Einstein and Hume’s philosophy of time(aeon.co)
aeon.co
Einstein and Hume’s philosophy of time
https://aeon.co/essays/what-albert-einstein-owes-to-david-humes-notion-of-time
42 comments
All true; Bergson's critique is believed to have directly influenced the Nobel prize committee. In hindsight an absolute travesty.
However, I would not say that Einstein's explanation of the photoelectric effect was not Nobel prize worthy in itself, or even less groundbreaking, as it laid the foundations for quantum theory.
Also, remember that at the time when Einstein's Nobel prize was awarded the general theory of relativity was very new and had only been partially confirmed by experiment (by light bending near the sun and the precession of mercury) so the Nobel prize would have have had to been awarded of the special theory alone.
However, I would not say that Einstein's explanation of the photoelectric effect was not Nobel prize worthy in itself, or even less groundbreaking, as it laid the foundations for quantum theory.
Also, remember that at the time when Einstein's Nobel prize was awarded the general theory of relativity was very new and had only been partially confirmed by experiment (by light bending near the sun and the precession of mercury) so the Nobel prize would have have had to been awarded of the special theory alone.
I have known this perspective on time for quite some time but never really thought about it much further until now reading this article.
Doesn't this imply that presentism is the right view or at least the one Occam's razor would suggest and not one of the block universe models? One could say without a fundamental time dimension there are not enough dimensions for a block universe to begin with. All of the universe would really exist in the same moment, a kind of true now, while each observer could invent his own frame-dependent time dimension and assign time coordinates to events in the normal way so that the laws of physics formulated in time become simple.
Not withstanding this the evolution of the state of the universe could be fixed - ignoring the complications of non-determinism or probabilistic laws for simplicity - by the laws of nature so that one could still think of the universe as a block universe once one has established a time dimension.
It still feels very weird to me to think about the evolution of the universe without any time. I understand that I can rexpress a circular motion x(t) = (r cos x, r sin t) as r² = x² + y² without reference to time but how do we recover the ordering of positions as time progresses without time? Just saying that from position X you will end up in position Y given some specific velocity at position X seems somewhat problematic to me as the velocity is a time derivative and time we do not have.
On the other hand it doesn't really matter because the idea alone of the state of the universe changing without any time for the change to occur in doesn't compute in my brain. And if there was such a time, wouldn't a time for the universe to involve in have to be a different time then the one we can invent inside of the universe to write simple equations? But couldn't we then link those times and arrive at a unique global time within the universe after all, some kind of preferred foliation of spacetime?
Doesn't this imply that presentism is the right view or at least the one Occam's razor would suggest and not one of the block universe models? One could say without a fundamental time dimension there are not enough dimensions for a block universe to begin with. All of the universe would really exist in the same moment, a kind of true now, while each observer could invent his own frame-dependent time dimension and assign time coordinates to events in the normal way so that the laws of physics formulated in time become simple.
Not withstanding this the evolution of the state of the universe could be fixed - ignoring the complications of non-determinism or probabilistic laws for simplicity - by the laws of nature so that one could still think of the universe as a block universe once one has established a time dimension.
It still feels very weird to me to think about the evolution of the universe without any time. I understand that I can rexpress a circular motion x(t) = (r cos x, r sin t) as r² = x² + y² without reference to time but how do we recover the ordering of positions as time progresses without time? Just saying that from position X you will end up in position Y given some specific velocity at position X seems somewhat problematic to me as the velocity is a time derivative and time we do not have.
On the other hand it doesn't really matter because the idea alone of the state of the universe changing without any time for the change to occur in doesn't compute in my brain. And if there was such a time, wouldn't a time for the universe to involve in have to be a different time then the one we can invent inside of the universe to write simple equations? But couldn't we then link those times and arrive at a unique global time within the universe after all, some kind of preferred foliation of spacetime?
> It still feels very weird to me to think about the evolution of the universe without any time.
It's not that time doesn't exist in the block universe, it's just a free parameter in the block.
It's not that time doesn't exist in the block universe, it's just a free parameter in the block.
That's not what I meant. I meant if time is not fundamental, then there must be a time-free formulation of the laws of physics and also the universe itself must fundamentally work without time. I can somewhat - but certainly not fully - wrap my head around a time-free formulation of physics for specific situations and recovering time from that as an emergent phenomenon. But thinking about the universe as fundamentally time-free just breaks my brain, I can not overcome the thinking that change happens over time while the truth is probably closer to time emerges from change, roughly speaking. I guess because we are so used to reductionism, thinking about things as the sum of their parts and how they work, we or at least I struggle when something is not decomposable. But time seems to fall into this category - if there is a single isolated particle, then there is no time, it only shows up once there is a composite system and relations between its parts can change.
