Related papers: Philosophical problems of space-time theories

In quantum mechanical experiments one distinguishes between the state of an experimental system and an observable measured in it. Heuristically, the distinction between states and observables is also suggested in scattering theory or when…

It is often claimed that the fundamental laws of physics are deterministic and time-symmetric and that therefore our experience of the passage of time is an illusion. This paper will critically discuss these claims and show that they are…

Quantum theory is a mathematical formalism to compute probabilities for outcomes happenning in physical experiments. These outcomes constitute events happening in space-time. One of these events represents the fact that a system located in…

In the canonical approach to quantization of gravity, one often uses relational clock variables and an interpretation in terms of conditional probabilities to overcome the problem of time. In this essay we show that these suffer from…

Reasoning under uncertainty is a fundamental challenge in Artificial Intelligence. As with most of these challenges, there is a harsh dilemma between the expressive power of the language used, and the tractability of the computational…

Quantum nonseparability is a central feature of quantum mechanics, and raises important philosophical questions. Interestingly, a particular theoretical development of quantum mechanics, called the process matrix formalism (PMF), features…

In this paper we address the problem of the arrow of time from a cosmological point of view, rejecting the traditional entropic approach that defines the future direction of time as the direction of the entropy increase: from our…

Time-symmetric interpretations of quantum theory are often presented as featuring "retrocausal" effects in addition to the usual forward notion of causation. This paper examines the ontological implications of certain timesymmetric…

General relativity treats spacetime as dynamical and exhibits its breakdown at singularities. This failure is interpreted as evidence that quantum gravity is not a theory formulated within spacetime; instead, it must explain the very…

In this letter, we point to three widely accepted challenges that the quantum theory, quantum information, and quantum foundations communities are currently facing: indeterminism, the semantics of conditional probabilities, and the spooky…

In quantum mechanics time usually appears as classical parameter which means that it is treated as being essentially different from spatial coordinates that are represented by operators. On the other hand, relativity theory demands to treat…

A major disagreement between different views about the foundations of quantum mechanics concerns whether for a theory to be intelligible as a fundamental physical theory it must involve a "primitive ontology" (PO), i.e., variables…

In quantum mechanics, time is introduced as a non-measurable quantity, as there is no possibility to build a hermitian operator canonically conjugated to the Hamiltonian. We cannot have, therefore, the time operator, which means that the…

This paper presents alternative ideas on the physics of time that lead to a new interpretation of cosmological redshifts. These ideas are based on the close relationship between the speed of time and entropy processes in our universe. I…

Research in quantum gravity strongly suggests that our world in not fundamentally spatiotemporal, but that spacetime may only emerge in some sense from a non-spatiotemporal structure, as this paper illustrates in the case of causal set…

It is a widespread belief that results like G\"odel's incompleteness theorems or the intrinsic randomness of quantum mechanics represent fundamental limitations to humanity's strive for scientific knowledge. As the argument goes, there are…

In this paper we propose that cosmological time is a quantum observable that does not commute with other quantum operators essential for the definition of cosmological states, notably the cosmological constant. This is inspired by…

At the intersection of what I call uncomputable art and computational epistemology, a form of experimental philosophy, we find an exciting and promising area of science related to causation with an alternative, possibly best possible,…

Classical limits of quantum systems are shown to lead to different conceptions of spaces different from the classical one underlying the process of quantization of such systems. The accent is put in situations where traces of…

Quantum mechanical time operator is introduced following the parametric formulation of classical mechanics in the extended phase space. Quantum constraint on the extended quantum system is defined in analogy to the constraint of the…