Philosophical Review 101 (1992): 49.
Richard Healey, “Introduction,” in Reduction, Time and Reality,p. vii.
Richard F. Kitchener, “Introduction: The World View of Contemporary Physics: Does It Need a New Metaphysics?” in The World View of Contemporary Physics, ed. Richard F. Kitchener ( Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988 ), p. 5.
M. Laue, “Zwei Einwände gegen die Relativitätstheorie und ihre Widerlegung,” Physikalische Zeitschrift 13 (1912): 120.
Richard Swinburne, “Verificationism and Theories of Spacetime,” in Space, Time, and Causality, ed. Richard Swinburne, Synthèse Library 157 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983), p. 63. He aptly remarks, “A satisfactory science ought to reveal the extent of our ignorance, not pretend that what is not knowable is not true” (Ibid., p. 74). Stating that “…I know of no good argument for verificationism,” Swinburne contends that there is “no need to follow Einstein in his verificationism” (Richard Swinburne, Space and Time, 2d ed. [London: Macmillan, 1981], pp. 6, 201 ).
John D. Norton, “Philosophy of Space and Time,” in Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, ed. Merilee Salmon (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1992 ), p. 179.
E. A. Milne, “Presidential Address to the Royal Astronomical Society,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 104 (1944): 121.
P. J. Zwart, “The Flow of Time,” Synthèse 24 (1972): 134. Cf the statement of A. N. Prior: “the theory of relativity isn’t about real space and time, in which the earlier-later relation is defined in terms of pastness, presentness, and futurity; the ‘time’ which enters into the so-called space-time of relativity theory isn’t this, but is just part of an artificial framework which scientists have constructed to link together observed facts in the simplest way possible….” (A. N. Prior, “Some Free Thinking about Time,” in Logic and Reality, ed. B. J. Copeland [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996 ], p. 51 ).
Mary F. Cleugh, Time and its Importance in Modern Thought, with a Foreword by L. Susan Stebbing (London: Methuen, 1937 ), pp. 29–30, 61.
James Jeans, Physics and Philosophy (Cambridge: University Press, 1942), p. 68; cf. p. 66. Some theorists have disputed the reduction of time to its measures but have gratuitously assumed that time is that quantity described by relativity theory. See, for example, the critique of operational definitions of time by Mario Bunge, “Physical Time: The Objective and Relational Theory,” Philosophy of Science 35 (1968): 355–388, though Bunge’s concept of time is still physical, not metaphysical, in that it is analyzed as a map from sets of events, reference frames, and chronometric scales to the real numbers; see also Henry Mehlberg, Time, Causality, and the Quantum Theory,2 vols., ed. Robert S. Cohen, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 19 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1980), 1: I, 189–190, 251, who thinks that physical time is but an aspect of universal time and yet seems to assume that universal time is relativistic.
Ralph Baierlein, Newton to Einstein: The Trail of Light ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992 ), p. 215.
Cleugh, Time,p. 61.
Ibid., p. 51.
Herman Bondi, Relativity and Common Sense ( New York: Dover Publications, 1964 ), p. 65.
C. Moller, The Theory of Relativity, 2d ed. ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972 ), p. 31.
Heinz Pagels, The Cosmic Code ( London: Michael Joseph, 1982 ), p. 50.
Clifford M. Will, Was Einstein Right? ( New York: Basic Books, 1986 ), pp. 49–50.
M. Capek, “The Inclusion of Becoming in the Physical World,” in The Concepts of Space and Time,ed. Milic Capek, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 22 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1976), p. 520; cf his verificationist remarks that “the succession of causally unrelated events” is devoid of physical meaning, so that the simultaneity of distant events and the succession of causally independent events simply do not exist (Ibid., pp. 514–515).
Julian B. Barbour, Absolute or Relative Motion?, vol. 1: The Discovery of Dynamics ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 ), pp. 8–9.
Yehudah Freundlich, “’Becoming’ and the Asymmetries of Time,” Philosophy of Science 40 (1973): 497–498.
