In Appreciation of Abner Shimony

Abstract

Abner Shimony was an exceptional human being and a remarkably lucid and penetrating thinker whose work centered on some of the most significant physical and philosophical questions of his era at their nexus. He approached these questions with an open, agile and critical mind, something quickly evident to anyone who had the privilege of conversing with him. His choice of problems to pursue, which for the most part involved epistemology and the relationships between mind, matter and space-time, was visionary. Undoubtedly, most of the discussions of Abner Shimony's work in future will center on his enormous contribution to the investigation of the significance to physics, both theoretical and experimental, of quantum entanglement, the characteristic of physical entities on which his work came to concentrate, well represented in the Clauser--Horne--Shimony--Holt inequality. Also significant for physics is his pioneering development of the quantification of entanglement in the early-to-mid 1990s. Shimony focused largely on the question of the relationship between knowledge and the world, as he did not view these two philosophical concerns as distinct from study of the implications of entanglement per se. Indeed, the most well known phrase he coined is "experimental metaphysics." He is also known for the reapplication of the expression "peaceful coexistence" as pertaining to the relationship between quantum mechanics and special relativity. Shimony's less well known intellectual engagement was with the question of the relationship between mind and matter, which only a few physicists of our time have engaged seriously, likely because of its more philosophical and less mathematically tractable character. This appreciation reflects all these aspects of Abner Shimony's long and successful intellectual career, in addition to details of his education, including mention of some of his teachers.