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 “chrw(133)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.
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: 1, 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 Einste in: The Trail of Light ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992 ), p. 215.
Cleugh, Time,p. 61.
Ibid., p. 51.
Hermann 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 presented 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 relativitychrw(133)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 waschrw…the same theorychrw….” Ives was apparently the keener epistemologist of the two.
Ray d’Invemo, 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 & Schuster, 1983 ), pp. 38–39.
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 physicschrw(133)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 Thatchrw(133),” Nuclear Physics B 249 (1985): 340.
Henry Mehlberg, “Philosophical Aspects of Physical Time, ” Monist 53 (1969): 363.
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 & Spottiswoode, 1963 ), pp. 9798.
M. Capek, “Introduction,” in The Concepts of Space and Time,ed. M. Capek, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 22 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1976), 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.
Julian B. Barbour, “The Timelessness of Quantum Gravity: I & 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,Synthèse 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 & 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 & Cie., 1938 ), p. 38.
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 & Sons, 1964), p.47; so also S. C. Tiwari, “Fresh Look on Relativistic Time and Lifetime of an Unstable Particle,” paper presented 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.
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 & Hall, 1967 ), p. 27.
T. Sjödin, “On the One-Way Velocity of Light and its Possible Measurability,” paper presented 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 can 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): 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 Eannan, Alan I. 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.
Gerald Holton, “On the Origins of the Special Theory of Relativity,” in Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler to Einstein, by Gerald Holton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University 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 retum, 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, with a Foreword by Louis de Broglie, trans. 1. R. Maddox [New York: Central Book Company, 1955 ], p. 490 ).
Cleugh, Time,p. 59. She asserts, “chrw(133)the simultaneity with which Einstein deals is only a very distant cousin of the simultaneity with which the plain man and the metaphysician are concernedchrw(133),” and, she might have added, the classical physicist as well (p. 58).
Friedman, “Simultaneity,” pp. 411–415.
G. Builder, “The Constancy of the Velocity of Light,” Australian Journal of Physics 11 (1958): 457–480, rep. in Speculations in Science and Technology 2 (1979): 421.
Frank, Philosophy of Science,p. 143.
Sklar, “Time, reality, and relativity,” p. 132.
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Craig, W.L. (2001). The Elimination of Absolute Time. In: Craig, W.L. (eds) Time and the Metaphysics of Relativity. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 84. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3532-2_8
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