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A New Look at Simultaneity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Kent A. Peacock
Kent A. Peacock*
Affiliation:
University of Western Ontario
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Extract

In recent years there has been renewed discussion of the problem of temporal becoming (Maxwell 1985,1988; Dieks 1988; Stein 1991). The theme of this paper is that these discussions, timely and interesting as they are, do not go deeply enough into the question. I would like to suggest that a certain way of thinking about simultaneity, which as far as I know was first sketched in a science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein (1956), opens up a set of possibilities that deserve serious consideration.

More precisely, I will address the following question: is there anything in the formal structure of Minkowski spacetime which corresponds to our intuitive albeit imprecise notion of a global “present”? It is generally assumed that because of the relativity of optical simultaneity the answer to this question is, resoundingly, no.

Type
Part XIII. Spacetime
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1992 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1992 , 1992 , pp. 542 - 552
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

I am very grateful to J.W. Crichton and C. Normore for encouragement in the early stages of development of these ideas, and G. Solomon for useful discussions. This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Grant #756-91-0068.

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