https://iai.tv/articles/the-extraordinar..._auid=2020
INTRO: Most people have heard that Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity revolutionized our understanding of time. But most people still aren’t aware of quite how profound the consequences of Einstein’s block universe are, according to which our experience of the present as uniquely different from the past or the future, the very idea of time having a direction, of “passing”, is put into question, argues Michael Silberstein.
EXCERPTS: If you explore YouTube, you will find hundreds of videos and recorded lectures that assert “time is an illusion” given Einstein’s relativity. But is this true? And what exactly do these people mean by “time” and “illusion”? Because these words have multiple meanings, we must ask.
My goal here is to help the reader understand in exactly what sense Einstein (or anyone else) might justifiably assert that time is an illusion based on relativity. In so doing, I argue that there are essential features of our temporal experience, such as the passage of time, presence, and direction, that cannot be fully explained in the block universe picture given to us by relativity—our best physical theory of time. And whilst these essential features of time are not themselves illusory, there is a mystery about the status in which relativity theory leaves them.
[...] In a recent piece, Tim Maudlin grants that spacetime is a block world as I have defined it, but he does not think it warrants the word “illusion.” In his own words, “when it comes to the question of whether time is real or illusory, there is no way in which it [Minkowski spacetime] essentially differs from Newtonian physics.” Some philosophers go further and suggest that there is no discernable difference at all between the Presentism of Newtonian mechanics and the Eternalism of Einstein’s spacetime.
We have already seen that such claims are false. Just think of time-dilation and length-contraction in relativity, wherein we learn that the elapsed time between events and the length of objects are frame-dependent. Regarding the very same events and objects, there will be observers on various reference frames who will disagree about these properties, and both will be right! This highly counter-intuitive state of affairs could not happen in Newton’s world. I would say all of this constitutes a pretty significant difference, and we are not done yet.
You might ask, since Maudlin and I do not disagree about the facts thus far, only whether to call this state of affairs an “illusion”, do we disagree about anything else? Yes. I think that the block universe of spacetime lacks PPD, and Maudlin does not. I will explain my position first and then reply to his.
So, why does the block universe of spacetime lack Presence, Passage, and Direction in a way that Newton’s model does not? As Maudlin himself notes, the Newtonian model assumes absolute/objective simultaneity relations and that time is “the succession of the global instants” from past to future. Unsurprisingly then, Newton’s physical model of time grounded in everyday experience is often associated with or interpreted in terms of Presentism... (MORE - missing details)
INTRO: Most people have heard that Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity revolutionized our understanding of time. But most people still aren’t aware of quite how profound the consequences of Einstein’s block universe are, according to which our experience of the present as uniquely different from the past or the future, the very idea of time having a direction, of “passing”, is put into question, argues Michael Silberstein.
EXCERPTS: If you explore YouTube, you will find hundreds of videos and recorded lectures that assert “time is an illusion” given Einstein’s relativity. But is this true? And what exactly do these people mean by “time” and “illusion”? Because these words have multiple meanings, we must ask.
My goal here is to help the reader understand in exactly what sense Einstein (or anyone else) might justifiably assert that time is an illusion based on relativity. In so doing, I argue that there are essential features of our temporal experience, such as the passage of time, presence, and direction, that cannot be fully explained in the block universe picture given to us by relativity—our best physical theory of time. And whilst these essential features of time are not themselves illusory, there is a mystery about the status in which relativity theory leaves them.
[...] In a recent piece, Tim Maudlin grants that spacetime is a block world as I have defined it, but he does not think it warrants the word “illusion.” In his own words, “when it comes to the question of whether time is real or illusory, there is no way in which it [Minkowski spacetime] essentially differs from Newtonian physics.” Some philosophers go further and suggest that there is no discernable difference at all between the Presentism of Newtonian mechanics and the Eternalism of Einstein’s spacetime.
We have already seen that such claims are false. Just think of time-dilation and length-contraction in relativity, wherein we learn that the elapsed time between events and the length of objects are frame-dependent. Regarding the very same events and objects, there will be observers on various reference frames who will disagree about these properties, and both will be right! This highly counter-intuitive state of affairs could not happen in Newton’s world. I would say all of this constitutes a pretty significant difference, and we are not done yet.
You might ask, since Maudlin and I do not disagree about the facts thus far, only whether to call this state of affairs an “illusion”, do we disagree about anything else? Yes. I think that the block universe of spacetime lacks PPD, and Maudlin does not. I will explain my position first and then reply to his.
So, why does the block universe of spacetime lack Presence, Passage, and Direction in a way that Newton’s model does not? As Maudlin himself notes, the Newtonian model assumes absolute/objective simultaneity relations and that time is “the succession of the global instants” from past to future. Unsurprisingly then, Newton’s physical model of time grounded in everyday experience is often associated with or interpreted in terms of Presentism... (MORE - missing details)