The philosophy of physics without time
(2015) The Genesis of Concepts and the Confrontation of Rationalities — Location: Louvain-la-Neuve (7.October.2015)
Files
No attached file found for this publication.
Details
- Authors
- Abstract
- There are two opposing but nevertheless mutually dependent trends in the philosophy of time. Genuine time requires becoming. Time is strongly related to the notion of change. Among other things, the first trend gave us impossibility arguments such as Parmenides’ and McTaggart’s ones. If becoming is metaphysically or logically impossible, then time and change cannot exist. In this talk I will put aside most of this typically metaphysical tradition to concentrate on the second trend. The second trend has always been present in what we call science today. From the symmetrical co-dependence of time and change in Aristotle’s physics to the unidirectional necessity of time for change in Newton’s Principia, time and change seem irremediably connected. Until now. An important result of the research program committed to produce an unification between quantum physics (our best theory about matter) and general relativity (our best theory about space-time) incites us to reconsider Einstein’s contribution to the physics of time and, in particular, to discard the dependence between time and change. Change is what is needed for evolution, but change does not need time. In the words of the physicists Carlo Rovelli and Francesca Vidotto: “This does not mean that there is no evolution in the world or that there is no change. It means that evolution and change in the real world are too complicated to be well represented as evolution of a single variable”. In this talk, I will analyse and discuss what philosophers should conclude from this new take on time and change, in particular, I will evoke how it makes the phenomenology of becoming even more problematic.
- Affiliations
Citations
Guay, A. (2015). The philosophy of physics without time. The Genesis of Concepts and the Confrontation of Rationalities, Louvain-la-Neuve. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/174613