Michael C. Duffy, “The Modified Vortex Sponge: a Classical Analogue for General Relativity,” paper delivered at the International Conference of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science, “Physical Interpretations of Relativity Theory,” Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, 16–19 September, 1988. He quotes with approval H. P. Robertson’s remark, “Ives had in fact set up a theory completely equivalent in substance to the special theory of relativity….but I was never able to convince him that since what he had was in fact indistinguishable in its predictions from the relativity theory within the domain of physics, it was…the same theory….” Ives was apparently the keener epistemologist of the two.
Ray d’Inverno, Introducing Einstein’s Relativity ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992 ), p. 16.
P. C. W. Davies, Space and Time in the Modern Universe ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977 ), p. 160.
P. C. W. Davies, God and the New Physics ( New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983 ), pp. 38–39.
He asks, “But what does it mean to say that God caused time to come into existence, when by our usual understanding of causation a cause must precede its effect? Causation is a temporal activity. Time must already exist before anything can be caused. The naive image of God existing before the universe is clearly absurd if time did not exist—if there was no ‘before”’(Ibid., p. 44). More recently, in his acceptance speech of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, Davies enunciates his belief that the quantum origin of spacetime “has illuminated the ancient theological debate” over divine eternity because the contingency of time reveals that the ultimate Being must be atemporal (Paul Davies, “The Acceptance Speech of Professor Paul Davies,” Westminster Abbey, London, 3 May 1995 ). Davies naively applies physical time concepts to a metaphysical question.
C. Misner, K. S. Thorne, and J. A. Wheeler, Gravitation (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1973), p. 1183. Cf. Wheeler’s declaration, “There is no such thing as spacetime in the real world of quantum physics….superspace leaves us space but not spacetime and therefore not time. With time gone the very ideas of ‘before’ and ‘after’ also lose their meaning” (J. A. Wheeler, “From Relativity to Mutability,” in The Physicist’s Conception of Nature, ed. J. Mehra [Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1973 ], p. 227 ).
T. Banks, “TCP, Quantum Gravity, the Cosmological Constant, and All That…,” Nuclear Physics B 249 (1985): 340.
Henryk Mehlberg, “Philosophical Aspects of Physical Time,” Monist 53 (1969): 363.
See my The Tensed Theory of Time: a Critical Examination,Synthèse Library (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, forthcoming), chap. 7.
To quote Wheeler again:“Before’ and ‘after’ don’t rule everywhere, as witness quantum fluctuations in the geometry of space at the scale of the Planck distance. Therefore, ‘before’ and ‘after’ cannot legalistically rule anywhere. Even at the classical level, Einstein’s standard closed-space cosmology denies all meaning to ‘before the big bang’ and ‘after the big crunch.’ Time cannot be an ultimate category in the description of nature. We cannot expect to understand genesis until we rise to an outlook that transcends time” (J. A. Wheeler, Frontiers of Time [Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1979], p. 20). Wheeler should have said, “transcends physical time,” i.e.,to God’s outlook in metaphysical time in which “before” and “after” exist regardless of any breakdown in physical time concepts.
On such models see Kurt Gödel, “A Remark About the Relationship Between Relativity Theory and Idealistic Philosophy,” in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist,ed. P. A. Schilpp, Library of Living Philosophers 7 (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1949), pp. 555–562. Gödel also recognized that such models were incompatible with objective becoming, but he opted for the static models, since “…no reason can be given why an objective lapse of time should be assumed at all” (Ibid., p. 561). He hoped to forestall the paradoxes of time travel by practical considerations like excessive fuel requirements. For discussion see Paul I-lorwich, Asymmetries in Time (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), chap. 7 and William Lane Craig, Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990), chap. 6.
Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, Gravitation,p. 823.
James Hartle and Stephen W. Hawking, “Wave Function of the Universe,” Physical Review D 28 (1983): 2960–2975.
Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes,with an Introduction by Carl Sagan (New York: Bantam Books, 1988), pp. 14,35.
C. J. Isham, “Creation of the Universe as a Quantum Process,” in Physics, Philosophy, and Theology: A Common Quest for Understanding, ed. R. J. Russell, W. R. Stoeger, and G. V. Coyne (Vatican City: Vatican Observatory, 1988), pp. 376, 391, 399, 402–403.
Adolf Grünbaum, Philosophical Problems of Space and Time, 2d ed., Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 12 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1973 ), pp. 197–201.
