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Time Doesn’t Belong to Physics – When Bergson met Einstein

51 points by mellosouls 3y ago

empath-nirvana 3y ago
> Of course, one of the most successful aspects of science has been to describe the world in a sense that is true without relying on appearances. For example, Descartes very successfully describes the moon illusion (why it appears larger closer to the horizon) in his book on optics. As science progressed, it continued to correct for more and more illusions that were not limited to the realm of the visual. Thus Laplace corrected illusions of a mathematical nature, such as the commonly held belief that if a coin had landed heads many times in a row it will have a greater probability to land tails. Einstein was part if this tradition, taking it to a new level. Very interesting quote, and I think in a sense that even hard sciences like physics are not only a study of the "external world", but also the "internal world" that our mind creates to represent it. So much of the conversation around quantum mechanics isn't really about the math or science, which really isn't that complicated, but around how it can be that what is _really_ happening is so different from what we perceive to be happening in our minds. I think every break through in theoretical physics is sort of inextricably tied with a breakthrough in the study of consciousness. You have to understand both how the world works and also how the mind translates that to conscious experience of the world to really have something that most people will see as an explanation. An understanding of light, for example, is not just an explanation of the math underlying electromagnetic waves, but also how the eye perceives those waves and translates that into vision.
- theonlybutlet 3y ago
  Whilst it definitely helps being able to understand it I don't think it's a prerequisite, you only have to look to what we know of the quantum world to see that.
- lisper 3y ago
  Science is about explaining the data, and "the data" includes our perceptions of the world. In fact, that is all that we have direct access to. So... our perceptions of the world include a constant stream of overwhelming evidence that the world is classical, a 3-D space inhabited by objects that exist in particular places at particular times. So when evidence comes along that this isn't actually true, it can cause some pretty severe cognitive dissonance, and at best it demands an explanation of why the world appears classical even though it isn't. That has nothing to do with science being "about the internal world as well as the external world." Science is about explaining the data. The (hypothetical) existence of internal and external worlds is part of one possible explanation.
  - 0thgen 3y ago
    well said. It might seem like semantics but I think getting people to think of science using the way you defined it would resolve a lot of these debates (plus many other other fashionably nonsensical ideas)
    - lisper 3y ago
      Thanks. Just to give credit where it's due, this characterization of the scientific method as being about seeking explanations of data is not my idea, it's due to Karl Popper. The best accessible exposition of Popper's position IMHO is by David Deutsch in The Fabric of Reality, chapter 7. Well worth a read.
  - circlefavshape 3y ago
    Science doesn't explain anything. Scientific "laws" are just very efficiently compressed experimental/observational data
    - lisper 3y ago
      What do you think an explanation is?
  - empath-nirvana 3y ago
    > So... our perceptions of the world include a constant stream of overwhelming evidence that the world is classical, a 3-D space inhabited by objects that exist in particular places at particular times. So when evidence comes along that this isn't actually true, it can cause some pretty severe cognitive dissonance, and at best it demands an explanation of why the world appears classical even though it isn't. It would be extremely difficult for anybody to accept the evidence provided by quantum mechanics without some additional explanation for how our mind constructs a "classical" reality to go along with it. Modern physics happened along with a materialistic explanation of the origin of mind to go along with it, I don't think either could have advanced without the other.
    - 3y ago
theonlybutlet 3y ago
Perhaps it went over my head but in summary he wanted the scientific process of discovery in physics research to stop because his philosophy couldn't keep up?
- lisper 3y ago
  Yep. Pretty much. This is a not-uncommon sentiment among philosophers. It's the only way they can cope with the shift in the societal power dynamic that has happened since Newton and Darwin and Einstein and Turing and Bell. Science has subsumed philosophy, and the philosophers really hate that.
  - uoaei 3y ago
    On the other hand, the hubris of physicists to call their trade a replacement for philosophy exposes the fatal flaw in scientism.
    - lisper 3y ago
      Why is that a fatal flaw?
      - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
        Because even if you have experimental results in your favor, you still need epistemology to tell you why you can believe the results of the experiments. And you can't derive epistemology from experiments. Logical positivism tried to do this, and failed. Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge pretty much killed logical positivism, because he showed that no scientist is in the fully objective position that was required to set up and evaluate the experiments.
        lisper 3y ago
