Bas van Fraassen - How Can Space and Time be the Same Thing?

What does it mean for space and time to be the same thing? Not related to each other, but literally two descriptions of precisely the same entity called ‘spacetime’? One cannot understand existence without understanding spacetime.

Bas C. van Fraassen is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University and the McCosh Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University. He teaches courses in the philosophy of science, philosophical logic and the role of models in scientific practice.

Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

[tom-kzpb]

The idea is not so much that space and time are the "same thing", but that they are "meshed together", similar to how the spatial directions of "North" and "West are meshed together. If you are traveling due North, then start to veer NorthWest, you are still making progress in the northerly direction, but more slowly, to the degree that you are also heading West.

Similarly, to the degree that you are moving more rapidly through space, you are passing through time more slowly. This parallel is even similar in how Pythagorean theorem comes into play to calculate the change of effective pace.

[kennethmalafy]

Space/ time is a "tool" we created to help us measure and the universe. Neither exists outside of that. These "tools" are great for helping us gain a basic understanding of relationships but that is all you will get. We are at the point in our understanding that we are moving past these basic models and we are being exposed to their limitations.

[terrycallow]

I love watching these videos closer to truth been watching these for some years now hoping to understand what the hell they are talking about. It hasn't happend yet!

[PaulCarr]

Just read that Van Fraassen was born in 1941. I can't believe he is 82 years old, he is incredibly youthful in manner and appearance.

[KaliFissure]

What GR indicates, but which everyone seems to ignore, is that both time and space are relative to energy density.
This is the fundamental dimension.
Energy density determines distance and determines distance/speed.

A high gravity field is more everyday dense space. And it refracts light proportionally. Gravitational lensing.

[Z-bone]

As usual, while watching these Closer to Truth videos, I'm sitting here furrowing my brow in a vain attempt to comprehend what they're talking about.

[spotteryk]

The issue boils down to a choice in how to think of the universe: If you approach the question thinking that man is the measure of all things, then it is perfectly natural to suppose absolute space and absolute time exist independently of observers, which is also how we tend to think of physical objects, like chairs and coffee cups. However, following the early development of classical physics, we started probing ever finer scales of size and distance, which also meant finer scales of time, until it was realized that you really couldn't talk about one without the other at the macroscopic scale, and that is why scientists routinely discuss "light-years" as a unit of distance. Something very similar happens at the microscopic scale when you start talking about chemistry and transformations. When you start talking about ever finer substances (particles/things) and how they interact (events/waves), you eventually find that you cannot discuss one without the other. space-time duality at the macro scale and wave-particle duality at the micro scale represent boundaries beyond which human understanding no longer applies.

[anywallsocket]

FINALLY, bout the first guest you've had on here with his head on straight.
Empiricists are sick of metaphysical blabberings. If you can't test it, it's moot.
Really refreshing to see someone without their heads stuck in the idealistic clouds.

[keithmetcalf]

That's my guy RLK! Love the Content, as always my Friend 👍👍

[haydenwayne]

Excellent episode! Thank you, gentlemen.

[huepix]

Time is not a dimension.
It's a comparison of rates of change.
Spacetime is the change in areas of space

[gettaasteroid]

In "the Philosophy of Rigorous Science" (1911), "Philosophy, " Husserl says, "is essentially a science of true beginning"

[milangugl]

Time is intrinsic property of change, of movement. When there is energy in a system that has a difference of potentials, energy starts moving and this process creates time. Time itself is dependant on the medium and some sort of entropy gradient throughout the system which sets its course. Time per se doesnt exist. One moment in time is a picture of the whole system with every single constituent that is connected by some force with every other constituent in that system, it's energetic blueprint of that system in a quant of time ( i'm picturing this quant of time as the smallest portion of time between wo differnt states of system). Sequence of this pictures is defined by the entropy and it defines movement of time or time flow which we can detect. New life, or life per se, is a miracle, because life beats entropy on a smaller scale, an entropy which is the ultimate ruler and killer of everything.

[derndernit]

One aspect is, If you pressed pause on the entire Universe, every single quanta of matter and energy would be at exactly the location in space that it is. At that exact moment in time.

If your fingers were magical and infinitely fast, you could un-pause and re-pause as fast as you could. And you could keep doing this. And see each piece of matter, travel it's path over a quantity of space over a quantity of time.

In an equal span of space, in an equal span of time, equal and unequal objects may travel differently depending on surrounding and previous circumstances.

Time is duration. Space is volume.

A car can travel 100 yds in A amount of time.
A horse can travel 100 yds in B amount of time.
A person running can travel 100 yds in C amount of time.

All of these bodies travel depend on mechanical makeup and energy expenditure.

Sound waves travel 100 yds of air volume in D amount of time.
There is the mechanical make up of the air medium, and the energy expended into the medium to make it wave.

Light can travel 100 yds in outer space in E amount of time.
There is the mechanical makeup of outer space and the energy expended onto it to make the light wave.

[chester-chickfunt]

Time most assuredly is directly tied to spatial coordinates. Time cannot exist without space. And vice versa. Maybe certain types of unknown gravities (e.g. black holes) break this rule. But here on the terrain, as Janice Joplin used to say, time and space are two sides of the same coin.

[duncanwallace]

The only think I'd say is that some things are not testable at a point in time, but eventually someone comes up with a clever way of testing it many years later.

[SRAVALM]

I've learned from a great teacher that space isn't a thing; it hasn't any properties or attributes; anything without an attribute doesn't exist. People think space itself is an attribute, and so I await the dissertation of this principle of which space is an attribute of. Space is like a shadow: it isn't a thing itself, but a lack of something(light), and too, coldness is not an attribute or quality of this 'lack' of something. Space is a lack of something and not a thing, nor has an attribute. Space does entail an antecedent and the question of how this has arisen... but persons don't want to discuss Metaphysics.
Space is synonymous to shadow.

Time is dependent on mass and magnitude, cyclical natures, dynamics, procession, change, life & death that is measurable; what of space is measurable. If space makes existence possible then shadows make light possible – and this is erroneous.

Even if space and time are the same thing, neither are a thing of existence – unreal.

[stewartquark]

At 4:35 this gentleman, had he known, was given an opportunity to blow the whole thing wide open

[chiptowers]

Fraassen just said it when he was explaining an event/somehting in the past, he said " at the time". That would mean at the/that time an event/something happened in that space at that time.
So that would mean Space and Time are the same thing.

[crisismanagement]

How about "Closer to the Limits of our Understanding"?