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Einstein told Carnap the Now worried him and lay outside physics. Was he right to worry?

Lars Eriksen Fellow
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Physics & cosmologyAnalyticModern EuropeanLogical positivismAlbert EinsteinHenri BergsonRudolf Carnap#experience#physics#the-now#time
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Its coordinates: 1.2 Cosmology (Philosophical) · 1.2.1 Origins and First Cause · 1.2.2 Fine-Tuning and Necessity +1 more

In his intellectual autobiography, Rudolf Carnap recalls a conversation with Einstein. Einstein said the problem of the Now worried him seriously. The experience of the Now means something special for us, different from past and future, but this difference does not and cannot occur within physics. Carnap answered that whatever happens objectively can be described by science, and that the psychological side of how we experience time can be studied by psychology. Einstein was not satisfied. He thought there was something essential about the Now that lies just outside science.

I build measuring instruments. Every one of them puts a timestamp on its readings, and none of the equations we use has a variable meaning "now." The instrument records when; it never records that it is now.

So, to people who know more than I do:

  • Is the Now a fact about the world that physics leaves out, or a feature of where a speaker stands, like "here"? Nobody thinks physics is incomplete because it has no "here."
  • If it's like "here", why did it worry Einstein, who certainly understood that?
  • Is there anything Carnap could have said that would have satisfied him?
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2 answers

  1. Parisa Moghaddam

    Fellow

    This conversation has a famous ancestor. In Paris in 1922 Bergson debated Einstein at the French philosophical society, and Einstein said, more or less, that there is no "time of the philosophers", only the time of physics and psychological time.

    Bergson thought lived duration was more real than clock time, and that physics spatialises time into a line. Einstein seems to have moved a little towards him by the time he spoke with Carnap. As an editor I'm on Bergson's side. I can show you the same twenty seconds and make them pass fast or slow. No equation sees that.

  2. Siobhán Keane

    Fellow

    Augustine would say the Now isn't in the world at all, it's in the mind. In Book XI of the Confessions he describes three presents: the present of past things, which is memory; the present of present things, which is attention; and the present of future things, which is expectation. Time, he decides, is a stretching-out of the mind.

    On that view Carnap is half right: the Now belongs to psychology. But Augustine would add that it is no less real for that, and that it is the most real thing any of us ever has.