He had originally studied chemical engineering at the University of New South Wales (1971–1974). After working at the Shell Oil Refinery at Clyde, Sydney for two years, he decided to switch fields, beginning doctoral studies in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of New South Wales (1978–1981). His dissertation was titled "The Historical Foundation of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity." After finishing his dissertation, he worked at the Princeton University Press on the Einstein Papers Project (1982–1983) under the direction of John Stachel. From 1983 until the present, he has been in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, first as a visiting faculty member, then (from 1997) as a full professor, serving as Chair of the department from 2000 to 2005. He is currently Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science.[2][3]
Norton is considered an authority on the science of Albert Einstein and the philosophy of science. He has published on general relativity, special relativity, the relationship between thermodynamics and information processing, quantum physics, and the genesis of scientific theories. He is well known for his analysis of Einstein's "Zurich Notebook", a small, brown notebook which contains Einstein's private day-to-day calculations during a critical period (1912–1913) in his development of general relativity.[4] The trio of Einstein scholars, John Norton, John Stachel, and John Earman, have sometimes been jokingly referred to as John3 = John Norton × John Stachel × John Earman.[5]
A central theme of his work on Einstein is that Einstein's fundamental contributions to the "old" quantum theory have been largely forgotten because of his well-known criticism of the "new" quantum mechanics and its statistical interpretation. In the field of information science, Norton has criticized the claim by Rolf Landauer and others that schemes exist whereby digital computers can store data in a logically and physically reversible manner that, until the data are erased, represent an apparent violation of the second law of thermodynamics.[6][7][note 1] In the philosophical debate about thought experiments, Norton has taken the position that all thought experiments (without exception) can be reconstructed as straightforward arguments.[9]
Norton's name is also attached to Norton's dome, a thought experiment showing nondeterminism in Newtonian physics.
Notes
^In 1982, Charles H. Bennett proposed a re-interpretation of Maxwell's demon, attributing its inability to break the second law of thermodynamics to the cost of destroying, rather than acquiring, information.[8] Rolf Landauer extended Bennett's proposal to argue for the possibility of reversible computational processes.
^"Brief History, page 2". Center for the Philosophy of Science. University of Pittsburgh. Archived from the original on 22 November 2017. Retrieved 1 May 2018.
^Norton, John D. "The Hole Argument". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), Stanford University. Archived from the original on 23 April 2018. Retrieved 1 May 2018.