The term "Arrow of Time" is something that might be relevant to what you're considering; which is a somewhat unsolved problem but generally thought to be caused as a statistical consequence of there being a very low entropy state in the past.
This is a different problem - the laws of physics when formulated in the usual way with a time dimension are mostly symmetric or reversible, i.e. there is no obvious difference between past and future. As you said, one of the proposed solutions is a low entropy initial state that can break this symmetry and help to explain the perceived difference between past and future.
There has been some research on directly visualizing the effects of relativity, e.g.:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2829521_Time_Dilati...
It might be a fun project to implement something like this.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2829521_Time_Dilati...
It might be a fun project to implement something like this.
I used to like such articles, but years and years of education made me realize what matters in the real world is the math you know in order to back up your claims. Otherwise, knowing a bunch of stuff (like this article) doesn't get you far at all, and in fact, may give you a fake sense of knowledge which is worse than not knowing these things in the first place.
Math doesn't really justify the claim: we have plenty of math to justify classic mechanics, yet it's not how the nature works. At some point you need to stop calculating and start thinking.
You make a good point and I agree with the "start thinking" part. But I think philosophizing about everything without actually being able to give concrete, substantive results is as useless as trying to use mathematics blindly and w/o "thinking".
Actually yes, that's how nature "works", at certains scales and regimes of applicability. Likewise quantum mechanics also tells us something fundamental about how nature works, again at certain regimes of applicability. It's still not a theory of everything, but that doesn't mean it's wrong.
Newtonian physics is only coincidentally correct. It’s not “wrong” in the sense that the math isn’t sound or that experiments aren’t reproducible within earth, but it’s not the correct model for what really happens in physical phenomenon regardless of scale.
What? It's not "coincidentally" correct, and yes, it absolutely is a correct model for phenomena at a certain scale (in fact, for the vast majority of phenomena in engineering disciplines for instance).
It's really not a correct model even at the scale of the phenomena for which it is correct, that's why it can't explain what's beyond its scale, nor can anyone draw a line to clearly define the boundaries of the scale in which it is correct. I'm afraid I don't have a more profound argument than that. The math of Newtonian physics merely coincides with what's actually going on in reality, but what's actually going on in reality is as explained by Einsteinian physics. We're only keeping Newtonian physics around because it's close enough as an approximation of natural phenomenon and therefore it is pragmatic, but pragmatic does not mean correct and it remains an estimation nonetheless. It's not the correct model of what's actually going on.
What scale? Quantum mechanics has no limit on scale, e.g. delayed choice experiment has galactic scale.
It certainly has. It's no theory of everything, therefore it has limits. For example not explaining gravity.
Exactly! Without the math to back it up, the additional rationalizing is not a foundational study. It cannot be built upon, and that is why it isn't a great idea.
Einstein would apparently disagree with you.
I find this to be a very narrow minded perspective.
Without the philosophy to back it up how can you justify your belief in the mathematics?
Without the philosophy to back it up how can you justify your belief in the mathematics?
Do I really need to know the history of science and philosophy in order to come up with Lorentz Transformation? No, I need solid understanding of physics and the mathematical models that are already available in that framework, and then build upon those.
Sure, these articles could be fun to read, but one does not really expect to have more practical knowledge after reading them. How would you use Hume’s arguments to help you learn the theory of relativity better?
And it’s not just in physics. I can make the same claim in almost any field of science that values results over cheap talk. In game theory for example, does philosophy help you come up with something as magnificent as Nash Equilibrium? No, but Kakutani’s theorem does. Learn the math and practical knowledge, the rest is a waste of time.
Sure, these articles could be fun to read, but one does not really expect to have more practical knowledge after reading them. How would you use Hume’s arguments to help you learn the theory of relativity better?
And it’s not just in physics. I can make the same claim in almost any field of science that values results over cheap talk. In game theory for example, does philosophy help you come up with something as magnificent as Nash Equilibrium? No, but Kakutani’s theorem does. Learn the math and practical knowledge, the rest is a waste of time.
It depends on your goals and where your interests align. The domain of philosophy is fundamental and all encompassing, and you have philosophical opinions that you can choose to examine or not. From a career perspective you are almost certainly right that time is better spent extending your skills in the empirical domain but others have a different temperament and have use for philosophy. And for some of those people, their contributions are long lasting and impactful.
