Craig Callender – A tale of two times

Craig Callender (UC San Diego) – A tale of two times

Abstract:
Programs in quantum gravity differ greatly, but agree on having profound consequences for time. What consequences? Some programs promise to “save” time from relativity by re-introducing a time that corresponds to our intuitive notion of time flowing. Others promise the opposite: to finish the job that relativity began by eliminating time altogether. I’ll focus on examples of the former and the latter, causal set theory and canonical quantum gravity, respectively. I’ll argue that time is both harder to get rid of and also harder to save than is commonly thought.