        > you still need epistemology to tell you why you can believe the results of the experiments No, you don't. This is a common mistake. Science is not about knowledge, it's about explanations. The whole idea of "knowledge" is just part of a vast web of explanations that turn out to be exceptionally good at accounting for the data. > logical positivism The mistake of logical positivism is the unjustified assumption that there exists such a thing as "truth", and that this thing is accessible to us by thinking. It isn't. It's a consequence of the empirical observation that the scientific method converges towards something. "Truth" is just a label that we attach to the thing that it's converging to (or at least appears to be converging to -- we won't know if that limit actually exists until we get there).
lisper 3y ago
> We have first order knowledge of things No, we don't. We only have first-order knowledge of our perceptions of things. And quantum mechanics shows us that those perceptions can be radically different from the underlying reality. Of course, Einstein can be forgiven for making this mistake because he didn't know about the Bell inequality and the subsequent experiments, so it is understandable that he would cling to the hope that something would come along and rescue QM from the EPR paradox by somehow extracting classical reality from the Schroedinger equation. But modern thinkers cannot be so readily absolved.
- likeabbas 3y ago
  >But modern thinkers cannot be so readily absolved No, but they can go on a 40 year goose chase trying to reconcile the many different string theories that don't have any physical evidence to substantiate. QFT is one of the most successful theories we've created, but GR is still our best theory regarding gravity. There's still no evidence for the graviton. We probably need something else besides QFT to describe the nature of reality
  - zhangjunphy 3y ago
    QFT is too successful that experimentalists stuck for half a century with no meaningful surprise. But theoreticians got to maintain a publication streak if trying to stay in academy. Thus string theory becomes the perfect field. Most ones doing it seem to know it is a goose chase but no one dare to admit it publicly as your colleagues stripped of funding would tear you to pieces. I feel we really should sort these papers into a category "physics in imaginary universe", so other people do not get confused.
  - lmm 3y ago
    > QFT is one of the most successful theories we've created, but GR is still our best theory regarding gravity. There's still no evidence for the graviton. We probably need something else besides QFT to describe the nature of reality The evidence for QFT is orders of magnitude stronger than the evidence for GR, and the two are incompatible. The empirical evidence is simply the fact that gravity exists; if there's no graviton then how does gravity work? If the right model isn't one of the (obscenely many) possible string theories, then what? I'm sceptical about string theory, but unless and until we come up with a better alternative, it's the only option. (People love to compare it with epicycles - but until you have the insight that lets you eliminate epicycles, you use them, because how else do you get on with doing science?)
tessellated 3y ago
Sorry for Kaku's old age decline, but not gonna waste my time listening to this crank. Has he been officially diagnosed with dementia yet? edit: you are right, I just flew over the article.
- mikhailfranco 3y ago
  Yes, Kaku is a crackpot grifter, but he is not relevant for this article.
- jakeinspace 3y ago
  This is not Michio Kaku, unless I’m very mistaken.
  - mannykannot 3y ago
    Kaku is mentioned just once, in a passing remark about an upcoming event. Mentioning him here seems bizarrely out of place.
denton-scratch 3y ago
TFA is presented as an interview. It's not clear to me who is asking the questions, and who is answering.
- munchler 3y ago
  Interviewee: Jimena Canales | Historian of science and author of The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time (2015) as well as Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science (2020). Interviewer: Alexis Papazoglou | Senior editor for IAI News, the online magazine of the Institute of Art and Ideas, and former philosophy lecturer at Cambridge and Royal Holloway.
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    Thanks.
KHRZ 3y ago
Well history doesn't belong to historians, people can believe any fan fic happened, as is tradition. Medicine doesn't belong to biology, there's a long traditional culture of alternatives. Art doesn't belong to artists, because anything is subjectively art. Philosophy doesn't belong to philosophers, who is to say some published philosophy is better than some drunken rant?
robertlagrant 3y ago
> Bergson emphasised the cultural and technological context in which Einstein formulated relativity and argued that a theory of time that relies on clocks but doesn’t understand their history and significance, is incomplete This is hard to get on board with. A theory of time is incomplete without a history of clocks? Have I misunderstood?
- uoaei 3y ago
  A theory of time is only complete without a history of clocks if you believe a theory of time can be completely physically correct, period. Do you know of any completely physically correct theories?
  - croes 3y ago
    You wouldn't know if you would
  - whatshisface 3y ago
    Relativity isn't even about clocks, and is practically difficult to verify with any but the absolute best... its most common applications are related to radiation physics. The only conflict science has with philosophers is its role as a stumbling block for people with high verbal abilities and a belief that they don't have to know anything about the subject they're writing about. If they had the same attitude towards glassblowing or archeology they would have the same results.
- CreateAccntAgn 3y ago
  It is incomplete in that it cannot replace older ideas of time in all contexts. It is perfectly valid/complete for use in scientific contexts. But the general population's use the idea of time for other purposes as well where Einsteins purely Relativistic formulation cannot be a stand in replacement is how I read it.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    > It is incomplete in that it cannot replace older ideas of time in all contexts. It is perfectly valid/complete for use in scientific contexts. It seems to just be saying: your theory uses clocks to illustrate it but doesn't include the history of clocks. I don't think that's quite what you're describing.
