Time, Abstracts, and Cosmology
Jan Faye
Department of Media, Cognition, and Communication
Section of Philosophy
University of Copenhagen
Modern cosmology treats both time and space as concrete particulars. The General Theory of Relativity combines the distribution of matter and energy with the curvature of space-time. In here space-time appears as a concrete entity which affects matter and energy and is affected by the things in it. In present talk I'll question the idea that time is a concrete entity. Instead I shall argue that time is an abstraction. There is, I think, several ways of avoiding a claim that GTR affirms the existence of real space-time. One possibility is to "go conventional" with respect to geometry by saying the actual distribution of matter and energy defines the geometry of the universe in the same way as a force, say in Newton's mechanics, is defined as mass time acceleration. Another way is to argue that the intrinsic geometry of space-time is identified with the structure of the gravitation field but that the latter is concrete whereas the former is not. So what the distribution of mass-energy really determines is the gravitational field, and vice versa. Finally one could argue in line with some philosophers of science that theories should not be considered as literal representations of the world. Rather theories should be taken as a mathematical construction which provides us with a formal language which helps us to construct models by which we explain the behaviour of concrete phenomena. It is the second possibility I shall advocate there, though I don't think this option excludes the others.