Last updated 10th July 2024: Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
Hardly any other problem has been discussed more than that of the status of time in modem physics. This is only natural since there are not many other more important problems in philosophy of science and in philosophy in general. There are also few other areas where controversies as well as confusion were more frequent. This is true not only of popular and semi-popular expositions of the Minkowski concept of space-time but also of a number of its philosophical interpretations. Generally we do not find anything of this kind in the writings of physicists, at least as long as they confine themselves to strictly mathematical and physical expositions; but when they sometimes venture beyond a strictly mathematical approach, they often do not escape certain unconscious or semi-conscious prejudices which are contrary not only to the spirit but sometimes even to the letter of relativity. The true significance of the relativistic fusion of space and time can be understood only when we contrast it with its classical counterpart, i.e., with what may be called the Newtonian space-time. Only on such a contrasting background will the revolutionary meaning of the new concept clearly stand out.
1 See the references in Emil Meyerson, La déduction relativiste, Paris, 1925. pp. 107-8.
2 Hermann Weyl, Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science, Princeton University Press, 1949, p. 95.
3 Cf. Pierre Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum (ed. Lugduni 1658), I, p. 224: "quodlibet temporis momentum idem est in omnibus locis;" Isaac Newton. Opera, ed. by Horsley, III, p. 72: "unumcumque temporis indivisibile momentum ubique." On this point cf. my article "Was Gassendi a Predecessor of Newton?" in Proceedings of the X International Congress of History of Science, Paris, 1964, pp. 705-9.
4 A. S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, New York, Macmillan, 1933, p. 47.
5 A. Einstein, "Autobiographical Notes," in: Albert Einstein, Philosopher-Scientist, ed. by Paul Schilpp, Evanston, Ill., 1949, p. 61.
6 Cf. M. Capek, The Philosophical Impact of Coratemporary Physics, enlarged ed., Princeton, Van Nostrand, 1969, pp. 189-90.
7 A. A. Robb, The Absolute Relations of Space and Time, Cambridge Universi ty Press, 1921, pp. 7, 12-13.
8 Eddington, loc. cit.; A.N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, New York, MacMillan, 1926, p. 172.
9 Robert M. Wald, Space, Time and Gravity, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1977, p. 30.
10 E. Meyerson, La déduction relativiste, pp. 97-108. Einstein's comment on Meyerson's book was published in Revue philosophique de la France et de l'etran ger v. 105, 1908, pp. 161-66. Its English translation by Mary-Alice and David A. Sipfle was published in my anthology The Concepts of Space and Time. Their Structure and Their Development, Dordrecht, D. Reidel, 1976, pp. 361-367.
11 L. Silberstein, Theory of Relativity, London, 1914, p. 134. Quoted by H. Bergson, Durée et simultanéité, Paris, 1923, p. 223.
12 Kurt Gödel, "A Remark About the Relationship Between Relativity and Idealistic Philosophy," in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, ed. by Paul Schilpp, Evanston, Ill., 1949, p. 558.
13 Eddington, op. cit., pp. 57-58.
14 K. Gödel, loc. cit., pp. 558-561.
15 On this problem cf. my articles "The Doctrine of Necessity Re-examined," The Review of Metaphysics V, 1951, pp. 11-44; "Toward a Widening of the Notion of Causality", Diogenes No. 28, Winter, 1959, pp. 63-90.
16 This possibility was envisaged, for instance, by Flammarion as recalled by H. Poincaré in his La science et la méthode, Paris, 1909, Ch. 4.
17 Paul Langevin, "Le temps, l'espace et la causalité dans la physique moderne," Bulletin de la Société française de la philosophie, Séance du 19 octobre 1911; "L'evolution de l'espace et du temps," Revue de métaphysique et de morale, vol. XIX, 1911, pp. 455-466; also in Scientia, vol. X, 1911, pp. 31-54.
18 Hans Reichenbach, Die Philosophie der Raum-Zeit Lehre, Berlin, 1928, p. 175.
19 I dealt with this problem most recently in the article "Relativity and the Status of Becoming," Foundations of Physics, vol. IV, December, 1975, in particular in its last part "The Physical Emptiness of the Future." (pp. 610-17).
20 Quoted by Meyerson, op. cit., p. 104.
21 This argument was put forth by Hugo Bergman, Der Kampf um das Kausal gesetz in der jüngsten Physik, Braunschweig, 1929, pp. 25-28. This argument was adopted by A. Grünbaum, Philosophical Problems of Space and Time, New York, 1963 and Modern Science and Zeno's Paradoxes, Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1967, Ch. I. My answer to Grünbaum is in "The Myth of Frozen Passage" in Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, II, 1965, pp. 441-453 and "Relativity and the Status of Becoming," Foundations of Physics V, 1975, pp. 607-616. Some other defenders of the static interpretation of Minkowski's world ignore the basic difference between Newtonian and Einsteinian spacetime; for instance Donald Williams "The Myth of Frozen Passage" Journal of Philosophy, v. 40, 1951, p. 457 and W. Quine in his Word and Object, Cambridge, Mass., 1967, p. 160.
22 H. Reichenbach, "Les fondements logiques de la mécanique des quanta," Annales de l'Institut Henri Poincaré, v. XIII, 1952, p. 157.
23 H. Reichenbach, "Die Kausalstruktur der Welt und der Unterschied Ver gangenheit und Zukunft," Sitzungsberichte der math.-naturw. Abteilung der bayerischen Akademie der Wissenscbaften, Munich, 1924, pp. 133-175. Also The Philosophy of Space and Time, Dover Publ., 1958, esp. § 16, "The Difference between Space and Time" and § 43, "The Singular Nature of Time."
24 H. Bergmann, op. cit., p. 25: "Darum hat dieser rein subjektive Begriff der Jetz, der Gegenwart, in der Physik keine Stelle." Against Bergmann's view cf. G. J. Whitrow, The Natural Philosophy of Time, 2nd ed., Oxford, 1980, pp. 348-350.
25 Olivier Costa de Beauregard, Le second principe de la science du temps, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1963, p. 132.
26 Mario Bunge, Foundations of Physics, New York, Springer Verlag, 1967, p. 206: "It is often claimed that SR [Special Relativity] has wiped out the difference between space and time and even between what has been and what may be: that it has spatialized time and that it pictures the world as a block given once and for all, so that nothing ever happens: everything would exist already in some region of the Minkowski space, which would be thoroughly homogeneous and isotropic. This is preposterous. SR cannot be even stated without the notion e.m. signal, and even e.m. signal is a process (sequence of events), not a static being."
27 H. Bergson, Creative Evolution, tr. by A. Mitchell, New York, 1911, p. 45. The usual, uncritically accepted claim that Bergson "completely misunderstood relativity," has been recently challenged by Marie-Antoinette Tonnélat, Histoire du principe de relativité, Paris, 1971, p. 280-93; M. Capek, Bergson and Modern Physics, Dordrecht, 1971, esp. pp. 237-256; the same author "Ce qui est vivant et ce qui est mort dans la critique bergsonienne de la relativité," Revue de Syn thèse, 1980, pp. 313-344.