deleted 3y ago
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jerf 3y ago
I find myself becoming more and more sensitive to this basic mistake: We know relativity is wrong somehow. We know quantum mechanics is wrong somehow. They're both incredibly correct with their predictions but they don't go together, so they can't both be right and in the end they both have to be wrong somehow. Two of the places where they are both clearly somehow wrong are gravity (completely missing from QM, incompatible with quantization in relativity) and time (both theories having problems with them in the extreme cases). Therefore, grand pronouncements about how the universe is "really" a static four-dimensional object "because that's what relativity says" are just wrong, for the exact same reasons. Perhaps even in the "not even wrong" sense, on the grounds that it is no different than taking Newtonian physics and making ground pronouncements about the nature of the universe. Newtonian physics implies things like "there can be no absolute speed limit in the universe"; not just that there isn't one, but that there can't be one for the transforms it uses to be valid. There is such a speed limit and the transforms it uses aren't valid. Declaring the universe to have this or that characteristic based on relativity is no different than declaring it must not have a speed-of-light because that's what Newtonian physics says. The only difference is that "everybody" knows the latter is wrong; the former is just as wrong. So in general getting too worked up over what Einstein's relativity says about the universe at this level is a waste of time, no pun intended. Science history being what it is, it is quite likely that if we ever do penetrate down to what time "really" is it'll be even more mind-blowing than a static four-dimensional universe, but that's a problem for the future. (And the current leading contenders in that theory race I'm not sure are any more disruptive than QM already was. Total chaos space/time at scales so small that they are in some sense literally microscopically microscopically microscopically microscopic may be vaguely unsettling, but to my mind doesn't seem to add anything philosophically material that QM didn't already introduce.)
- hetman 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    It doesn’t look downvoted to me. I think this post of true and nice, but I can’t think of anything to discuss about it. Because of the way the ranking system works here, spats like the philosophy/physics thing will always rise to the top, I think.
Garlef 3y ago
Ever since reading some of Nick Bostrom's works, I find it advisable to be very sceptical when philosophers attempt to deal with mathematical thought.
b450 3y ago
It is very hard to read philosophy in this phenomenological/continental tradition. There is a real resistance in that tradition to plainly stating a core thesis. There may well be defensible reasons for this - maybe it preserves the subtleties, peculiar texture; the holistic, or even contradictory nature of thought or consciousness or what have you. But I think a lot of the time these philosophers won't come right out and say what they mean because they don't really know what they mean, and any sufficiently plain statement of their views would reveal itself as either trivially correct, or obviously wrong. Here is an example: > Bergson seems to argue that even Einstein’s concept of time, as what’s measured by a clock, is based on some more fundamental, more real, non-mathematical view of time, time as we perceive it, which might defy exact mathematical expression. What sense of time does Bergson have in mind here? > Consider, for example, how different pre-modern notions of time are from ours. When I write about the history of time in contemporary times, I always have in the back of my mind the image of Saturn devouring his son. In it, the passage, keeping and telling of time occurs be reference to love, violence, anthropophagy and reproduction. Throughout time, it is clear that we are dealing with radically different beasts. Bergson did not draw such stark distinctions, but in Duration and Simultaneity he asked us not to forget how time was a precondition for effective action. “Le temps est pour moi ce qu'il y a de plus réel et de plus nécessaire ; c'est la condition fondamentale de l'action ; – que dis-je ? c'est l'action même.” > Einstein’s definition of time has none of these radical elements and might even be responsible for leading us to forget about them. This question gets at the heart of the matter: what exactly is the disagreement between Bergson and Einstein? And we get a non-answer as far as I can tell. I have no idea what "radical elements" she is referencing. There some notion about ideas like "violence" or "reproduction" being stand-ins for the concept of time? and something about time being a precondition for, or even identical to, action? Violence and reproduction and action per se all take a non-zero amount of clock time, so I don't what the conflict is here. --- Ok, enough rambling. If anyone has a reaction similar to mine, they might find a more relatable exploration of this subject in Wilfrid Sellars' concepts of the the (naive, common-sensical, person-centric) "manifest image" and the "scientific image", and the role of philosophy in reconciling them.
SkeuomorphicBee 3y ago
> It has become a dominant view in the philosophy of time that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity showed that the passage of time is an illusion, and that in fact the past, present, and future all coexist. The first paragraph is already troubling for me, the "fact the past, present, and future all coexist" is a gross misinterpretation of general relativity, a borderline esoteric atrology-type view, and I can't believe that such mistaken view grew to be the "dominant view in the philosophy".
