Investigations of Time

时间是物理学和哲学中的一个基本概念，因此它是试图连接这两个学科的人的自然研究主题。物理学家和科学哲学家Shimony教授正在研究关于时间的三个主题。第一是制定适当衡量时间间隔的标准。这个问题已经被称为“原物理学”的学派广泛地研究过了，但是这个学派的一些学说将会受到批评--特别是关于测量的学说，即测量标准应该先于动力学定律的表述。希莫尼教授认为，这些标准必须与动态一起制定，就像牛顿在《原理》中隐含的那样。第二个调查涉及“成为”或“现在的短暂”。科学哲学家们通常认为，一个事件或一个时刻的“现在性”仅仅是主观的，麦克塔格特对此引用了一个古老的论点。教授Shimony将回答这个论点修改和推广的经典康德命题的“存在”不是一个属性。第三项研究是关于已被区分的许多不同的“时间箭头”--心理时间感的箭头、热力学第二定律的箭头、膨胀宇宙的箭头、来自源的向外辐射的箭头等。Shimony教授正在发展一个论文，即基本的“箭头”是量子力学潜力的实现（其中一个特殊情况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改，可能是通过在含时薛定谔方程中加入随机项。这样，不可逆性将被插入到物理学的基本动力学中，它将以一种将客观性归因于生成的方式来实现。

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.