Space, Time, and Spacetime Physical and Philosophical Implications o
This volume is dedicated to the centennial anniversary of Minkowski's discovery of spacetime. It contains selected papers by physicists and philosophers on the Nature and Ontology of Spacetime. The first six papers, comprising Part I of the book, provide
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Abstract Ever since Hermann Minkowski’s now infamous comments in 1908 concerning the proper way to view space-time, the debate has raged as to whether or not the universe should be viewed as a four-dimensional, unified whole wherein the past, present, and future are regarded as equally real or whether the views espoused by the possibilists, historicists, and presentists regarding the unreality of the future (and, for presentists, the past) are more accurate. Now, a century after Minkowski’s proposed block universe first sparked debate, we present a new, more conclusive argument in favor of the eternalism. Utilizing an argument based on the relativity of simultaneity in the tradition of Putnam and Rietdijk and explicit novel but reasonable assumptions as to the nature of reality, we argue that the past, present, and future should be treated as equally real, thus ruling that presentism and other theories of time that bestow special ontological status to the past, present, or future are untenable. Finally, we respond to our critics who suggest that: (1) there is no metaphysical difference between the positions of eternalism and presentism, (2) the present must be defined as the “here” as well as the “now”, or (3) presentism is correct and physicists’ current understanding of relativity is incomplete because it does not incorporate a preferred frame. We call response 1 deflationary since it purports to dissolve or deconstruct the age-old debate between the two views and response 2 compatibilist because it does nothing to alter special relativity (SR), arguing instead that SR unadorned has the resources to save presentism. Response 3 we will call incompatibilist because it adorns SR in some way in order to save presentism a la some sort of preferred frame. We show that neither 1 nor 2 can save presentism and 3 is not well motivated at this juncture except as an ad hoc device to refute eternalism.
1 Introduction As Ladyman et al. [12] wisely note, the following are distinct but frequently conflated, deeply related questions in the metaphysics of time: 1. Are all events, past, present and future, real? 2. Is there temporal passage or objective becoming? V. Petkov (ed.), Space, Time, and Spacetime, Fundamental Theories of Physics 167, c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010 DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-13538-5 10,
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D. Peterson and M. Silberstein
3. Does tensed language have tenseless truth conditions? 4. Does time have a privileged direction? This paper will focus almost exclusively on question (1). In the philosophy of time, this major question has captivated philosophers for decades now. This problem stems from two competing notions of time. The first, originally suggested by Heraclitus, is called presentism.1 Though we will later present the presentist position more clearly so that it can be made relevant to a more thorough and modern treatment of presentist/eternalist debate, a good starting definition for presentism is the view that only the present is real; both the past and the future are unreal.2 This view
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