- crazydoggers 3y ago
  I don’t think it’s a gross misinterpretation. General relativity does show that what one observer would consider the future can exists as the present of another observer, and vice versa. As time is part of the 4 dimensional Minkowski space, saying that the future, past and present don’t coexist would be like saying left doesn’t exists when you’re going right.
  - mattclarkdotnet 3y ago
    It’s a misinterpretation because it uses phrases like “the future” and “the past”, when the whole insight of relativity theory is that neither term has much useful meaning.
    - tsimionescu 3y ago
      "The future" and "the past" have very useful and well defined meanings in SR. The key insight is that they are only meaningful locally, not at the level of the entire universe as it is assumed in Newtonian mechanics. Every possible observer has a clear view of their own past and their own future. As long as two observers are a long distance from each other, they may disagree on the order in which events that happen far away from each of them happen. But, they will never disagree on the order in which events that are close to either of them happened. And, if they ever meet, they will have a shared notion of what is in the past and what is in the future compared to the moment of their meeting (that is, any event that is in the future compared to their meeting for one of them is also in the future after their meeting for the other).
mannykannot 3y ago
> Q: In one of your talks you mention that the correct way to understand Einstein’s revolution is not as a theoretical, but as a technological revolution. Can you explain what you mean by that? > A: ...A very interesting question is why and how Einstein’s work was able to shed its mundane origins and parade itself as theoretical, cosmological and universal. The "mundane origins" here are Einstein's uses of the mostly then-relatively-new technologies of clocks, trains, bullets and rulers. I feel that the view Canales is setting out here is a mistaken reading of the history, and that Einstein was addressing "theoretical, cosmological and universal" concepts from the beginning, only referring to mundane entities for pedagogical purposes. By the late 1880's it was becoming clear that some of the further implications of Maxwell's electromagnetic theory were at odds with cosmological assumptions, a tension made more pointed by Michelson and Morley's 1887 aether-wind experiment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation#History
- whatshisface 3y ago
  Science doesn't have a conflict with philosophy, knowledge in any form has a conflict with people who can write an entire book without learning anything about their subject.
  - mikhailfranco 3y ago
    Yes, Bergson is not only completely wrong, but lazily and proudly wrong. He is either: - an early proto-Post-Modernist, who denies anything they don't advocate can be true; - an early woo-quantum-consciousness connector of mysteries, all mysteries are each other's explanations. Would, perhaps, Mr Bergson be a French philosopher?
thyrsus 3y ago
“Our entire belief in objects,” [Bergson] wrote in Creative Evolution (1907), “indeed rests upon the idea that time does not bite into them." The only "objects" I know of that time does not "bite into" are mathematical abstractions such as integers, or God existing outside of time. No physical entity (Einstein was concerned, after all, with physics) escapes being embedded in time. Can love transcend time? Only to the degree it, like mathematics, transcends physics.
Nevermark 3y ago
We know time and space are the same fabric, because different relativistic speeds let us see the same regions of space-time with different space-time coordinates. The “angle” of time vs space is different based on perspective. Each perspective sees a different direction of time through the 4D space-time. Yet from any perspective, the space time regions coordinates are still best represented with three real values and one imaginary value. This is the form of coordinates in the space time interval equation, and reflects time dilation and space contraction. So space and time are identical stuff, but from any vantage point you will see “your” time dimension acting differently than 3 spatial dimensions. It’s a really interesting property.
- vintermann 3y ago
  We know - how do we know? From experiments. And did we have to assume things about time in order to make experiments? You bet we did. We wouldn't get very far with experiments if we didn't take as axiomatic that causes precede their effect in time, for instance. I haven't got into the depths of Bergson's argument, but I think I see the point in the headline that time belongs in philosophy, and I can easily imagine he was right that Einstein was smuggling in philosophical assumptions in the particular choice of words he used to describe the implications of his findings.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  On the contrary, I would say that the Lorrentz transforms prove that time is fundamentally different from space. They form a continuum in some sense, but they are not the same at all: you have to flip the sign of the "time" coordinate compared to the three space coordinates to get the right results. Additionally, events in 4D spacetime can be either space-like separated or time-like separated, and this difference is the same for all (inertial) observers. This is especially relevant in discussions about the arrow of time since all inertial observers agree on the order in which time-like separated events happen. So even though in the 4D spacetime model there isn't an absolute ordering of events, there exists a partial order that all (inertial) observers agree on.
  - Nevermark 3y ago

