by Julian Sanchez
Back when I interviewed the (now late) philosopher Robert Nozick about his final book Invariances,
I asked him about a phrase in the book that had puzzled me: He had
referred to superstring theory as an interesting branch of metaphysics. He replied:
Well, I think that science, as it probes realms that
aren’t just at the level of ordinary macroscopic objects that we look
at, uncovers strange phenomena, unusual and surprising phenomena that
we didn’t expect that leads the scientist to formulate radically new
theories about what’s going on. And those are conceptually very
interesting, and philosophers ought to be interested in other
conceptual possibilities, especially when there’s some reason to think
that they might be actualities and not just possibilities. The
scientists often have more unfettered imaginations than current
philosophers do. Relativity theory came as a complete surprise to
philosophers, and so did quantum mechanics, and so did other things. So
I think that scientific theories are of great philosophical interest,
and that they stimulate the philosophical imagination and mind. And
they tend to undercut some of the traditional categories that we take
for granted.
I don’t think I fully appreciated what an insightful point this was
until I began reading (OK, OK, listening to the audiobook of) Walter
Isaacson’s wonderful biography Einstein: His Life and Universe.
(I should admit here that my interest in Albert Einstein is not wholly
unrelated to the fact that, in this inertial reference frame, he was
born 100 years to the day before I was. But then, since motion is
relative, there’s a sense in which I’m justified in thinking the world
revolves around me…) Because I now realize there’s a very literal sense
in which Einstein was really doing philosophy at least as much as he
was doing science. Not just because his subject matter—the fundamental
nature of time and space—obviously overlaps with the concerns of
metaphysicians, but because the methods that led to his major
discoveries look (to me, anyway) much more like what we associate with
philosophical reasoning than with the scientific method of hypothesis
construction and experimental testing, which he largely left to others.
Note, for instance that the most famous of Einstein’s four legendary Annus Mirabilis papers, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,”
is essentially a series of thought-experiments given mathematical
expression; the paper cites no other contemporary scientific
publications. Einstein himself would later emphasize that perhaps his
most important intellectual influence as he was developing the theory
of Special Relativity was not another physicist, but the Scottish
philosopher David Hume, who had cautioned against imputing objective reality to abstractions that extended beyond experiential evidence.
Einstein was also, apparently, influenced by the early
positivists, who insisted that the meaning of any concept, if it was to
be coherent, had to be reducible to specific processes or observations.
The key to Einstein’s great breakthrough was not any experimental data,
but his willingness to pose a series of philosophical-sounding
questions—what do we mean when we say that two events are
“simultaneous”?—and to interpret concepts like “time” not as
corresponding to some kind of nebulous entity, but in terms of the operations
we perform when making and verifying statements about time. This is how
he hit upon the insight that all our talk about “time” is ultimately
talk about the relative motion of physical systems (like clocks). This
at least arguably prefigures points of the sort Wittgenstein would
later make in his Philosophical Investigations. As Nozick
points out, then, Einstein was not just one of the greatest physicists
who ever lived (and even the qualification there is doubtful) but also
a far better and more imaginative philosopher than most philosophers.
