Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T19:32:00.591Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - The inclusive reality of time

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2014

Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Affiliation:
Harvard Law School, Massachusetts
Lee Smolin
Affiliation:
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Canada
Get access

Summary

The problem presented: how much of nature exists in time?

Time is real, and everything that exists, or has ever existed, or will ever exist, takes place in time. From this thesis there results the idea that the laws of nature must in principle be susceptible to change. Like everything else in this one real universe, they have a history.

The inclusive reality of time is not a tautology or a truism. It is a revolutionary proposition. Rightly and therefore radically understood, it is incompatible with a major element in the dominant tradition of modern science, the tradition that goes from Galileo and Newton to the particle physics of today. In particular, it contradicts the “block-universe” picture of the universe as well as the application of the Newtonian paradigm – the explanatory practice that explores law-governed phenomena within a configuration space bounded by initial conditions – to the universe as a whole. It puts pressure on our conventional notions of causality. It compels us to reconsider our beliefs about the possible and the new in nature. It suggests that the laws of nature are mutable and that the relation between laws of nature and states of affairs varies. It gives us reason fundamentally to invert the relation between historical and structural explanation in natural science, so that we may come to see the former as more fundamental than the latter rather than as derivative from it.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time
A Proposal in Natural Philosophy
, pp. 162 - 258
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Einstein, himself rejected efforts to represent general relativity as committed to the spatialization of time. In his review essay, “À propos de La Déduction Rélativiste de M. Émile Meyerson” (Revue Philosophique de la France et de l´Étranger, 105 (1928), 161–166)Google Scholar
Draft of an article, left unfinished and unpublished, for Nature, 1919/1920.

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×