Arthur Pap, Introduction to the Philosophy of Science ( London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1963 ), pp. 9798.
M. Capek, “Introduction,” in Concepts of Space and Time,p. xxx.
Carlo Rovelli, “What Does Present Days [sic] Physics Tell Us about Time and Space?”, lecture presented at the Annual Series Lectures of the Center for Philosophy of Science of the University of Pittsburgh, 17 September 1993. Elsewhere he writes, “We lack a general coherent picture of the physical world capable of embracing what, or at least most of what, we have learned about it. The ‘fundamental scientific view of the world’ of the present time is characterized by an astonishing amount of perplexity, and disagreement, about what time, space, matter, and causality are” (Carlo Rovelli, “Halfway through the Woods: Contemporary Research on Space and Time,” in The Cosmos of Science, ed. J. Norton and John Earman [Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998 ], p. 180 ).
Julian B. Barbour, “The Timelessness of Quantum Gravity: I and II,” Classical and Quantum Gravity 11 (1994): 2853–2873, 2875–2897. Barbour holds that instants exist, but these are analyzed as three-dimensional relative configurations of the universe in superspace.
Jonathan Powers, Philosophy and the New Physics, Ideas (London: Methuen, 1982 ), p. 12.
Peter Kroes, Time: Its Structure and Role in Physical Theories,Synthese Library 179 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985), p. xiii; cf. p. viii.
Ibid., p. 196.
Ibid., p. xxiv [my emphasis]; cf. p. 209.
See also Herbert Dingle, “Time in Philosophy and Physics,” Philosophy 54 (1979): 99–104. Though overly generous to Einstein in stating that “’time,’ the ever-rolling stream, never entered his thoughts” in the 1905 paper, Dingle is correct that Einstein’s theory had only to do with clock-times and proved nothing about the nature of time itself. Cf. idem, Science at the Crossroads ( London: Martin Brian and O’Keefe, 1972 ), p. 137.
H. Margenau, “Metaphysical Elements in Physics,” Reviews of Modern Physics 13 (1941): 183.
Philipp Frank, Interpretations and Misinterpretations of Modern Physics,Actualités Scientifiques et Industrielles 587: Exposés de Philosophie Scientifique 2 (Paris: Hermann and Cie., 1938), p. 38 [my emphasis].
Philipp Frank, Philosophy of Science (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1957 ), p. 144.
Arthur Eddington, Space, Time and Gravitation, Cambridge Science Classics (1920; rep. ed.: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987 ), p. 17.
Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World,with an Introductory Note by Sir Edmund Whittaker, Everyman’s Library (1928; rep. ed.: London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1964), p.47; so also S. C. Tiwari, “Fresh Look on Relativistic Time and Lifetime of an Unstable Particle,” paper presented at “Physical Interpretations of Relativity Theory,” International Conference of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science, Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, 16–19 September, 1988.
Herbert Dingle, “Time in Relativity Theory: Measurement or Coordinate?” in The Voices of Time, 2d ed., ed. with a new Introduction by J. T. Fraser ( Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981 ), p. 462.
Cleugh, Time,p. 57.
Albert Einstein, The Meaning of Relativity,6th ed., (1922; rep. ed.: London: Chapman and Hall, 1967), p. 27.
T. Sjödin, “On the One-Way Velocity of Light and its Possible Measurability,” paper delivered at “Physical Interpretations of Relativity Theory.” See also Richard Gale, “Human Time: Introduction,” in The Philosophy of Time: a Collection of Essays,ed. R. M. Gale (New York: Humanities Press, 1968), p. 299; M. Capek, The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1961), p. 172. It is noteworthy that the Galilean transformations follow automatically from the Lorentz equations if we substitute for c an infinite value.
Sjödin, “One Way Velocity of Light.”
SR prohibits the acceleration of particles from subluminal to luminal or superluminal speeds, not particles that always travel at such speeds. SR may also be incompatible with superluminal signals (controllable causal connections), but nothing in Sjödin’s definition depends on the use of signals as opposed to raw tachyon beams occurring naturally.
See the discussion and literature listed in Craig, Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom.
Grünbaum, Space and Time,p. 827.
Michael Friedman, Foundations of Spacetime Theories ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983 ), p. 167.
