Related papers: Does a Computer have an Arrow of Time?
This is the second of five papers comprising The Semantic Arrow of Time. Part I established that computing's arrow of time is semantic rather than thermodynamic, and that the Forward-In-Time-Only (FITO) assumption constitutes a category…
An attempt is made to de-mystify the apparent "paradox" between microscopic time revsersibility and macroscopic time irreversibility. It is our common experience that a hot cup of coffee cools down to room temperature and it never…
We show that the arrow of time is intimately related to the geometry and topology of the whole universe, and is therefore best understood as a cosmological phenomenon.
Irreversibility is one of the most intriguing concepts in physics. While microscopic physical laws are perfectly reversible, macroscopic average behavior has a preferred direction of time. According to the second law of thermodynamics, this…
The operational formulations of quantum theory are drastically time oriented. However, to the best of our knowledge, microscopic physics is time-symmetric. We address this tension by showing that the asymmetry of the operational…
Recent research on the thermodynamic arrow of time, at the microscopic scale, has questioned the universality of its direction. Theoretical studies showed that quantum correlations can be used to revert the natural heat flow (from the hot…
Can the thermodynamic arrow of time in a single universe be reversed, even temporarily, within semiclassical gravity without invoking additional universes or branches? We address this question in a single, connected spacetime where quantum…
We investigate the relationship between computation and spacetime structure, focussing on the role of closed timelike curves (CTCs) in promoting computational speedup. We note first that CTC traversal can be interpreted in two distinct…
The Lorentzian length of a timelike curve connecting both endpoints of a classical computation is a function of the path taken through Minkowski spacetime. The associated runtime difference is due to time-dilation: the phenomenon whereby an…
We prove that a time series satisfying a (linear) multivariate autoregressive moving average (VARMA) model satisfies the same model assumption in the reversed time direction, too, if all innovations are normally distributed. This…
One of the basic assumptions implicit in the way physics is usually done is that all causation flows in a bottom up fashion, from micro to macro scales. However this is wrong in many cases in biology, and in particular in the way the brain…
The existence of a non-thermodynamic arrow of time was demonstrated in a recent paper (Mod.Phys.Lett. A13, 1265 (1998)), in which a model of non-local Quantum Electrodynamics was formulated through the principle of gauge invariance. In this…
Various diagnostics of the emergence of an arrow of time in the bulk description of a holographic theory have been proposed, including the decay of some real time correlation functions and the appearance of type III$_1$ von Neumann algebras…
Certain intriguing consequences of the discreteness of time on the time evolution of dynamical systems are discussed. In the discrete-time classical mechanics proposed here, there is an {\it arrow of time} that follows from the fact that…
The importance of the global nature of the arrow of time is shown. Classical Reichenbach diagram and quantum Bohm-Reichenbach diagram, for the universe are introduced. They are used to show the increase of entropy in closed systems, the…
Developing a thermodynamic theory of computation is a challenging task at the interface of non-equilibrium thermodynamics and computer science. In particular, this task requires dealing with difficulties such as stochastic halting times,…
We demonstrate that the cosmological arrow of time is the cause for the arrow of time associated with the retarded radiation. This implies that the proposed mathematical model serves to confirm the hypothesis of Gold and Wheeler that the…
The arrow of time problem remains one of the most intriguing questions of modern physics. We investigate one particular example of this problem: the irreversibility of heat transfer through an interface between two materials. This special…
This study proposes a time-symmetric framework for quantum measurement that restores microscopic reversibility at the level of the dynamical description while remaining compatible with causality and thermodynamic consistency. Instead of…
We investigate three aspects of the supposed problem of time: The disagreement between the treatments of time in general relativity and quantum theory, the problem of recovering time from within an isolated Universe and the prevalence of a…