51 points by mellosouls 3y ago

> Of course, one of the most successful aspects of science has been to describe the world in a sense that is true without relying on appearances. For example, Descartes very successfully describes the moon illusion (why it appears larger closer to the horizon) in his book on optics. As science progressed, it continued to correct for more and more illusions that were not limited to the realm of the visual. Thus Laplace corrected illusions of a mathematical nature, such as the commonly held belief that if a coin had landed heads many times in a row it will have a greater probability to land tails. Einstein was part if this tradition, taking it to a new level. Very interesting quote, and I think in a sense that even hard sciences like physics are not only a study of the "external world", but also the "internal world" that our mind creates to represent it. So much of the conversation around quantum mechanics isn't really about the math or science, which really isn't that complicated, but around how it can be that what is _really_ happening is so different from what we perceive to be happening in our minds. I think every break through in theoretical physics is sort of inextricably tied with a breakthrough in the study of consciousness. You have to understand both how the world works and also how the mind translates that to conscious experience of the world to really have something that most people will see as an explanation. An understanding of light, for example, is not just an explanation of the math underlying electromagnetic waves, but also how the eye perceives those waves and translates that into vision.

theonlybutlet 3y ago
Whilst it definitely helps being able to understand it I don't think it's a prerequisite, you only have to look to what we know of the quantum world to see that.
lisper 3y ago
Science is about explaining the data, and "the data" includes our perceptions of the world. In fact, that is all that we have direct access to. So... our perceptions of the world include a constant stream of overwhelming evidence that the world is classical, a 3-D space inhabited by objects that exist in particular places at particular times. So when evidence comes along that this isn't actually true, it can cause some pretty severe cognitive dissonance, and at best it demands an explanation of why the world appears classical even though it isn't. That has nothing to do with science being "about the internal world as well as the external world." Science is about explaining the data. The (hypothetical) existence of internal and external worlds is part of one possible explanation.
- 0thgen 3y ago
  well said. It might seem like semantics but I think getting people to think of science using the way you defined it would resolve a lot of these debates (plus many other other fashionably nonsensical ideas)
  - lisper 3y ago
    Thanks. Just to give credit where it's due, this characterization of the scientific method as being about seeking explanations of data is not my idea, it's due to Karl Popper. The best accessible exposition of Popper's position IMHO is by David Deutsch in The Fabric of Reality, chapter 7. Well worth a read.
- circlefavshape 3y ago
  Science doesn't explain anything. Scientific "laws" are just very efficiently compressed experimental/observational data
  - lisper 3y ago
    What do you think an explanation is?
- empath-nirvana 3y ago
  > So... our perceptions of the world include a constant stream of overwhelming evidence that the world is classical, a 3-D space inhabited by objects that exist in particular places at particular times. So when evidence comes along that this isn't actually true, it can cause some pretty severe cognitive dissonance, and at best it demands an explanation of why the world appears classical even though it isn't. It would be extremely difficult for anybody to accept the evidence provided by quantum mechanics without some additional explanation for how our mind constructs a "classical" reality to go along with it. Modern physics happened along with a materialistic explanation of the origin of mind to go along with it, I don't think either could have advanced without the other.
  - 3y ago

theonlybutlet 3y ago

Perhaps it went over my head but in summary he wanted the scientific process of discovery in physics research to stop because his philosophy couldn't keep up?

lisper 3y ago
Yep. Pretty much. This is a not-uncommon sentiment among philosophers. It's the only way they can cope with the shift in the societal power dynamic that has happened since Newton and Darwin and Einstein and Turing and Bell. Science has subsumed philosophy, and the philosophers really hate that.
- uoaei 3y ago
  On the other hand, the hubris of physicists to call their trade a replacement for philosophy exposes the fatal flaw in scientism.
  - lisper 3y ago
    Why is that a fatal flaw?
    - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      Because even if you have experimental results in your favor, you still need epistemology to tell you why you can believe the results of the experiments. And you can't derive epistemology from experiments. Logical positivism tried to do this, and failed. Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge pretty much killed logical positivism, because he showed that no scientist is in the fully objective position that was required to set up and evaluate the experiments.
      - lisper 3y ago
        > you still need epistemology to tell you why you can believe the results of the experiments No, you don't. This is a common mistake. Science is not about knowledge, it's about explanations. The whole idea of "knowledge" is just part of a vast web of explanations that turn out to be exceptionally good at accounting for the data. > logical positivism The mistake of logical positivism is the unjustified assumption that there exists such a thing as "truth", and that this thing is accessible to us by thinking. It isn't. It's a consequence of the empirical observation that the scientific method converges towards something. "Truth" is just a label that we attach to the thing that it's converging to (or at least appears to be converging to -- we won't know if that limit actually exists until we get there).

