Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity

Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy

by William Lane Craig (Editor), Quentin Smith (Editor)

Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity is an anthology of original essays by an international team of leading philosophers and physicists who have come together to reassess the contemporary paradigm of the relativistic concept of time. A great deal has changed since 1905 when Einstein proposed his Special Theory of Relativity, and this book offers a fresh reassessment of Special Relativity’s relativistic concept of time in terms of epistemology, metaphysics, and physics.

Genres: Philosophy, Physics, Science

310 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

William Lane Craig is Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California. He and his wife Jan have two grown children.

At the age of sixteen as a junior in high school, he first heard the message of the Christian gospel and yielded his life to Christ. Dr. Craig pursued his undergraduate studies at Wheaton College (B.A. 1971) and graduate studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (M.A. 1974; M.A. 1975), the University of Birmingham (England) (Ph.D. 1977), and the University of Munich (Germany) (D.Theol. 1984). From 1980-86 he taught Philosophy of Religion at Trinity, during which time he and Jan started their family. In 1987 they moved to Brussels, Belgium, where Dr. Craig pursued research at the University of Louvain until assuming his position at Talbot in 1994.

He has authored or edited over thirty books, including The Kalam Cosmological Argument; Assessing the New Testament Evidence for the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus; Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom; Theism, Atheism and Big Bang Cosmology; and God, Time and Eternity, as well as over a hundred articles in professional journals of philosophy and theology, including The Journal of Philosophy, New Testament Studies, Journal for the Study of the New Testament, American Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy, and British Journal for Philosophy of Science.

Reviews

[Ben Nasmith · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was excited to find a book on this topic but was disappointed with some of the chapters. For example, Quentin Smith's article involves a great number of typos and the mathematical equations are very poorly typeset so as to be blatantly incorrect at times.
I appreciated W.L. Craig's article for laying out three possible interetations of special relativity. I also thought that Craig Callender's article was very thoughtful. He puts forward a 'coordination' problem for the presentist, suggesting that one might lack justification for attributing the frame of presentism to the frame of quantum correlations. Tim Maudlin's paper was also very good, discussing under what conditions absolute simultaneity is necessary (or otiose) for a theory involving quantum non-locality.

In summary, there are some very valuable thoughts in this book. I would say that the quality of Smith's chapter detracts.

[Chris]

I started this book and managed to finish the first chapter. I then decided that the rest of the book would be way over my head. So it's back on the shelf, awaiting a slightly older and wiser reader. Not sure when that reader will come, if ever....

[Manuel · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little bit to complicated for me as a lay person.