Professor Abner Shimony 1928-2015
Abner E. Shimony, 1928-2015
Abner Shimony, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and of Physics at Boston University, died on August 8, 2015. His research transcended disciplinary boundaries and even literary genres. He made lasting contributions to inductive logic, the philosophy of C.S. Peirce, a naturalistic ‘integral’ epistemology, the quantum measurement problem, and the first experimental test of Bell’s theorem, to name just a few. He was an activist who campaigned for peace and was an inspiration to his students and colleagues.
Shimony was born March 10, 1928 in Columbus Ohio and grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. He began his undergraduate studies at Yale at age sixteen and obtained a joint degree in philosophy and mathematics in 1948. He went to the University of Chicago to study with Rudolf Carnap and completed a Masters in philosophy on Whitehead’s Theory of Linguistic Symbolism. He returned to Yale to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy. There he met Annemarie Anrod, a graduate student in anthropology, and they were married in 1951. He completed his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1953 with a dissertation titled A Theory of Confirmation, directed by John Myhill.
After two years in the army at Fort Monmouth, he returned to school for a second doctorate, this time in physics from Princeton University. His dissertation advisor was the soon-to-be Nobel Prize winner Eugene Wigner. While Shimony was there, Wigner drafted his famous philosophical essay “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics,” with Shimony commenting and encouraging Wigner to read Peirce.
Before completing his dissertation, Shimony left Princeton to take up his first teaching position in the Humanities Department at MIT in 1959 (with Annemarie’s position at Mount Holyoke College they had the infamous “two-body problem”). Shimony completed his Ph.D. in physics in 1962 with a dissertation on Regression and Response in Thermodynamic Systems. He taught philosophy at MIT until 1968, influencing many students, such as Paul Teller. Boston University was able to attract Shimony largely through the efforts of Bob Cohen, who co-founded the BU Center for Philosophy and History of Science less than a decade before and offered Shimony a joint appointment in the Physics and Philosophy Departments. Shimony actively participated in the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science and edited volumes of Boston Studies, such as Naturalistic Epistemology: A Symposium of Two Decades (co-edited with Debra Nails), which contains an extended defense of Shimony’s own “integral epistemology.”
One year after arriving at BU, Shimony published arguably the most important physics article of his career. With his BU graduate student, Michael Horne, and two other graduate students (John Clauser at Columbia and Michael Horne at Harvard) he derived a new form of Bell’s inequality, now known as the CHSH inequality, amenable to experimental test. The question was whether there could be a theory that reproduces the predictions of quantum mechanics but without the “spooky action-at-a-distance” that Einstein despised. Along with subsequent experiments, this paper shows the answer appears to be no. Thanks to this early work of Shimony’s, mainstream physics came to appreciate nonlocality and entanglement as genuine physical effects with practical importance.
Some of Shimony’s most important contributions involved coming up with an appropriate conceptual language for clarifying a confused issue. For example, following the work of Bell and Jon Jarrett, Shimony introduced the terms ‘parameter independence’ and ‘outcome independence’ to distinguish two different senses of (non-)locality that had been conflated. He showed that while a violation of parameter independence is controllable, and hence leads to a conflict with special relativity, a violation of outcome independence is uncontrollable, and hence allows what Shimony termed a ‘peaceful coexistence’ between the theories. He concluded that quantum nonlocality (resulting from violations of outcome independence) is best described not as action-at-a-distance, but rather as “passion at-a-distance.”
Another important expression of Shimony’s was “experimental metaphysics,” meaning the use of scientific experiments to investigate metaphysical questions. Shimony saw no sharp divide between physics and metaphysics. Like most of the great philosophers (such as Aristotle, Avicenna, Descartes, Hume, and Kant) Shimony was deeply engaged in the science of his day, contributing both to its content and to a deeper understanding of its methodology. Also like many of the greatest physicists (such as Galileo, Maxwell, Heisenberg, and Einstein) he was well-versed in philosophy and deeply philosophical in his scientific reasoning. As Shimony’s life work reminds us, both fields benefit from a close connection.
Upon Shimony’s retirement from BU in 1994, a session of the Boston Colloquium was organized in his honor, which resulted in two impressive volumes: Experimental Metaphysics and Potentiality, Entanglement, and Passion-at-a-Distance. Shimony supervised many Ph.D. students during his time at BU, including, Don Howard, the late Fr. Ron Anderson, and Wayne Myrvold (in philosophy), and Mike Horne, Andre Mirabelli, Joy Christian, Sandu Popescu (as a postdoc), Penha Dias, and Gregg Jaeger (in physics).
It was a tremendous loss when Shimony’s first wife, Annemarie, died in 1995, but he reunited with a high-school companion Helen-Claire (Pierce) Walker, to whom he was married from 1997 until her death in 2001. In 2005 he married his last love, Manana Sikic, who brought him great joy and contentment in the final decade of his life. Shimony had two wonderful sons, Jonathan and Ethan, who inspired his forays into writing children’s literature, such as his enchanting Tibaldo and the Hole in the Calendar, illustrated by Jonathan, and his poem “Babar et les Variables Cachées.”
Shimony was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Physical Society. He served as President of the Philosophy of Science Association in 1995-96. His two-volume collection of essays, Search for a Naturalistic World View, received the prestigious Lakatos Prize in 1996. But for all his achievements and honors, Shimony was never self-aggrandizing. When praised, he was apt to respond in his humble and humorous way with a saying such as, “Even the blind chicken finds a kernel of corn.” His profound mind and generous spirit will be greatly missed.
Additional remembrances and photos can be found here: http://www.bu.edu/cphs/about/history/abner-shimony/
Alisa Bokulich and Don Howard