lisper 3y ago

> We have first order knowledge of things No, we don't. We only have first-order knowledge of our perceptions of things. And quantum mechanics shows us that those perceptions can be radically different from the underlying reality. Of course, Einstein can be forgiven for making this mistake because he didn't know about the Bell inequality and the subsequent experiments, so it is understandable that he would cling to the hope that something would come along and rescue QM from the EPR paradox by somehow extracting classical reality from the Schroedinger equation. But modern thinkers cannot be so readily absolved.

likeabbas 3y ago
>But modern thinkers cannot be so readily absolved No, but they can go on a 40 year goose chase trying to reconcile the many different string theories that don't have any physical evidence to substantiate. QFT is one of the most successful theories we've created, but GR is still our best theory regarding gravity. There's still no evidence for the graviton. We probably need something else besides QFT to describe the nature of reality
- zhangjunphy 3y ago
  QFT is too successful that experimentalists stuck for half a century with no meaningful surprise. But theoreticians got to maintain a publication streak if trying to stay in academy. Thus string theory becomes the perfect field. Most ones doing it seem to know it is a goose chase but no one dare to admit it publicly as your colleagues stripped of funding would tear you to pieces. I feel we really should sort these papers into a category "physics in imaginary universe", so other people do not get confused.
- lmm 3y ago
  > QFT is one of the most successful theories we've created, but GR is still our best theory regarding gravity. There's still no evidence for the graviton. We probably need something else besides QFT to describe the nature of reality The evidence for QFT is orders of magnitude stronger than the evidence for GR, and the two are incompatible. The empirical evidence is simply the fact that gravity exists; if there's no graviton then how does gravity work? If the right model isn't one of the (obscenely many) possible string theories, then what? I'm sceptical about string theory, but unless and until we come up with a better alternative, it's the only option. (People love to compare it with epicycles - but until you have the insight that lets you eliminate epicycles, you use them, because how else do you get on with doing science?)

tessellated 3y ago

Sorry for Kaku's old age decline, but not gonna waste my time listening to this crank. Has he been officially diagnosed with dementia yet? edit: you are right, I just flew over the article.

mikhailfranco 3y ago
Yes, Kaku is a crackpot grifter, but he is not relevant for this article.
jakeinspace 3y ago
This is not Michio Kaku, unless I’m very mistaken.
- mannykannot 3y ago
  Kaku is mentioned just once, in a passing remark about an upcoming event. Mentioning him here seems bizarrely out of place.

denton-scratch 3y ago

TFA is presented as an interview. It's not clear to me who is asking the questions, and who is answering.

munchler 3y ago
Interviewee: Jimena Canales | Historian of science and author of The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time (2015) as well as Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science (2020). Interviewer: Alexis Papazoglou | Senior editor for IAI News, the online magazine of the Institute of Art and Ideas, and former philosophy lecturer at Cambridge and Royal Holloway.
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  Thanks.

KHRZ 3y ago

Well history doesn't belong to historians, people can believe any fan fic happened, as is tradition. Medicine doesn't belong to biology, there's a long traditional culture of alternatives. Art doesn't belong to artists, because anything is subjectively art. Philosophy doesn't belong to philosophers, who is to say some published philosophy is better than some drunken rant?

robertlagrant 3y ago

> Bergson emphasised the cultural and technological context in which Einstein formulated relativity and argued that a theory of time that relies on clocks but doesn’t understand their history and significance, is incomplete This is hard to get on board with. A theory of time is incomplete without a history of clocks? Have I misunderstood?

uoaei 3y ago
A theory of time is only complete without a history of clocks if you believe a theory of time can be completely physically correct, period. Do you know of any completely physically correct theories?
- croes 3y ago
  You wouldn't know if you would
- whatshisface 3y ago
  Relativity isn't even about clocks, and is practically difficult to verify with any but the absolute best... its most common applications are related to radiation physics. The only conflict science has with philosophers is its role as a stumbling block for people with high verbal abilities and a belief that they don't have to know anything about the subject they're writing about. If they had the same attitude towards glassblowing or archeology they would have the same results.
CreateAccntAgn 3y ago
It is incomplete in that it cannot replace older ideas of time in all contexts. It is perfectly valid/complete for use in scientific contexts. But the general population's use the idea of time for other purposes as well where Einsteins purely Relativistic formulation cannot be a stand in replacement is how I read it.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > It is incomplete in that it cannot replace older ideas of time in all contexts. It is perfectly valid/complete for use in scientific contexts. It seems to just be saying: your theory uses clocks to illustrate it but doesn't include the history of clocks. I don't think that's quite what you're describing.

