Skip to main content

Time: The A Team

LeeSmolinAtHarvard.JPG

Philosophers who discuss the nature of time sometimes talk of the "A series" view versus the "B series" view. Here's the Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-series_and_B-series

The terminology goes back to the work of Scottish Hegelian McTaggart, writing a little more than a century ago. But the 21st century meaning of the labels may be a bit different from what McTaggart had in mind.

"A-series" includes any view to the effect that the intuitive non-philosophic notion of time is more-or-less correct --there is a moving "now" and things that weren't real yesterday will become real tomorrow when the moving "now" gets there. The "B-series" view (again, in my imperfect understanding) is the view that there is only a single block universe already including tomorrow and next century etc. -- and the moving "now" is an illusion.

McTaggart's work neatly coincided (in whatever time is) with Albert Einstein's, though McTaggart seems not to have been influenced by contemporary physics. As Einsteinian physics became widely known, McTaggart's B-series seemed to many to be a clear statement of its philosophic consequences, and it has been widely adopted. A-series folks have been on the defensive ever since, especially in academia.

Lately, though, some A-series folks have been making some noise, suggesting a desire to play offense. Tim Maudlin represents the philosophy department and Lee Smolin represents the physics department within this incipient rebellion. That's a photo of Smolin, above.

Here's a link to a paper by Maudlin: http://philpapers.org/rec/MAUTTA-2

Maudlin isn't really arguing, if I understand him, that Einstein was wrong. He seems to be saying that A series could be rendered consistent with special relativity, though it would apparently involve some as yet undone spade work. Instead of spatializing time, Einstein could be re-worked to temporalize space.  Or something like that. I'm clearly out of my depth here, though I'll keep floundering rather than seeking the safety of the kiddie pool where I belong.

Maudlin's ally Smolin, again speaking with the qualification "if I understand correctly", does want to say that Einstein was wrong in important respects. Here's the Amazon page for his book, Time Reborn.

Here's the Wikipedia page on Smolin. He is certainly credentialed: a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Harvard University in 1979, postdoc research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (Einstein's old stomping grounds, I believe) , and various high-level professorships.  If anyone in the world can criticize Einstein without being hopelessly out of his depth, it would be someone with that resume.

Anyway, those who know me will have figured out by now that all my sympathies are with the A team.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more