Tim Maudlin | |
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 Maudlin in 2018 | |
| Born | Tim William Eric Maudlin April 23, 1958 Washington, D.C., U.S. |
| Alma mater | |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | |
| Institutions | |
Main interests | Philosophy of science, philosophy of physics |
Notable ideas | Mathematicism |
Tim William Eric Maudlin (born April 23, 1958) is an American philosopher of science who has done influential work on the metaphysical foundations of physics and logic.
Maudlin graduated from Sidwell Friends School, Washington, D.C. Later he studied physics and philosophy at Yale University, and history and philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh, where he received his Ph.D. in 1986. He taught for more than two decades at Rutgers University before joining the Department of Philosophy at New York University in 2010.
Maudlin has also been a visiting professor at Harvard University and Carnegie Mellon University. He is a member of the "Foundational Questions Institute" of the Académie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship. [1] [2] In 2015 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He is the founder of the John Bell Institute for the Foundations of Physics in Sveta Nedilja, Hvar, Croatia.
Since the academic year 2020–21 Maudlin is Visiting Professor at the University of Italian Switzerland. [3]
Tim Maudlin is married to Vishnya Maudlin; they have two children.
In his first book, Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity (1994), Maudlin explains Bell's Theorem and the tension between violations of Bell's inequality and relativity.
In Truth and Paradox: Solving the Riddles (2004), Maudlin presents a new resolution to the "Liar Paradox" (for example, the sentence "This sentence is false") and other semantic paradoxes that requires a modification of classical logic.
In The Metaphysics Within Physics (2007) the central idea is that "metaphysics, in so far as it is concerned with the natural world, can do no better than to reflect on physics". [4]
Metaphysics is ontology. Ontology is the most generic study of what exists. Evidence for what exists, at least in the physical world, is provided solely by empirical research. Hence the proper object of most metaphysics is the careful analysis of our best scientific theories (and especially of fundamental physical theories) with the goal of determining what they imply about the constitution of the physical world. [5]
Maudlin delves into fundamental topics of cosmology, arguing that laws of nature ought to be taken as primitive, not reduced to something else, and that the passage and direction of time are fundamental. On this theory the arrow of time has a single direction and time is asymmetric, contradicting the quantum-mechanical idea of time's symmetry and other theories that deny the existence of time, as championed by physicist Julian Barbour. [6]
I believe that it is a fundamental, irreducible fact about the spatio-temporal structure of the world that time passes. [...] The passage of time is an intrinsic asymmetry in the temporal structure of the world, an asymmetry that has no spatial counterpart.[...] Still, going from Mars to Earth is not the same as going from Earth to Mars. The difference, if you will, is how these sequences of states are oriented with respect to the passage of time. [...] The belief that time passes, in this sense, has no bearing on the question of the 'reality' of the past or of the future. I believe that the past is real: there are facts about what happened in the past that are independent of the present state of the world and independent of all knowledge or beliefs about the past. I similarly believe that there is (i.e. will be) a single unique future. I know what it would be to believe that the past is unreal (i.e. nothing ever happened, everything was just created ex nihilo) and to believe that the future is unreal (i.e. all will end, I will not exist tomorrow, I have no future). I do not believe these things, and would act very differently if I did. Insofar as belief in the reality of the past and the future constitutes a belief in a 'block universe', I believe in a block universe. But I also believe that time passes, and see no contradiction or tension between these views. [7]
Maudlin defends his view over rival proposals by David Lewis and Bas Van Fraassen, among others. Lewis analyzed natural laws as those generalizations that figure in all theoretical systematizations of empirical truths that best combine strength and simplicity. Maudlin objects that this analysis rides roughshod over the intuition that some such generalizations could fail to be laws in worlds that we should follow scientists in deeming physically possible. Van Fraassen argued that laws of nature are of no philosophical significance, and may be eliminated in favor of models in a satisfactory analysis of science. Maudlin counters that this deprives one of the resources to say how cutting down its class of models can enhance a theory's explanatory power, a phenomenon readily accounted for when one takes a theory's model class as well as its explanatory power to derive from its constituent laws (Richard Healey, University of Arizona). [8]
In Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time (2012) Maudlin explains the philosophical issues of relativity to a lay audience, [9] though some of his arguments, like his divorcing of the resolution of the twin paradox from the presence of acceleration for the travelling twin, have been criticised in the literature. [10] In New Foundations for Physical Geometry (2014) he proposes a new mathematics of physical space called the theory of linear structures. Maudlin's subject is specifically empirical spacetime, which he believes a kind of linearization describes better than abstract topological open sets. [11] [12]
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Physics is the natural science of matter, involving the study of matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. Physics is one of the most fundamental scientific disciplines, with its main goal being to understand how the universe behaves. A scientist who specializes in the field of physics is called a physicist.
