Gordon Belot (2005), Handbook of the Philosophy of Science: Philosophy of Physics, ed. J. Butterfield & J. Earman (Elsevier/North-Holland, 2007), pp. 133–227; preprint on PhilSci-Archive (#2549) from December 2005 — DOI-10.1016/B978-044451560-5/50005-1
Key takeaways
- The “problem of time” in general relativity is that, unlike in well-behaved Hamiltonian/Lagrangian theories, time is not represented by a flow on a symplectic space and change is not represented by functions on a space of states — not that GR shows change to be an illusion; privileging a “geometric time” is the natural but costly way around it.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-118. What follows is what the work says about itself.
The chapter examines how classical (non-quantum) physical theories represent time and change. Its main aim is to clarify the nature and scope of the “problem of time” — the knot of technical and interpretive difficulties rooted in general covariance that obstruct the quantisation of general relativity. It approaches GR by first working through better-understood cases, from Newtonian particle mechanics through field theories, gauge theories and time-dependent systems, each preparing a feature of GR responsible for the problem.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 0 seconds of active reading over 0 sessions. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-118 is the close reading of 2026-09-26, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as the careful technical-philosophical statement of what the problem of time is and is not in classical GR. It is long and assumes graduate differential geometry, and it offers a diagnosis, not a solution. Its quantum-gravity motivations date from 2005 and are not updated here.
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-118, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: medium — never opened by the owner (t = 0) and very long and technical, but load-bearing for philosophy of time in physics; the skim captures the thesis, and a deeper read should target §7 only.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-118 is that reading):
- The standard technical-philosophical reference on the problem of time; a strong anchor for anything on time, change, and gauge/symmetry interpretation in physics.
- Check the argument that the content of GR is “exhausted by the set of all Hamiltonianizations” and how it relates to Earman’s and Maudlin’s opposing readings of change in GR.
- Its distinction between symmetries of laws and symmetries of solutions connects to Wigner’s geometric vs dynamical invariance (LIT-180).
Access when seeded: philpapers.org and philsci-archive.pitt.edu are blocked here; the PhilSci record’s metadata (deposited 2005-12-06, keywords, “forthcoming in” note) came from a Wayback snapshot; the published 2007 chapter PDF (95 pp.) was read from a public mirror (isidore.co); DOI and pages from Crossref.