deleted 3y ago

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jerf 3y ago

I find myself becoming more and more sensitive to this basic mistake: We know relativity is wrong somehow. We know quantum mechanics is wrong somehow. They're both incredibly correct with their predictions but they don't go together, so they can't both be right and in the end they both have to be wrong somehow. Two of the places where they are both clearly somehow wrong are gravity (completely missing from QM, incompatible with quantization in relativity) and time (both theories having problems with them in the extreme cases). Therefore, grand pronouncements about how the universe is "really" a static four-dimensional object "because that's what relativity says" are just wrong, for the exact same reasons. Perhaps even in the "not even wrong" sense, on the grounds that it is no different than taking Newtonian physics and making ground pronouncements about the nature of the universe. Newtonian physics implies things like "there can be no absolute speed limit in the universe"; not just that there isn't one, but that there can't be one for the transforms it uses to be valid. There is such a speed limit and the transforms it uses aren't valid. Declaring the universe to have this or that characteristic based on relativity is no different than declaring it must not have a speed-of-light because that's what Newtonian physics says. The only difference is that "everybody" knows the latter is wrong; the former is just as wrong. So in general getting too worked up over what Einstein's relativity says about the universe at this level is a waste of time, no pun intended. Science history being what it is, it is quite likely that if we ever do penetrate down to what time "really" is it'll be even more mind-blowing than a static four-dimensional universe, but that's a problem for the future. (And the current leading contenders in that theory race I'm not sure are any more disruptive than QM already was. Total chaos space/time at scales so small that they are in some sense literally microscopically microscopically microscopically microscopic may be vaguely unsettling, but to my mind doesn't seem to add anything philosophically material that QM didn't already introduce.)

hetman 3y ago
[flagged]
- bee_rider 3y ago
  It doesn’t look downvoted to me. I think this post of true and nice, but I can’t think of anything to discuss about it. Because of the way the ranking system works here, spats like the philosophy/physics thing will always rise to the top, I think.

Garlef 3y ago

Ever since reading some of Nick Bostrom's works, I find it advisable to be very sceptical when philosophers attempt to deal with mathematical thought.

b450 3y ago

It is very hard to read philosophy in this phenomenological/continental tradition. There is a real resistance in that tradition to plainly stating a core thesis. There may well be defensible reasons for this - maybe it preserves the subtleties, peculiar texture; the holistic, or even contradictory nature of thought or consciousness or what have you. But I think a lot of the time these philosophers won't come right out and say what they mean because they don't really know what they mean, and any sufficiently plain statement of their views would reveal itself as either trivially correct, or obviously wrong. Here is an example: > Bergson seems to argue that even Einstein’s concept of time, as what’s measured by a clock, is based on some more fundamental, more real, non-mathematical view of time, time as we perceive it, which might defy exact mathematical expression. What sense of time does Bergson have in mind here? > Consider, for example, how different pre-modern notions of time are from ours. When I write about the history of time in contemporary times, I always have in the back of my mind the image of Saturn devouring his son. In it, the passage, keeping and telling of time occurs be reference to love, violence, anthropophagy and reproduction. Throughout time, it is clear that we are dealing with radically different beasts. Bergson did not draw such stark distinctions, but in Duration and Simultaneity he asked us not to forget how time was a precondition for effective action. “Le temps est pour moi ce qu'il y a de plus réel et de plus nécessaire ; c'est la condition fondamentale de l'action ; – que dis-je ? c'est l'action même.” > Einstein’s definition of time has none of these radical elements and might even be responsible for leading us to forget about them. This question gets at the heart of the matter: what exactly is the disagreement between Bergson and Einstein? And we get a non-answer as far as I can tell. I have no idea what "radical elements" she is referencing. There some notion about ideas like "violence" or "reproduction" being stand-ins for the concept of time? and something about time being a precondition for, or even identical to, action? Violence and reproduction and action per se all take a non-zero amount of clock time, so I don't what the conflict is here. --- Ok, enough rambling. If anyone has a reaction similar to mine, they might find a more relatable exploration of this subject in Wilfrid Sellars' concepts of the the (naive, common-sensical, person-centric) "manifest image" and the "scientific image", and the role of philosophy in reconciling them.