Sir Roger Penrose is an English mathematician, mathematical physicist, philosopher of science and Nobel Laureate in Physics. He is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics in the University of Oxford, an emeritus fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, and an honorary fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, and University College London.
Time travel is the hypothetical activity of traveling into the past or future. Time travel is a widely recognized concept in philosophy and fiction, particularly science fiction. In fiction, time travel is typically achieved through the use of a hypothetical device known as a time machine. The idea of a time machine was popularized by H. G. Wells's 1895 novel The Time Machine.
The de Broglie–Bohm theory, also known as the pilot wave theory, Bohmian mechanics, Bohm's interpretation, and the causal interpretation, is an interpretation of quantum mechanics. It postulates that in addition to the wavefunction, an actual configuration of particles exists, even when unobserved. The evolution over time of the configuration of all particles is defined by a guiding equation. The evolution of the wave function over time is given by the Schrödinger equation. The theory is named after Louis de Broglie (1892–1987) and David Bohm (1917–1992).
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In philosophy, philosophy of physics deals with conceptual and interpretational issues in modern physics, many of which overlap with research done by certain kinds of theoretical physicists. Philosophy of physics can be broadly divided into three areas:
John Stewart Bell FRS was a physicist from Northern Ireland and the originator of Bell's theorem, an important theorem in quantum physics regarding hidden-variable theories.
The transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics (TIQM) takes the wave function of the standard quantum formalism, and its complex conjugate, to be retarded and advanced waves that form a quantum interaction as a Wheeler–Feynman handshake or transaction. It was first proposed in 1986 by John G. Cramer, who argues that it helps in developing intuition for quantum processes. He also suggests that it avoids the philosophical problems with the Copenhagen interpretation and the role of the observer, and also resolves various quantum paradoxes. TIQM formed a minor plot point in his science fiction novel Einstein's Bridge.
Philosophy of space and time is the branch of philosophy concerned with the issues surrounding the ontology and epistemology of space and time. While such ideas have been central to philosophy from its inception, the philosophy of space and time was both an inspiration for and a central aspect of early analytic philosophy. The subject focuses on a number of basic issues, including whether time and space exist independently of the mind, whether they exist independently of one another, what accounts for time's apparently unidirectional flow, whether times other than the present moment exist, and questions about the nature of identity.
A temporal paradox, time paradox, or time travel paradox, is a paradox, an apparent contradiction, or logical contradiction associated with the idea of time travel or other foreknowledge of the future. While the notion of time travel to the future complies with the current understanding of physics via relativistic time dilation, temporal paradoxes arise from circumstances involving hypothetical time travel to the past – and are often used to demonstrate its impossibility.
The deductive-nomological model of scientific explanation, also known as Hempel's model, the Hempel–Oppenheim model, the Popper–Hempel model, or the covering law model, is a formal view of scientifically answering questions asking, "Why...?". The DN model poses scientific explanation as a deductive structure, one where truth of its premises entails truth of its conclusion, hinged on accurate prediction or postdiction of the phenomenon to be explained.
In general relativity, the hole argument is an apparent paradox that much troubled Albert Einstein while developing his famous field equations.
In philosophy, the Rietdijk–Putnam argument, named after C. Wim Rietdijk and Hilary Putnam, uses 20th-century findings in physics – specifically in special relativity – to support the philosophical position known as four-dimensionalism.
Jeremy Nicholas Butterfield FBA is a philosopher at the University of Cambridge, noted particularly for his work on philosophical aspects of quantum theory, relativity theory and classical mechanics.
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Craig Callender is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. His main areas of research are philosophy of science, philosophy of physics and metaphysics.
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Sheldon Goldstein is an American theoretical physicist. He introduced the term "Bohmian mechanics".
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