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Did Malament Prove the Non-Conventionality of Simultaneity in the Special Theory of Relativity?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Sahotra Sarkar  and
John Stachel
Sahotra Sarkar
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin
John Stachel
Affiliation:
Department of Physics and Center for Einstein Studies, Boston University
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Abstract

David Malament's (1977) well-known result, which is often taken to show the uniqueness of the Poincaré-Einstein convention for defining simultaneity, involves an unwarranted physical assumption: that any simultaneity relation must remain invariant under temporal reflections. Once that assumption is removed, his other criteria for defining simultaneity are also satisfied by membership in the same backward (forward) null cone of the family of such cones with vertices on an inertial path. What is then unique about the Poincaré-Einstein convention is that it is independent of the choice of inertial path in a given inertial frame, confirming a remark in Einstein 1905. Similarly, what is unique about the backward (forward) null cone definition is that it is independent of the state of motion of an observer at a point on the inertial path.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 66 , Issue 2 , June 1999 , pp. 208 - 220
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

Send requests for reprints to either author: Sahotra Sarkar, Department of Philosophy, The University of Texas at Austin, Waggener Hall 316, Austin, TX 78712–1180; John Stachel, Department of Physics, Boston University, 590 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215.

‡

We thank the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin for hospitality during the period when this paper was written. We thank R. Anderson, R. Clifton, D. Malament, H. Stein, and two anonymous referees for comments on earlier drafts of this paper; and M. Janssen for comments on this version.

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