Einstein and Hume’s philosophy of time
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On the other hand, established philosophy was very sceptical of his ideas, which collided spectacularly with Henri Bergson's ideas about time, now forgotten, but very fashionable then. This made relativity controversial for a long time (even after Eddington's 1919 observation of gravitational lensing during an eclipse) and probably was the reason that he never got a Nobel prize for it, but only for his much less groundbreaking work on photoelectricity.
However, I would not say that Einstein's explanation of the photoelectric effect was not Nobel prize worthy in itself, or even less groundbreaking, as it laid the foundations for quantum theory.
Also, remember that at the time when Einstein's Nobel prize was awarded the general theory of relativity was very new and had only been partially confirmed by experiment (by light bending near the sun and the precession of mercury) so the Nobel prize would have have had to been awarded of the special theory alone.
Doesn't this imply that presentism is the right view or at least the one Occam's razor would suggest and not one of the block universe models? One could say without a fundamental time dimension there are not enough dimensions for a block universe to begin with. All of the universe would really exist in the same moment, a kind of true now, while each observer could invent his own frame-dependent time dimension and assign time coordinates to events in the normal way so that the laws of physics formulated in time become simple.
Not withstanding this the evolution of the state of the universe could be fixed - ignoring the complications of non-determinism or probabilistic laws for simplicity - by the laws of nature so that one could still think of the universe as a block universe once one has established a time dimension.
It still feels very weird to me to think about the evolution of the universe without any time. I understand that I can rexpress a circular motion x(t) = (r cos x, r sin t) as r² = x² + y² without reference to time but how do we recover the ordering of positions as time progresses without time? Just saying that from position X you will end up in position Y given some specific velocity at position X seems somewhat problematic to me as the velocity is a time derivative and time we do not have.
On the other hand it doesn't really matter because the idea alone of the state of the universe changing without any time for the change to occur in doesn't compute in my brain. And if there was such a time, wouldn't a time for the universe to involve in have to be a different time then the one we can invent inside of the universe to write simple equations? But couldn't we then link those times and arrive at a unique global time within the universe after all, some kind of preferred foliation of spacetime?
It's not that time doesn't exist in the block universe, it's just a free parameter in the block.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2829521_Time_Dilati...
It might be a fun project to implement something like this.
Without the philosophy to back it up how can you justify your belief in the mathematics?
Sure, these articles could be fun to read, but one does not really expect to have more practical knowledge after reading them. How would you use Hume’s arguments to help you learn the theory of relativity better?
And it’s not just in physics. I can make the same claim in almost any field of science that values results over cheap talk. In game theory for example, does philosophy help you come up with something as magnificent as Nash Equilibrium? No, but Kakutani’s theorem does. Learn the math and practical knowledge, the rest is a waste of time.
See this link titled “The Purpose of Philosophy”: http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s10113.pdf
(That's in the site guidelines, by the way: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
This declining relevance is true of other scientific works as well, but that is rarely touched upon. I suppose in some sense my comment expressed my annoyance that only philosophical roots are rediscovered every now and then.
It lasted up until the 1950s or so, and then philosophers started to fall behind. There has also be a substantial decline in math education for philosophers. Both Russell and Quine contributed directly to the foundations of mathematics, for instance. Even Kripke made substantial contributions to modal logic and semantic paradoxes. Nowadays you'll have to look very hard to even find a substantial contribution of a philosopher in logic, even though that's historically the mathematical discipline they know best.
As for the philosophical ideas without backing them up. People always grab some philosopher who had an idea and point out the "early roots", but they conveniently neglect the fact that simultaneously hundreds of other philosophers had patently absurd ideas as well. Even within philosophy there is a huge business based entirely on selection bias. People quote Aristotle as authoritative source, but of course only ever those parts of his work that remotely make sense. Democrit's theory of atoms is another typical example. It barely made sense at his time, and only so in opposition to other nonsense invented by "nature" philosophers then, yet he's misquoted as the inventor of the modern atom theory in every second slide show about chemistry.
But it seems equally valid to consider him a mathematician who knew philosophy. In which case, you could just as well frame the argument as mathematicians and scientists no longer have a good understanding of philosophy and are therefore incapable of contributing to the philosophy of their field.
And there are a few philosophers, such as Tim Maudlin, who know the science well enough to persue its philosophical questions. Despite these exceptions, I think it is not unreasonable to ask if 21st. century academic philosophy has chosen to turn away from the philosophical issues of 21st. century fundamental science.
No-one is stopping philosophers from contributing to science.
I see what you're saying. If Einstein attributes his thinking to Hume's influence, nobody can deny it. That's true of admissions in a court of law, however, our understanding of how scientific ideas are generated lacks the same certainty. Personal reflection is no guarantee of insight into the formation of ideas.
Einstein's acknowledgement of Hume as an intellectual predecessor tells us he admires Hume. It doesn't tell us where Einstein's own thoughts came from. Our knowledge of neurology isn't advanced enough to draw that conclusion.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/there-is-no-such-...
Dang says "That's as solid evidence of a link as could exist."
I don't think it is the most solid evidence that could exist.
We don't even know how theories are formed in the mind, and we don't know the data format used by the brain. One day, we might be able to observe that empirically, in the same way we can examine source code versions of computer software in order to make informed statements about the aetiology of forked code. Today, we can't do that.
We can only guess at the origins of people's thoughts, and when the thoughts come from our own selves, no advantage or insight is conferred. That is considered in the Scientific American essay I linked to above. Do you have any constructive criticism to offer about that essay?
Einstein noted the limitations of this ontological discussion as well, in the preface clause of his remarks to Besso "In so far as I can be aware, the immediate influence of D Hume on me was greater."
My point is that Einstein's awareness, like your own and my own awareness of where our own thoughts come from, is slim. That's an entirely different thing to wanting to associate ourselves and our ideas with great figures in history. On that point, Einstein and I both know that great minds think alike.