The Institute of Philosophy of the Research Center for the Humanities of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences kindly invites you to the upcoming talk of its seminar series:

Hanoch Ben-Yami

Becoming and Simultaneity in Special Relativity: On What Physics Can and Cannot Discover

Date and Venue of the lecture: 2nd September 2014, 4.00 pm, Institute of Philosophy, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 30. Országház Street, 2. floor, "Pepita" room.

Over the ages physics has time and again made surprising discoveries that have fundamentally changed our worldview. However, sometime physics’ claim have the air of paradox. ‘Change or becoming are an illusion according to Special Relativity’, for instance, or ‘there is no such thing as distant simultaneity in SR’. These, I claim, cannot be true. I go on to demonstrate why Rietdijk and Putnam’s well-known argument against becoming in Special Relativity is unsound, and also in what sense distant simultaneity is absolute in SR.