A creature living on a large enough cylinder wouldn't know whether they live on the cylinder or the plane, and so wouldn't know important facts about the global topology of the space they inhabit. Many physicists and philosophers of physics have the intuition that, in General Relativity, we have access only to local information; from … Continue reading The Malament-Manchak Theorem and Some Objections to Cosmic Skepticism
cosmology
If Einstein was right, there are no essentially ordered causal series
How we understand cosmology was altered by the development of Special and General Relativity. Here, I want to discuss a less appreciated change I think SR introduced to cosmology. In Aristotelian or Thomistic cosmology, there are two kinds of causal series, i.e., accidentally and essentially ordered causal series, and both Aquinas and Aristotle thought that … Continue reading If Einstein was right, there are no essentially ordered causal series
Daniel Linford 