Related papers: The length of time's arrow

The cosmological arrow of time may be linked to the thermodynamic arrow by second law of thermodynamics. The time asymmetry is also associated with dissipative fluid as Tolman introduced a viscous fluid to generate an arrow of time in…

Thermodynamic length is a metric distance between equilibrium thermodynamic states. Among other interesting properties, this metric asymptotically bounds the dissipation induced by a finite time transformation of a thermodynamic system. It…

Time-asymmetric spacetime structures, in particular those representing black holes and the expansion of the universe, are intimately related to other arrows of time, such as the second law and the retardation of radiation. The nature of the…

The aim of this article is to analyze the relation between the second law of thermodynamics and the so-called arrow of time. For this purpose, a number of different aspects in this arrow of time are distinguished, in particular those of…

Scientific discussions of the arrow of time often get quite confusing due to highly complex systems they deal with. Popular literature then often coveys messages that tend to get lost in translation. The purpose of this note is to demystify…

The laws of Physics are time-reversible, making no qualitative distinction between the past and the future -- yet we can only go towards the future. This apparent contradiction is known as the "arrow of time problem". Its current resolution…

The puzzle of the thermodynamic arrow of time reduces to the question of how the universe could have had lower entropy in the past. I show that no special entropy lowering mechanism (or fluctuation) is necessary. As a consequence of…

Quantifying irreversibility of a system using finite information constitutes a major challenge in stochastic thermodynamics. We introduce an observable that measures the time-reversal asymmetry between two states after a given time lag. Our…

In any physical theory that admits true indeterminism, the thermodynamic arrow of time can arise regardless of the system's initial conditions. Hence on such theories time's arrow emerges out of the basic physical interactions. The example…

Understanding the emergence of the thermodynamic arrow of time in microscopic systems is of fundamental importance, particularly given that unitary evolution preserves time-reversal symmetry. While projective measurements introduce temporal…

We investigate the thermodynamic arrow of time in a time-symmetrically recollapsing universe by calculating quantum mechanically the entropy production of a massive scalar field. It is found that even though the Hamiltonian has a…

Living systems are fundamentally irreversible, breaking detailed balance and establishing an arrow of time. But how does the evident arrow of time for a whole system arise from the interactions among its multiple elements? We show that the…

The arrow of time and the accelerated expansion are two fundamental empirical facts of the Universe. We advance the viewpoint that the dark energy (positive cosmological constant) accelerating the expansion of the Universe also supports the…

It is brought forward that viable theories of the physical world that have no variable at all that can play the role of time, do not exist; some notion of time is one of the very first ingredients a candidate theory should possess. Almost…

The recent surge of interest in the origin of the temporal asymmetry of thermodynamical systems (including the accessible part of the universe itself) put forward two possible explanatory approaches to this age-old problem. Hereby we show…

It is generally believed that a cosmological arrow of time must be associated with entropy production. Indeed, in his seminal work on cyclic cosmology, Tolman introduced a viscous fluid in order to make successive expansion/contraction…

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…

For more than a century, physics has known of a puzzling conflict between the T-asymmetry of thermodynamic phenomena and the T-symmetry of the underlying microphysics on which these phenomena depend. This paper provides a guide to the…

The only widely accepted explanation for the various arrows of time that everywhere and at all epochs point in the same direction is the `past hypothesis': the Universe had a very special low-entropy initial state. We present the first…

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…