See Wesley C. Salmon, Space, Time, and Motion ( Encino, Calif.: Dickenson Publishing, 1975 ), pp. 119–122.
Olexa-Myron Bilaniuk, et al.,“More about Tachyons,” Physics Today (December 1969), p. 52.
See, for example, Michael Redhead, “Nonlocality and Peaceful Coexistence,” in Space, Time and Causality, ed. Richard Swinburne, Synthèse Library 157 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983), pp. 167–179; idem, “The Conventionality of Simultaneity,” in Philosophical Problems of the Internal and External Worlds, ed. John Earman, Alan 1. Janis, Gerald J. Massey, and Nicholas Rescher, Pittsburgh-Konstanz Series in the Philosophy and History of Science (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993), pp. 116–125; Graham Nerlich, What Spacetime Explains ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 ), pp. 68–71.
See Craig, Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom,pp. 122–127.
Tim Maudlin, Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity,Aristotelian Society Series 13 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 115–116; cf. pp. 73–75.
Gerald Holton, “On the Origin of the Special Theory of Relativity,” in Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought, by G. Holton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 170–171. Dugas comments, “We shall not go as far to complain, as certain critics do, that Einstein made use of magical clocks and enchanted measuring rods in order to return, in the last analysis, to Lorentz’s transformation (T). But there is no doubt that those ideal clocks and rods can only be used in idealised experiments” (René Dugas, A History of Mechanics, trans. J. R. Maddox [N. Y.: Central Book Co., 1955 ], p. 490 ).
Cleugh, Time,p. 59. She asserts, “…the simultaneity with which Einstein deals is only a very distant cousin of the simultaneity with which the plain man and the metaphysician are concerned…,” and, she might have added, the classical physicist as well (p. 58).
Friedman, “Simultaneity in Newtonian Mechanics and Special Relativity,” in Foundations of Spacetime Theories, ed. John Earman, et al. ( Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1977 ), pp. 411–415.
As Suppe explains, “Often there is more than one experimental procedure used to determine, for example, an object’s mass. Since concepts or properties are identified with unique combinations of operations, each different experimental procedure defines a distinct concept, and so there are as many distinct concepts of mass as there are procedures for determining it. In actual scientific practice, however, these different procedures are taken as measuring the same thing, mass; thus operational definition is unsatisfactory as an analysis of the meaning (hence the cognitive significance) of theoretical terms” (Suppe, “Search for Philosophic Understanding,” p. 19).
Leon N. Cooper, An Introduction to the Meaning and Structure of Physics (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 401. Cf. the comment by Henry Margenau and Richard A. Mould, “Relativity: an Epistemological Appraisal,” Philosophy of Science 24 (1957): 303: “…it does not make sense to speak of settling the matter between Einstein and Lorentz by experiment. What is significant about Einstein’s principle is that it can be maintained, not that it must be maintained. In rejecting it, Lorentz did not commit any technical error, but he did forego its conceptual and heuristic advantages.” But we have already seen that Einstein’s theory is conceptually hobbled in comparison with Lorentz’s, being based on an arbitrary and counter-intuitive re-definition of distant simultaneity motivated by an untenable epistemology; as for heuristic advantages, see discussion in the sequel.
G. Builder, “The Constancy of the Velocity of Light,” Australian Journal of Physics 11 (1958): 457480, rep. in Speculations in Science and Technology 2 (1979): 421.
Frank, Philosophy of Science,p. 143.
Sklar, “Time, Reality, and Relativity,” p. 132.
Recall discussion in chap. 1, pp. 1–5.
Sklar, “Time, Reality, and Relativity,” p. 131_ He adds, “One can extract only so much metaphysics from a physical theory as one puts in.”
Ibid., p. 140. In Gódel’s words, “the observational results by themselves really do not force us to abandon Newtonian time and space as objective realities, but only the observational results together with certain general principles, e.g.,the principle that two states of affairs which cannot be distinguished by observers are also objectively equal” (unpublished Nachlass cited by Palle Yourgrau, The Disappearance of Time [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], p. 54).
See chap. 1, pp. 7–9.
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Craig, W.L. (2000). SR’s Elimination of Metaphysical Time. In: The Tenseless Theory of Time. Synthese Library, vol 294. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3473-8_4
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