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The Confessions of Saint Augustine

The Confessions of Saint Augustine

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Weinberg, Steven. “The Cosmological Constant Problem.” Reviews of Modern Physics 61 , no. 1 (1989): 1–23. DOI: 10.1103/RevModPhys.61.1, p. 15 col. 2

cites St. Augustine’s Confessions ’s theory of time:

Quæritur : “What 20ᵗʰ century physics paper cited St. Augustine's theory of time?

What 20th century physics paper (in Physical Review?) cited St. Augustine of Hippo's theory of time?

I recall it cited his Confessions , bk. 11, ch. 14-16, his "disquisition concerning time".

Respondetur:

Weinberg, Steven. “The Cosmological Constant Problem.” Reviews of Modern Physics 61 , no. 1 (1989): 1–23. DOI: 10.1103/RevModPhys.61.1, p. 15 col. 2:p. 15 col. 2:

As Augustine (398) warned, “I must not allow my mind to insist that time is something objective.”13


13. This quote is not merely a display of useless erudition. Book XI of Augustine's Confessions contains a famous discussion of the nature of time, and it seems to have become a tradition to quote from this chapter in writing about quantum cosmology. Thus Hawking (1979) quotes "What did God do before He made Heaven and Earth? I do not answer as one did merrily: He was preparing a Hell for those that ask such questions. For at no time had God not made anything, for time itself was made by God.” Coleman (1988a) quotes "The past is present memory. " To this, I can add one more very relevant quote: "I confess to you, Lord, that I still do not know what time is. Yet I confess too that I do know that I am saying this in time, that I have been talking about time for a long time, …”


Augustine, 398, Confessions , translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1961), Book XI.
Hawking, S. W. , 1979, in Three Hundred Years of Gravitation , edited by S. W. Hawking and W. Israel (Cambridge University, Cambridge).
Coleman, S. , 1988a, Nucl. Phys. B 307 , 867


For the relevant quotes from St. Augustine's Confessions , see:

What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know…

But, then, how is it that there are the two times, past and future, when even the past is now no longer and the future is now not yet? But if the present were always present, and did not pass into past time, it obviously would not be time but eternity…

…And yet, O Lord, we do perceive intervals of time, and we compare them with each other, and we say that some are longer and others are shorter. We even measure how much longer or shorter this time may be than that time...But we measure the passage of time when we measure the intervals of perception.…

(Augustine, [Confessions] 11:XIV–XVI)