Understanding Space-Time: The Philosophical Development of Physics from Newton to Einstein 1st Edition by Robert DiSalle (PDF)

Description

Presenting the history of space-time physics, from Newton to Einstein, as a philosophical development DiSalle reflects our increasing understanding of the connections between ideas of space and time and our physical knowledge. He suggests that philosophy’s greatest impact on physics has come about, less by the influence of philosophical hypotheses, than by the philosophical analysis of concepts of space, time and motion, and the roles they play in our assumptions about physical objects and physical measurements. This way of thinking leads to interpretations of the work of Newton and Einstein and the connections between them. It also offers ways of looking at old questions about a priori knowledge, the physical interpretation of mathematics, and the nature of conceptual change. Understanding Space-Time will interest readers in philosophy, history and philosophy of science, and physics, as well as readers interested in the relations between physics and philosophy.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Book Description Presents the history of space-time physics, from Newton to Einstein, as philosophical and scientific developments. About the Author Robert DiSalle is Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Western Ontario. His publications include a contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Newton (2002).

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I am transitioning from graduate studies in physics to graduate studies in the History and Philosophy of Physics. This is the second book on philosophy of physics that I read, and it was great. My specialty is in gravity and, consequently, space and time. This book added a great deal of perspective to my knowledge, and I found myself savoring the technical rigor of this book. Disalle wrote this book with great academic spirit, assuming the reader has a strong grasp of Newton’s Principia to the mathematics of Relativity. A must read, even for those who are physics majors/ engineers.

⭐Empirical knowledge of spatial relations is always relative: by measurements we can determine whether a body is moving with respect to another, but not whether it is “really” moving in some absolute sense. Descartes and Leibniz insisted on this. Newton, on the contrary, stipulated an absolute space as a universal frame of reference for his physics, so that the velocity and position of a body have a fixed meaning in and of itself, not only in relation to other bodies.“What right did Newton have to explain the observable relative motions by an appeal to these unobservable entities? What role can such metaphysical hypotheses play in empirical science? … [In fact,] Newton’s theory of space and time was never a mere metaphysical hypothesis. Instead, it was his attempt to define the concepts presupposed by the new mechanical science.” (13) “[Newton] parted from his contemporaries … in his belief that these novel explications [of space and time] came from science itself—that their authority rested, not on their conformity to epistemological and metaphysical principles …, but on the role that they play in science. What must be the nature of space and time, in order for the world to be as it appears to be, and to follow the natural laws that it appears to follow? This is Newton’s question.” (42)“Newton’s theory was forced into confrontation with the most prominent general philosophical accounts of space and time, namely those of Descartes and Leibniz. But its rejoinder to them was only that those philosophical views could not be reconciled with their own views of physics.” (55) Indeed, there is an “apparent contradiction within Leibniz’s picture: … How can the idea of force as a genuine metaphysical quantity be reconciled with the relativity of motion? Leibniz himself occasionally juxtaposed these notions, apparently unaware of the conflict that others saw quite clearly. … For example, he wrote, ‘… each [body in a group of interacting bodies] does truly have a certain degree of motion, or, if you wish, of force, in spite of the equivalence of these hypotheses about their motion’. … As Euler put it, ‘Therefore I am least afraid of those philosophers who reduce everything to relations, since they themselves attribute so much to motion that they regard moving force as something substantial’.” (61)Similarly, the law of inertia—that a body under no external influence continues to move in the same direction with the same speed—seems almost impossible to formulate coherently in a relativistic framework. As Euler put it: “For if space and place were nothing but the relation among co-existing bodies, what would be the same direction? … Identity of direction, which is an essential circumstance in the general principles of motion, is … not to be explicated by the relation … of co-existing bodies.” (37)“For the [relativists], then, there were only three legitimate ways to resist Newton’s … argument. One would be to acknowledge it, but to insist on its limitations: … [it falls short of proving that absolute space is unavoidable, leaving the possibility open that] a weaker structure than absolute space [might suffice]. … A second way is to argue that, since the laws of motion do presuppose something like the Newtonian conception of space, time, and motion, they ought to be replaced by laws that don’t presuppose any such thing. … The third way is … to maintain that no matter what spatio-temporal concepts might be required by physics, the authority to pronounce upon the true nature of space, time, and motion ultimately belongs to metaphysics.” (52)Options 1 and 2 were far from viable in the 17th century, though eventually, in the late 19th century, they proved the way forward. “But we can point to a lasting philosophical accomplishment of Newton’s work. He showed that the philosophical understanding of space and time has to start, not from general philosophical principles, but from a critical analysis of what we presuppose in our observation and reasoning about the physics of motion. The eventual overthrow of Newton’s theory was made possible by the further pursuit, in a different theoretical and empirical context, of the same kind of analysis.” (53)“[Newton’s approach] cannot be viewed as a complete philosophical account of space and time, … because it treats space and time solely from the perspective of classical mechanics—that is as concepts implicitly presupposed by the classical mechanical understanding of causality and force. A philosophically thorough treatment of the problem would embrace, not only the implicit metaphysics of physics, but the general epistemological problem of space and time and the ways in which physics, and human knowledge generally, have some access to them.” (55) In Kant’s own words, his goal was to “provide, not engineers, as Euler had in mind, but geometers themselves with a convincing ground … for claiming the actuality of their absolute space.” (62)“[Newton had showed that] the concept of absolute motion … was implicitly assumed in … physics, and was in a sense a ‘condition of possibility’ of … reasoning about the motions of the solar system and their physical causes. … [But this is a limited form of argument since it shows only that] the concept is necessary, relative to a certain well-established practice of scientific reasoning about a certain kind of phenomenon. Kant, instead, argues that the Newtonian concept, and the laws of motion, [are necessary in much more general sense:] They are the only basis on which the concept of causality can be applied to the universe at large. They are the only basis, indeed, on which the phenomena of the heavens can be grasped as something more than mere appearances—as the appearance of genuine physical objects that stand in objective geometrical and causal relations.” (71)“Kant [was] right in a certain limited sense; the kind of a-priori principle that goes to constitute a spatio-temporal framework cannot be the same as an empirical principle, and cannot be justified by the usual sort of empirical or inductive argument—since empirical arguments … must take such principles for granted.” (156) “In the history of modern physics, space and time have after all played something like the role attributed to them by Kant. Not as forms of intuition: this was only incidentally the case, in a context where the geometry of space and the intuitive means of knowing about space seemed inseparable from one another. … But they have played the quasi-Kantian role of a framework that enables physics to constructively define its fundamental concepts.” (153)

⭐I am transitioning from graduate studies in physics to graduate studies in the History and Philosophy of Physics. This is the second book on philosophy of physics that I read, and it was great. My specialty is in gravity and, consequently, space and time. This book added a great deal of perspective to my knowledge, and I found myself savoring the technical rigor of this book. Disalle wrote this book with great academic spirit, assuming the reader has a strong grasp of Newton’s Principia to the mathematics of Relativity. A must read, even for those who are physics majors/engineers.

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