SkeuomorphicBee 3y ago

> It has become a dominant view in the philosophy of time that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity showed that the passage of time is an illusion, and that in fact the past, present, and future all coexist. The first paragraph is already troubling for me, the "fact the past, present, and future all coexist" is a gross misinterpretation of general relativity, a borderline esoteric atrology-type view, and I can't believe that such mistaken view grew to be the "dominant view in the philosophy".

crazydoggers 3y ago
I don’t think it’s a gross misinterpretation. General relativity does show that what one observer would consider the future can exists as the present of another observer, and vice versa. As time is part of the 4 dimensional Minkowski space, saying that the future, past and present don’t coexist would be like saying left doesn’t exists when you’re going right.
- mattclarkdotnet 3y ago
  It’s a misinterpretation because it uses phrases like “the future” and “the past”, when the whole insight of relativity theory is that neither term has much useful meaning.
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    "The future" and "the past" have very useful and well defined meanings in SR. The key insight is that they are only meaningful locally, not at the level of the entire universe as it is assumed in Newtonian mechanics. Every possible observer has a clear view of their own past and their own future. As long as two observers are a long distance from each other, they may disagree on the order in which events that happen far away from each of them happen. But, they will never disagree on the order in which events that are close to either of them happened. And, if they ever meet, they will have a shared notion of what is in the past and what is in the future compared to the moment of their meeting (that is, any event that is in the future compared to their meeting for one of them is also in the future after their meeting for the other).

mannykannot 3y ago

> Q: In one of your talks you mention that the correct way to understand Einstein’s revolution is not as a theoretical, but as a technological revolution. Can you explain what you mean by that? > A: ...A very interesting question is why and how Einstein’s work was able to shed its mundane origins and parade itself as theoretical, cosmological and universal. The "mundane origins" here are Einstein's uses of the mostly then-relatively-new technologies of clocks, trains, bullets and rulers. I feel that the view Canales is setting out here is a mistaken reading of the history, and that Einstein was addressing "theoretical, cosmological and universal" concepts from the beginning, only referring to mundane entities for pedagogical purposes. By the late 1880's it was becoming clear that some of the further implications of Maxwell's electromagnetic theory were at odds with cosmological assumptions, a tension made more pointed by Michelson and Morley's 1887 aether-wind experiment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation#History

whatshisface 3y ago
Science doesn't have a conflict with philosophy, knowledge in any form has a conflict with people who can write an entire book without learning anything about their subject.
- mikhailfranco 3y ago
  Yes, Bergson is not only completely wrong, but lazily and proudly wrong. He is either: - an early proto-Post-Modernist, who denies anything they don't advocate can be true; - an early woo-quantum-consciousness connector of mysteries, all mysteries are each other's explanations. Would, perhaps, Mr Bergson be a French philosopher?

thyrsus 3y ago

“Our entire belief in objects,” [Bergson] wrote in Creative Evolution (1907), “indeed rests upon the idea that time does not bite into them." The only "objects" I know of that time does not "bite into" are mathematical abstractions such as integers, or God existing outside of time. No physical entity (Einstein was concerned, after all, with physics) escapes being embedded in time. Can love transcend time? Only to the degree it, like mathematics, transcends physics.

Nevermark 3y ago

We know time and space are the same fabric, because different relativistic speeds let us see the same regions of space-time with different space-time coordinates. The “angle” of time vs space is different based on perspective. Each perspective sees a different direction of time through the 4D space-time. Yet from any perspective, the space time regions coordinates are still best represented with three real values and one imaginary value. This is the form of coordinates in the space time interval equation, and reflects time dilation and space contraction. So space and time are identical stuff, but from any vantage point you will see “your” time dimension acting differently than 3 spatial dimensions. It’s a really interesting property.

vintermann 3y ago
We know - how do we know? From experiments. And did we have to assume things about time in order to make experiments? You bet we did. We wouldn't get very far with experiments if we didn't take as axiomatic that causes precede their effect in time, for instance. I haven't got into the depths of Bergson's argument, but I think I see the point in the headline that time belongs in philosophy, and I can easily imagine he was right that Einstein was smuggling in philosophical assumptions in the particular choice of words he used to describe the implications of his findings.
tsimionescu 3y ago
On the contrary, I would say that the Lorrentz transforms prove that time is fundamentally different from space. They form a continuum in some sense, but they are not the same at all: you have to flip the sign of the "time" coordinate compared to the three space coordinates to get the right results. Additionally, events in 4D spacetime can be either space-like separated or time-like separated, and this difference is the same for all (inertial) observers. This is especially relevant in discussions about the arrow of time since all inertial observers agree on the order in which time-like separated events happen. So even though in the 4D spacetime model there isn't an absolute ordering of events, there exists a partial order that all (inertial) observers agree on.
- Nevermark 3y ago