| Time Travel and Modern Physics |
| Time travel has been a staple of science fiction. With the advent of general relativity it has been entertained by serious physicists. But, especially in the philosophy literature, there have been arguments that time travel is inherently paradoxical. The most famous paradox is the grandfather paradox: ... |
| Frank Arntzenius and Tim Maudlin |
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| Time |
| Discussions of the nature of time, and of various issues related to time, have always featured prominently in philosophy, but they have been especially important since the beginning of the 20th Century. ... time travel; and the 3D/4D controversy — together with some suggestions for further reading on each topic, and a bibliography. 1. Fatalism 2. Reductionism and Platonism with Respect to Time 3. ... |
| Ned Markosian |
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| Time Machines |
| Recent years have seen a growing consensus in the philosophical community that the grandfather paradox and similar logical puzzles do not preclude the possibility of time travel scenarios that utilize spacetimes containing closed timelike curves. At the sametime, physicists, who for half a century ... |
| John Earman and Christian Wüthrich |
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| Backward Causation |
| Sometimes also called retro-causation. A common feature of our world seems to be that in all cases of causation, the cause and the effect are placed in time so that the cause precedes its effect temporally. Our ... time travel. These two notions are related to the extent that both agree that it is possible to causally affect the past. The difference, however, is that time travel involves a causal loop whereas backward causation ... |
| Jan Faye |
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| Being and Becoming in Modern Physics |
| Does time flow or lapse or pass? Are the future or the past as real as the present? These metaphysical questions have been debated for more than two millennia, with no resolution in sight. Modern physics provides ... Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction. 2nd edn. New York, Berlin, and Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag. Oaklander, N. and Smith, Q. (eds.) 1994. The New Theory of Time. New Haven and London: ... |
| Steven Savitt |
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| The Metaphysics of Causation |
| What must a world be like, to host causal relations? When the cue ball knocks the nine ball into the corner pocket, in virtue of what is this a case of causation? Questions about the metaphysics ... time travel, which maintains that the causal order must not be the temporal order because of the possibility of time travel. Third, there is the argument from simultaneous causation, which maintains that ... |
| Jonathan Schaffer |
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| The Experience and Perception of Time |
| We see colours, hear sounds and feel textures. Some aspects of the world, it seems, are perceived through a particular sense. Others, like shape, are perceived through more than one sense. But what sense or senses do we use when perceiving time? It is certainly not associated with one particular ... |
| Robin Le Poidevin |
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| Reichenbach's Common Cause Principle |
| Suppose that two geysers, about one mile apart, erupt at irregular intervals, but usually erupt almost exactly at the same time. One would suspect that they come from a common source, or at least that there is a common cause of their eruptions. And this common cause surely acts before both eruptions ... |
| Frank Arntzenius |
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| Conventionality of Simultaneity |
| In his first paper on the special theory of relativity, Einstein indicated that the question of whether or not two spatially separated events were simultaneous did not necessarily have a definite answer, but ... time t1 (as measured by a clock at rest there), and arrive at B coincident with the event E at B. Let the ray be instantaneously reflected back to A, arriving at time t2. Then standard synchrony is defined ... |
| Allen Janis |
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| Space and Time: Inertial Frames |
| A “frame of reference” is a standard relative to which motion and rest may be measured; any set of points or objects that are at rest relative to one another enables us, in principle, to ... time, so that uniform motions can be distinguished from accelerated motions. The laws of Newtonian dynamics provide a simple definition: an inertial frame is a reference-frame with a time-scale, relative ... |
| Robert DiSalle |
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