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Judging from the quotations below, philosophers of science John Norton
and Craig Callender reject the consequence of Einstein's 1905 light postulate known as "the passage of time is an illusion". Then what could possibly prevent both philosophers from making the next obvious step and inferring that Einstein's 1905 light postulate is false? http://www.humanamente.eu/PDF/Issue13_Paper_Norton.pdf John Norton: "It is common to dismiss the passage of time as illusory since its passage has not been captured within modern physical theories. I argue that this is a mistake. Other than the awkward fact that it does not appear in our physics, there is no indication that the passage of time is an illusion. (...) The passage of time is a real, objective fact that obtains in the world independently of us. How, you may wonder, could we think anything else? One possibility is that we might think that the passage of time is some sort of illusion, an artifact of the peculiar way that our brains interact with the world. Indeed that is just what you might think if you have spent a lot of time reading modern physics. Following from the work of Einstein, Minkowski and many more, physics has given a wonderfully powerful conception of space and time. Relativity theory, in its most perspicacious form, melds space and time together to form a four- dimensional spacetime. The study of motion in space and all other processes that unfold in them merely reduce to the study of an odd sort of geometry that prevails in spacetime. In many ways, time turns out to be just like space. In this spacetime geometry, there are differences between space and time. But a difference that somehow captures the passage of time is not to be found. There is no passage of time." http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...me-an-illusion Craig Callender in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: "Einstein mounted the next assault by doing away with the idea of absolute simultaneity. According to his special theory of relativity, what events are happening at the same time depends on how fast you are going. The true arena of events is not time or space, but their union: spacetime. Two observers moving at different velocities disagree on when and where an event occurs, but they agree on its spacetime location. Space and time are secondary concepts that, as mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who had been one of Einstein's university professors, famously declared, "are doomed to fade away into mere shadows." And things only get worse in 1915 with Einstein's general theory of relativity, which extends special relativity to situations where the force of gravity operates. Gravity distorts time, so that a second's passage here may not mean the same thing as a second's passage there. Only in rare cases is it possible to synchronize clocks and have them stay synchronized, even in principle. You cannot generally think of the world as unfolding, tick by tick, according to a single time parameter. In extreme situations, the world might not be carvable into instants of time at all. It then becomes impossible to say that an event happened before or after another." Pentcho Valev |
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