Investigations of Time

时间调查

• 批准号: 8908264
• 负责人: Abner Shimony
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Trustees of Boston University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 1989
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1989-08-15 至 1991-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=8908264&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Investigations; Time

Time is a fundamental concept in both physics and philosophy, and it is therefore a natural subject for investigation by someone who attempts to bridge these two disciplines. Professor Shimony, a physicist and philosopher of science, is investigating three topics about time. The first is to lay down criteria for the proper measurement of time intervals. This problem has been extensively studied by the school called "Protophysics," but some of the doctrines of this school will be criticized -- particularly that measurement that measurement criteria should precede the formulation of dynamical laws. Professor Shimony argues that these criteria must be formulated in tandem with dynamic, as Newton implicitly does in the "Principia." The second investigation concerns "becoming" or "the transient now." It is commonly maintained by philosophers of science that the"nowness" of an event or a moment is merely subjective, and an old argument by McTaggart to this effect is cited. Professor Shimony will answer this argument by modifying and generalizing the classical Kantian thesis the "existence" in not a property. The third investigation is about the many different "arrows of time" that have been distinguished -- that of the psychological time sense, that of the second law of thermodynamics, that of the expanding universe, that of outgoing radiation from a source, and others. Professor Shimony is developing a thesis that the fundamental "arrow" is that of the actualization of quantum mechanical potentialities (of which a special case is the outcome of measurement of an indefinite quantity). This thesis requires a modification of the standard quantum dynamics, probably by adding a stochastic term to the time-dependent Schrodinger equation. In this way irreversibility will be inserted into the fundamental dynamics of physics, and it will be accomplished in a way that attributes objectivity to becoming.

时间在物理学和哲学中都是一个基本概念，因此它是试图连接这两个学科的人研究的一个自然主题。希蒙尼教授是一位物理学家和科学哲学家，他正在研究三个关于时间的话题。第一个是为适当地测量时间间隔制定标准。这个问题已经被称为“原物理学”的学派广泛研究过，但这个学派的一些学说将受到批评--特别是关于测量标准应该先于动力学定律的制定的测量。希蒙尼教授认为，这些标准必须与动态一起制定，就像牛顿在《原理》中含蓄地做的那样。第二项调查涉及“成为”或“现在的过客”。科学哲学家通常认为，一个事件或某个时刻的“现实性”仅仅是主观的，麦克塔格特对此有一个古老的论点。希蒙尼教授将通过修改和推广经典的康德命题--不是属性中的“存在”来回答这一论点。第三项研究是关于已被区分的许多不同的“时间之箭”--心理时间意识的时间之箭，热力学第二定律的时间之箭，膨胀宇宙的时间之箭，一个源发出的辐射之箭，等等。希蒙尼教授正在发展一篇论文，他认为基本的“箭”是量子力学势的实现(其中一个特例是测量不确定量的结果)。这篇论文需要对标准量子动力学进行修正，可能是在含时薛定谔方程中加入一个随机项。通过这种方式，不可逆性将被插入到物理学的基本动力学中，并且它将以一种将客观性归因于成为的方式来完成。