See this link titled “The Purpose of Philosophy”: http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s10113.pdf
See this link titled “The Purpose of Philosophy”: http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s10113.pdf
Well, the very idea of the scientific method is a philosophical innovation. I think you're not even aware of the history of how we got here.
Saying that physics has a “mathematical framework” is a philosophical stance.
This is a bit of a giant leap. Scientific advances rely on many many many previous works, just look at the references. I fail to see the relevance of singling one out.
The article opens with several references, from 1915 all the way to 1949, in which Einstein reports Hume's influence on him and says that without Hume it's possible he would never have come up with relativity. That's as solid evidence of a link as could exist. More importantly, though, this material is interesting and worth discussing rather than dismissing.
(That's in the site guidelines, by the way: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
(That's in the site guidelines, by the way: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
Thank you for the reminder. I was overly dismissive and I'm glad you called me out over it. To be more constructive though, I feel like the intersection of the sciences and philosophy now is purely driven by these kind of articles which seek to establish that in the past research ideas would borrow from concepts of philosophy. Globally education has shifted further and further from this view, and without articles like this, no living professional scientist would know Hume from Kant.
This declining relevance is true of other scientific works as well, but that is rarely touched upon. I suppose in some sense my comment expressed my annoyance that only philosophical roots are rediscovered every now and then.
This declining relevance is true of other scientific works as well, but that is rarely touched upon. I suppose in some sense my comment expressed my annoyance that only philosophical roots are rediscovered every now and then.
You're being downvoted unfairly. There is of course a very simple reason why philosophy plays almost no role any longer, which was rightly pointed out by Stephen Hawking in 2010. Philosophers lack the mathematical training and maturity to follow what is going on in modern science. At Einstein's time this was not yet the case, at least Special Relativity was relatively easy to follow for philosophers (even though, to be fair, none of them managed to contribute anything of substance to it or anything of substance to early Quantum Mechanics).
It lasted up until the 1950s or so, and then philosophers started to fall behind. There has also be a substantial decline in math education for philosophers. Both Russell and Quine contributed directly to the foundations of mathematics, for instance. Even Kripke made substantial contributions to modal logic and semantic paradoxes. Nowadays you'll have to look very hard to even find a substantial contribution of a philosopher in logic, even though that's historically the mathematical discipline they know best.
As for the philosophical ideas without backing them up. People always grab some philosopher who had an idea and point out the "early roots", but they conveniently neglect the fact that simultaneously hundreds of other philosophers had patently absurd ideas as well. Even within philosophy there is a huge business based entirely on selection bias. People quote Aristotle as authoritative source, but of course only ever those parts of his work that remotely make sense. Democrit's theory of atoms is another typical example. It barely made sense at his time, and only so in opposition to other nonsense invented by "nature" philosophers then, yet he's misquoted as the inventor of the modern atom theory in every second slide show about chemistry.
It lasted up until the 1950s or so, and then philosophers started to fall behind. There has also be a substantial decline in math education for philosophers. Both Russell and Quine contributed directly to the foundations of mathematics, for instance. Even Kripke made substantial contributions to modal logic and semantic paradoxes. Nowadays you'll have to look very hard to even find a substantial contribution of a philosopher in logic, even though that's historically the mathematical discipline they know best.
As for the philosophical ideas without backing them up. People always grab some philosopher who had an idea and point out the "early roots", but they conveniently neglect the fact that simultaneously hundreds of other philosophers had patently absurd ideas as well. Even within philosophy there is a huge business based entirely on selection bias. People quote Aristotle as authoritative source, but of course only ever those parts of his work that remotely make sense. Democrit's theory of atoms is another typical example. It barely made sense at his time, and only so in opposition to other nonsense invented by "nature" philosophers then, yet he's misquoted as the inventor of the modern atom theory in every second slide show about chemistry.
That would seem reasonable if you consider Russell, for example, as a philosopher who knew mathematics.
But it seems equally valid to consider him a mathematician who knew philosophy. In which case, you could just as well frame the argument as mathematicians and scientists no longer have a good understanding of philosophy and are therefore incapable of contributing to the philosophy of their field.
But it seems equally valid to consider him a mathematician who knew philosophy. In which case, you could just as well frame the argument as mathematicians and scientists no longer have a good understanding of philosophy and are therefore incapable of contributing to the philosophy of their field.
