Concepts of simultaneity: from antiquity to Einstein and beyond

321 Pages·2006·0.95 MB·English

by  Max Jammer

Concepts of Simultaneity
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Concepts of Simultaneity
From Antiquity to Einstein
and Beyond
Max Jammer
The Johns Hopkins University Press
Baltimore
© 2006 The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2006
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Johns Hopkins University Press
2715 North Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363
www.press.jhu.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jammer, Max.
Concepts of simultaneity : from antiquity to Einstein and
beyond / Max Jammer.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8018-8422-5
1. Simultaneity (Physics) 2. Physics—Philosophy.
3. Relativity (Physics) 4. Space and time. 5. Time—Philosophy.
I. Title.
QC173.5.S56J36 2006
530.11—dc22 2006048564
A catalog record for this book is available from the British
Library.
We have to bear in mind that all our propositions involving time are
always propositions about simultaneous events.
Albert Einstein, 1905
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Contents
Preface ix
Introduction 1
1 Terminological Preliminaries 8
2 The Concept of Simultaneity in Antiquity 16
3 Medieval Conceptions of Simultaneity 47
4 The Concept of Simultaneity in the Sixteenth and 59
Seventeenth Centuries
5 The Concept of Simultaneity in Classical Physics 68
6 The Transition to the Relativistic Conception of Simultaneity 95
7 Simultaneity in the Special Theory of Relativity 106
8 The Reception of the Relativistic Conception of Simultaneity 148
9 The Conventionality Thesis 171
10 The Promulgation of the Conventionality Thesis 192
11 Symmetry and Transitivity of Simultaneity 201
12 Arguments against the Conventionality Thesis 220
13 Clock Transport Synchrony 240
14 Recent Debates on the Conventionality of Simultaneity 251
15 Simultaneity in General Relativity and in 271
Quantum Mechanics
Epilogue 295
Index 301
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Preface
Quite a few notions in the physical sciences, such as “force” or “mass,” are
used in everyday language before becoming rigorously defined scientific con-
cepts or technical terms. Only one concept of this kind, however, played a
critical role in initiating a new physical theory that has fundamentally
changed all our conceptions of physical reality and for which the question
of whether it has a factual or only a conventional status in this theory re-
mains a matter of dispute.
This unique notion is the concept of simultaneity of spatially separated
events, and the theory that it initiated is Albert Einstein’s special theory
of relativity. In fact, the first paragraph of the seminal paper of this theory,
published by Einstein in 1905 and hailed as “possibly the most important
scientific paper . . . written in the twentieth century,”1 carries the heading
“§ 1. Definition of Simultaneity.”2
This monograph presents a comprehensive, coherent, critical, and com-
pletely documented analysis of the conceptual development of the notion of
simultaneity from its earliest use in remote antiquity until its present status
in modern physics.
Some sections of the text are based on papers that I have read at scientific
meetings or on lectures given at various times. They include (1) “Some Fun-
damental Problems in the Special Theory of Relativity,”3 a lecture presented
in June 1978 at the International School of Physics Enrico Fermi in Varenna,
Italy; (2) a series of lectures given in 1981 at the University of Otago in
Dunedin, New Zealand; (3) “The Concept of Time,”4 an address delivered in
August 1983 at Gakushuin University in Tokyo, Japan; (4) “The History of
1R. W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times(New York: Avon Books, 1971), p. 116.
2A. Einstein, “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper,” Annalen der Physik17,891–921 (1905).
3In Toraldo di Francia, ed., Problems in the Foundations of Physics, Course 72(Amsterdam:
North-Holland, 1979), pp. 202–236.
4InGakushuin Daigaku2,1–35 (1984), in Japanese.