Related papers: On the Arrow of Time
Time has always played a crucial role in cosmology. I review some of the aspects of the present cosmological model which are more directly related to time, such as: the definition of a cosmic time; the existence of typical timescales and…
The phenomenon of local dynamical inhomogeneity of time is predicted, which implies that the course of time along the trajectory of motion of a particle in the inertial reference frames moving relative to each other depends on the state of…
Recently, a thermodynamic definition of time has been introduced. This definition is useful to find approach some open problems in physics. But, it was obtained by a phenomenological approach and a logical inconsistency appears in the…
Time is, figuratively and literally, becoming the new dimension for crystalline matter. As such, rapid recent progress on time-varying media gave rise to the notion of temporal and spatiotemporal crystals. Fundamentally rethinking the role…
In spite of the fact that the Newtonian dynsmics of the underlying molecules do not seem to favor one direction of time over its opposite, the non-decreasing entropy of macroscopic physical systems provides a unique direction to 'the arrow…
While the microscopic laws of physics are often symmetric under time reversal, most natural processes that we observe are not. The emergent asymmetry between typical and time-reversed processes is referred to as the arrow of time. In…
The connection between the micro and macro-arrow of time is discussed in the frame of the stochastic quantum hydrodynamic analogy (SQHA). The presence of fluctuations that in the case on non-linear interactions leads to the breaking of the…
Physical laws for elementary particles can be described by the quantum dynamics equation given a Hamiltonian. The solution are probability amplitudes in Hilbert space that evolve over time. A probability density function over position and…
Difficulties around the idea of spontaneous breaking of time translation symmetry in a closed quantum mechanical system are identified, and then overcome in a simple model. The possibility of ordering in imaginary time is also discussed.
The purpose of the paper is five-fold: (a) Argue that the question in the title can be presented in a meaningful manner and that it requires an answer. (b) Discuss the conventional answers and explain why they are unsatisfactory. (c)…
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…
We argue against current proposals concerning the non-existence of time. We point out that a large number of these proposals rely, at least implicitly, on the assumption of `closure' (or `partial closure') of the laws of Physics. I.e. the…
Several physical concepts, including the concept of time, are clarified herein by taking into account existing experimental data. In addition, the missing links among these physical concepts are established. This allows us to take another…
Reasoning about unpredicted change consists in explaining observations by events; we propose here an approach for explaining time-stamped observations by surprises, which are simple events consisting in the change of the truth value of a…
Microphysical laws are time reversible, but macrophysics, chemistry and biology are not. This chapter explores how this asymmetry (a classic example of a broken symmetry) arises due to the cosmological context, where a non-local Direction…
For nearly two centuries the dynamics of chains have offered examples of paradoxical theoretical predictions. Here we propose a theory for the dissipative dynamics of one-dimensional continua with singularities which provides a unified…
We argue that it is a fluctuational underpinning of the Quantum vacuum which on the one hand gives a stochastic character to the conservation laws, and on the other is required for explaining the recently observed acceleration of the…
We study the implications of time-varying wave mechanics, and show how the standard wave equation is modified if the speed of a wave is not constant in time. In particular, waves which experience longitudinal acceleration are shown to have…
A turbulent flow is maintained by an external supply of kinetic energy, which is eventually dissipated into heat at steep velocity gradients. The scale at which energy is supplied greatly differs from the scale at which energy is…
The identification of a solution to the dark matter problem has many arrows to its bow: if dark matter is a new elementary particle, both laboratory experiments and astrophysics can bring relevant and complementary pieces of information,…