Linke

Professor Dr. P. F. Linke / Jena: Relativity Theory And Psychological Time

My opposition to Relativity begins as soon as it believes it can make philosophical and ideological statements.

No physicist can be prevented from building his science into a positivistic-instrumentalistic system of knowledge.

He can say that physical propositions are “true” if it is possible with their help to calculate other phenomena and predict them correctly.

In the building of a physics in this way, Relativity fits in casually and also provides haunting evidence of its feasibility.

The task of research is the establishment of the truth.

The only question is whether this feasibility was achieved at the expense of the truth.

Because “truth” of positivistic physics is fundamentally different from the truth in Nature.

• The real truth always refers to an existing being.
• The positivistic “truth” is just a mere instrument for calculating the phenomena.
  • Therefore, it tolerates false principles, even contradicting real truth.

Logical Difficulties

It is an open secret that thinking about the categorical foundations of Relativity actually leads to logical difficulties.

R. Weinmann pointed out that Einstein already assumed simultaneity in his physical definition of simultaneity:

One will reply:

But is that the case?

Simultaneity presupposes time and since according to Relativity there are several equal times.

In the sense of which time is there simultaneity?

Hugo Bergmann follows Bergson and answers that here psychological time protrudes into physics.

In fact, when the physicist makes time determinations, he is always compelled to determine directly experienced simultaneities (namely that of the physical event to be investigated with the pointer of his clock).

Thus, he immediately includes time experienced in its results.*

Bergmann recognizes it as a contradiction:

That is certainly correct.

But an abstraction that introduces contradictions into the abstraction result which are not present in what is being abstracted from is strange. *

I can abstract the concept of furniture from the concepts of tables, chairs, benches, cupboards and beds.

My abstraction would be flawed if it contradicted with the concept of furniture.

However above all, there is no psychological time at all in the Bergsonian sense presupposed here (as something coordinated with physical time).

His psychological time is rather the experience of time as opposed to time itself.

• His time is time grasped in experience, more or less modified by conception.

At the moment, it is related to itself as the number perceived by us in the immediate experience (e.g. a point group) as related to the actual number.

To speak of a psychological time in any other than this entirely secondary sense is as wrong as to speak of a psychological number.

For example, if 125 actually-perceived points are estimated at 60 mental-points, then it is a special psychological Number of 60 points.*

If there is no particular psychological time, then it cannot be used to remove the logical inconsistency which we have uncovered above.

• Rather, it remains unchanged as such.

By the way: from an actual one.

Eliminating the discrepancy in question is also out of the question for Bergmann. What he is doing is merely to soften it, to push it onto a dead track.

But it is also there for him. Such a staunch advocate of Relativity as Hugo Bergmann recognized and emphasized one of its most fundamental weaknesses.