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How Relativity Contradicts Presentism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2010

Simon Saunders
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Extract

But this picture of a ‘block universe’, composed of a timeless web of ‘world-lines’ in a four-dimensional space, however strongly suggested by the theory of relativity, is a piece of gratuitous metaphysics. Since the concept of change, of something happening, is an inseparable component of the common-sense concept of time and a necessary component of the scientist's view of reality, it is quite out of the question that theoretical physics should require us to hold the Eleatic view that nothing happens in ‘the objective world’. Here, as so often in the philosophy of science, a useful limitation in the form of representation is mistaken for a deficiency of the universe (Black, 1962).

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Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 50 , March 2002 , pp. 277 - 292
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2002

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