Volume 23: Pages 285-292, 2010
Apriorics and a new meaning of space and time
Yakir Z. Shoshani 1
1Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, 12 Anna Frank Street, Ramat Gan 52521, Israel
The objective of this paper is to suggest a new avenue to explore the nonintuitive meaning of space and time by investigating into their roles in the description of reality. The central idea is to look at the space-time manifold as a “multiplication space,” enabling the plurality of the fundamental entities in the universe. The “points” of this space are the roots of an ontological structure of infinite order [Y. Z. Shoshani, Introduction to Formal Ontology (Philosophy of the Natural Sciences), Proceedings of the 13th International Wittgenstein Symposium (V.H.P. Temfky, Vienna, 1989), pp. 202–209; Phys. Essays 4, 566 (1991); Phys. Essays 11, 512 (1998)]. I will show that such a description resolves basic philosophical problems associated with the intuitive grasp of space-time. It also yields a more coherent image of reality in which the fundamental entities and the points of space-time emerge from the same origin. Some interesting physical implications from this theory will be discussed, including the exponential expansion of the universe, a result compatible with the de Sitter solution of Einstein field equations in empty space.
Keywords: Space and Time, A Priori Ontology, Fundamental Entities, Elementary Particles Physics, Philosophical Foundations of Physics, Plurality in Nature, Expansion of the Universe, the Early Universe, de Sitter Universe, Structuralism
Received: October 4, 2009; Accepted: March 6, 2010; Published Online: April 13, 2010