I doubt that is anything to be concerned about, as we can reasonably expect that, among scientists, there will be a number following in the steps of Einstein and Bohr, taking a philospohically-minded approach to science - there's David Deutsch, for one. Ironically, many of the people objecting to Hawking's dismissal of philosophy offered, as counterpoint, the claim that Hawking's own work had philosophical components!
And there are a few philosophers, such as Tim Maudlin, who know the science well enough to persue its philosophical questions. Despite these exceptions, I think it is not unreasonable to ask if 21st. century academic philosophy has chosen to turn away from the philosophical issues of 21st. century fundamental science.
No-one is stopping philosophers from contributing to science.
And there are a few philosophers, such as Tim Maudlin, who know the science well enough to persue its philosophical questions. Despite these exceptions, I think it is not unreasonable to ask if 21st. century academic philosophy has chosen to turn away from the philosophical issues of 21st. century fundamental science.
No-one is stopping philosophers from contributing to science.
Given the current state of the world, perhaps it's not a good thing that philosophical thinking has taken a backseat.
> Einstein reports Hume's influence on him and says that without Hume it's possible he would never have come up with relativity. That's as solid evidence of a link as could exist.
I see what you're saying. If Einstein attributes his thinking to Hume's influence, nobody can deny it. That's true of admissions in a court of law, however, our understanding of how scientific ideas are generated lacks the same certainty. Personal reflection is no guarantee of insight into the formation of ideas.
Einstein's acknowledgement of Hume as an intellectual predecessor tells us he admires Hume. It doesn't tell us where Einstein's own thoughts came from. Our knowledge of neurology isn't advanced enough to draw that conclusion.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/there-is-no-such-...
I see what you're saying. If Einstein attributes his thinking to Hume's influence, nobody can deny it. That's true of admissions in a court of law, however, our understanding of how scientific ideas are generated lacks the same certainty. Personal reflection is no guarantee of insight into the formation of ideas.
Einstein's acknowledgement of Hume as an intellectual predecessor tells us he admires Hume. It doesn't tell us where Einstein's own thoughts came from. Our knowledge of neurology isn't advanced enough to draw that conclusion.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/there-is-no-such-...
What are you trying to say? It seems like the point you're making is that given a certain standard we are not able to say how someone's thoughts came to be for certain. But how is this a relevant or interesting point?
I am responding to dang's statement about Einstein's own analysis of the aetiology of his theory, for which he Einstein credits the influence of Hume.
Dang says "That's as solid evidence of a link as could exist."
I don't think it is the most solid evidence that could exist.
We don't even know how theories are formed in the mind, and we don't know the data format used by the brain. One day, we might be able to observe that empirically, in the same way we can examine source code versions of computer software in order to make informed statements about the aetiology of forked code. Today, we can't do that.
We can only guess at the origins of people's thoughts, and when the thoughts come from our own selves, no advantage or insight is conferred. That is considered in the Scientific American essay I linked to above. Do you have any constructive criticism to offer about that essay?
Einstein noted the limitations of this ontological discussion as well, in the preface clause of his remarks to Besso "In so far as I can be aware, the immediate influence of D Hume on me was greater."
My point is that Einstein's awareness, like your own and my own awareness of where our own thoughts come from, is slim. That's an entirely different thing to wanting to associate ourselves and our ideas with great figures in history. On that point, Einstein and I both know that great minds think alike.
Dang says "That's as solid evidence of a link as could exist."
I don't think it is the most solid evidence that could exist.
We don't even know how theories are formed in the mind, and we don't know the data format used by the brain. One day, we might be able to observe that empirically, in the same way we can examine source code versions of computer software in order to make informed statements about the aetiology of forked code. Today, we can't do that.
We can only guess at the origins of people's thoughts, and when the thoughts come from our own selves, no advantage or insight is conferred. That is considered in the Scientific American essay I linked to above. Do you have any constructive criticism to offer about that essay?
Einstein noted the limitations of this ontological discussion as well, in the preface clause of his remarks to Besso "In so far as I can be aware, the immediate influence of D Hume on me was greater."
My point is that Einstein's awareness, like your own and my own awareness of where our own thoughts come from, is slim. That's an entirely different thing to wanting to associate ourselves and our ideas with great figures in history. On that point, Einstein and I both know that great minds think alike.
On the other hand, established philosophy was very sceptical of his ideas, which collided spectacularly with Henri Bergson's ideas about time, now forgotten, but very fashionable then. This made relativity controversial for a long time (even after Eddington's 1919 observation of gravitational lensing during an eclipse) and probably was the reason that he never got a Nobel prize for it, but only for his much less groundbreaking work on photoelectricity.