SYSTEMATICS

Vol. 3 No 1, June 1965

THE PROBLEM OF SPACE AND TIME IN SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE

J. G. Bennett and H. Bortoft

The aim of scientific discourse should be to communicate without ambiguity the experience of a scientist or group of scientists to others interested in his or their work This experience is very rich; it includes, among other things, decisions, intentions, actions, cognitions and modes of experimentation and theorizing. In practice, however, scientific communication brings in much that is not derived from experience, but from linguistic habits and unnoticed assumptions; and this extraneous material results in ambiguity and misunderstanding for all concerned, including the originating scientist himself. Our linguistic habits are mainly due to our common Indo-European linguistic heritage. The inflected languages tend to isolate concepts and show their relationships in subject-predicate form. This has proved immensely valuable for thousands of years while men have been finding out about the world as revealed through the senses. Within the last century, natural science has broken through the barriers of sense perception and has begun to explore worlds for which the older concepts no longer provide adequate or even meaningful means of expression. The failure of language is aggravated by the care that has been lavished upon the refining of notions which were indispensable so long as the field of scientific enquiry was limited to what could be seen and touched. Philosophers have grafted upon our naive processes of thought an epistemology of sense perception that is wholly inadequate for dealing with the experience of physical scientists. Even to this day, discussions regarding the nature of knowledge often assume that the problem is to relate sense perceptions to a source in an objective world. Many attempts are being made to produce unambiguous linguistic forms by making use of symbolic logic. These formalized languages may be free from ambiguity: but they do not touch the heart of the problem, which is that of getting beyond the limitations of ordinary speech rather than of removing its ambiguities. We need to be able to describe experiences that are peculiar inasmuch as there is no direct resemblance between what is actually present in the scientist's experience and the mental images that are aroused. For example, observing tracks in a bubble or spark chamber evokes definite images of particles that certainly do not exist as material objects in any way similar to those that we can see and touch. Bender 1 has shown that it is possible to eliminate all non-perceptual concepts and derive - admittedly with an immense amount of circumlocution and inconvenience - the familiar generalizations of modern physics in terms of the operations actually performed by an experimental physicist. There are, however, more deeply embedded pre-suppositions in our language that cannot be eliminated by dealing with observed magnitude alone. These concern time and space. We are all agreed nowadays that we do not know what we mean by "time" or by "space". Nevertheless, we ascribe to them all kinds of; properties that are wholly conceptual and have no basis in experience. In field theories, space-time is objectified as the very stuff of existence. In evolutionary theories, time is hypostatized as the agent of transformation. This is strikingly seen in the modern Soviet philosophy of dialectical materialism; but it is common to all theories of existence which postulate progress while denying a conscious will that directs it.
1 Bender. W. Ali Introduction to Scale Coordinate Physics. Burgess Publishing

Company. 1958.

Our uses of the word "space" are no less riddled with presuppositions as to the character of extension, motion, configuration and structure. All metrical science-and physical scientists still regard measurement as the basic scientific activity-requires rigid bodies that do not change their size or shape. There are no means of demonstrating that such bodies exist, and there are even grounds for doubting whether size and shape invariance holds good for very large or very small regions. It is, at the very least, highly doubtful if they have any meaning on the sub-atomic scale. In any case, notions of objective size and shape must be conventional: for no one nowadays supposes that there is an absolute reference frame independent of bodies, by which size and shape could be defined. The objections to the way in which the words "time" and "space" are used in scientific language are not confined to cosmology, sub-atomic physics and theories of evolution. Causal explanations of any kind of phenomenon make demands upon the nature of time which are never made explicit. Such explanations conceal our complete ignorance of the way in which past. present and future are connected. The difficulties can be evaded by a mathematical formalism that deals only with arrays of numbers without concerning itself with the way in which the numbers are related to actual experience. This procedure appears to be validated by innumerable instances of successful prediction of future events based on the assumption that measurements of time, length, mass, energy, electric charge, etc., refer to "real" quantities that exist apart from our perceptions. Only recently have observations begun to be made that cast doubt on these assumptions and also upon general principles of the uniformity of nature that have worked successfully for the three or four centuries during which science has taken its present shape. An illustration of this situation is to be found in the recently announced discovery of the breakdown of timereversal invariance in certain sub-nuclear processes (K.-meson decay). Many accounts of this innovation refer to the "direction of the flow of time" and the reversal of this "direction". Since Newton published his Principia the notion of a "universal time flowing uniformly on" has become so firmly embedded in our language that even after Einstein the assumption continues tacitly to be made that a phrase like the "flow of time" has a meaning. The reform of language recently undertaken by some philosophers has neglected the essential task of reconstructing our ways of referring to the order of events without presuppositions as to the character of the spatio-temporal framework. At the Institute for the Comparative Study of History, Philosophy and the Sciences, we have for some years investigated the problem of constructing a language free from spatio-temporal presuppositions, and have recently made. encouraging progress. We intend to publish the results in a later issue of this journal. and the present communication is to indicate the lines upon which we are working. The aim is to set tip a fully descriptive language able to communicate all that the scientist does and experiences, avoiding as far as possible inferences involving presuppositions as to the nature of the physical world. We are well aware that the most important and also the most difficult part of the task is to describe the scientific activity without taking space and time for granted. This can to some extent be achieved by careful attention to what the scientist actually does rather than to what he says he does. For example, a physicist may say that he is "noting the time", whereas anyone can see that he is observing the correspondence of two traces on a structure existing in the present moment. One of the traces is a member of a. quantitative scale, and for this reason the action is conventionally described as "noting the time". No one can "note the time", for no one has any experience of time nor any idea of what time is. It is therefore not surprising that difficulties arise when statements about time are made without reference to the specific act and the accompanying experience that led up to them. Many difficulties can be avoided if we remember that all scientific activity takes place in the "present moment". The scientist plans, decides, acts, observes the results of his actions, and is aware of mental processes all within his own present moment. If, therefore, we confine ourselves to the description o f what happens in the present moment without reference to "past". "future" and "elsewhere'" we can avoid referring to time and space as if they exist. The traces of past events are all that we can know about them. Because these traces are so complex. and so voluminous, we tend to forget that all that we can possibly know directly is what we are experiencing here and now. To avoid being influenced by the habits of thought formed by our subject-

predicate language, we have constructed a formalized descriptive language that can communicate not only what the scientist thinks, but also what he intends, what he decides, what he does and what he perceives in the present moment of his scientific activity. We find that this is possible by using three classes of symbols to refer to modes of action, connection and existence. Each class contains three types of symbol.

All nine symbols are taken to refer only to that which is experienced in the present moment and therefore do not presuppose any characterization of time in general or space in general. In order to get beyond the present moment, for purposes of description it is sufficient to postulate composite entities whose " present moment" embraces the present moments of all scientists and all those with wham they communicate. Thus, by a process of generalized description, which can be applied without postulating universal time or universal space, the language enables us to dispense with the admittedly ambiguous notion of causality and yet to clarify the real character of scientific inference and generalization. The transition from our descriptive language to mathematics is made within the framework of the language itself. We believe that, without invoking any theory as to the nature of existence, it will be possible to describe the various kinds of entity that are commonly assumed in natural science, such as particles, molecules, material objects, living and sentient beings, and also beings like men capable of conscious voluntary actions. There are many difficulties in maintaining a sufficiently rigorous treatment to ensure that unnoticed assumptions are avoided: but we are confident that the undertaking will help to clarify some of the fundamental problems that recent progress in physical and biological science has brought to light.