Related papers: The length of time's arrow
Driven by the term "the arrow of time" as a general topic, the article develops a musical discussion by referring to the etymological origin of the term: philosophy (epistemology) and physics (thermodynamics). In particular, the article…
This paper relates both to the metaphysics of probability and to the physics of time asymmetry. Using the formalism of decoherent histories, it investigates whether intuitions about intrinsic time directedness that are often associated with…
Together with the concept of reversibility, another relevant physical notion is time-symmetry, which expresses that there is no way of distinguishing between backward and forward time directions. This notion, found in physical theories, has…
We show that the Wheeler-DeWitt equation with a consistent boundary condition is only compatible with an arrow of time that formally reverses in a recollapsing universe. Consistency of these opposite arrows is facilitated by quantum effects…
Physical systems that power motion and create structure in a fixed amount of time dissipate energy and produce entropy. Whether living or synthetic, systems performing these dynamic functions must balance dissipation and speed. Here, we…
It was previously argued that the phenomenon of quantum gravitational decoherence described by the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is responsible for the emergence of the arrow of time. Here we show that the characteristic spatio-temporal scales of…
Over the past several decades, a rich series of experiments has repeatedly verified the quantum nature of superconducting devices, leading some of these systems to be regarded as artificial atoms. In addition to their application in quantum…
The energetic efficiency of an overdamped Brownian particle in a saw tooth potential in the presence of time asymmetric forcing is studied in the adiabatic limit. An error made in the earlier work on the same problem in literature is…
Time remains one of the least well understood concepts in physics, most notably in quantum mechanics. A central goal is to find the fundamental limits of measuring time. One of the main obstacles is the fact that time is not an observable…
We expand the time reversal symmetry arguments of quantum mechanics, originally proposed by Wigner in the context of unitary dynamics, to contain situations including generalized measurements for monitored quantum systems. We propose a…
It is demonstrated how a convenient choice of the mathematical structure of the quantum cosmology superspace, precisely the definition of a convenient regular state superspace and the restriction of the dynamics to this space, yields…
Many physicists think that the maximum entropy formalism is a straightforward application of Bayesian statistical ideas to statistical mechanics. Some even say that statistical mechanics is just the general Bayesian logic of inductive…
This paper is a continuation of the paper gr-qc/0203045 and is devoted to the problem of the arrow of time. A deterministic past-directed dynamics is constructed, which results in the retrodictive universe. A future-directed dynamics of the…
The observed general time-asymmetric behavior of macroscopic systems -- embodied in the second law of thermodynamics -- arises naturally from time-symmetric microscopic laws due to the great disparity between macro and micro-scales. More…
The experimental proofs of strong time invariance violation in optics are discussed. Time noninvariance is the only real physical base for explanation the origin of the most phenomena in nonlinear optics. The experimental study of forward…
Thermodynamic uncertainty relations quantify how the signal-to-noise ratio of a given observable is constrained by dissipation. Fluctuation relations generalize the second law of thermodynamics to stochastic processes. We show that any…
This is the written version of a lecture at the KITP workshop on Bits, Branes, and Black Holes. In it I describe work with D. Harlow, S. Shenker, D. Stanford which explains how the tree-like structure of eternal inflation, together with the…
An asymmetry exists between time and space in the sense that physical systems inevitably evolve over time whereas there is no corresponding ubiquitous translation over space. The asymmetry, which is presumed to be elemental, is represented…
This is the first of five papers comprising The Semantic Arrow of Time. The argument begins with a claim: computing's arrow of time is semantic, not thermodynamic. The direction in which meaning is preserved or destroyed across transactions…
It has been shown that the combination of a broken spatial symmetry in the potential (or ratchet potential) and time correlations in the driving are crucial, and enough to allow transformation of the fluctuations into work. The required…