Related papers: Parmenides reloaded
In the History of Ideas, a succession of philosophical and scientific achievements, concerning the concept of space and its dimensionality, were essential to contribute, after a long period, to the theoretical possibility of thinking…
Modern physics, via the standard model with Higgs mechanism and string theory for example, has supplied ether-like models and emergent general relativity scenarios that substantially weaken the usual defense of orthodox relativity and…
Eternalism is the view that the past, the present and the future exist simpliciter. A typical argument in favor of this view leans on the relativity of simultaneity. The 'equally real with' relation is assumed to be transitive between…
In this speculative analysis, interdimensionality is introduced as the (co)existence of universes embedded into larger ones. These interdimensional universes may be isolated or intertwined, suggesting a variety of interdimensional intrinsic…
The paper puts forward a conceptual framework in which the phenomenon of time can be presented and discussed in a proper way. We argue that change is ontologically and epistemologically a more basic phenomenon than time. Time is an abstract…
The problem of topology change description in gravitation theory is analized in detailes. It is pointed out that in standard four-dimensional theories the topology of space may be considered as a particular case of boundary conditions (or…
Experimental evidene of the last decades has made the status of "collapses of the wave function" even more shaky than it already was on conceptual grounds: interference effects turn out to be detectable even when collapses are typically…
The physical world is quantum. However, our description of the quantum physics still relies much on concepts in classical physics and in some cases with `quantized' interpretations. The most important case example is that of spacetime. We…
The discovery that the Universe is accelerating in its expansion has brought the basic concept of cosmic expansion into question. An analysis of the evolution of this concept suggests that the paradigm that was finally settled into prior to…
A new, very different physical model of the universe is proposed. Its virtues include unifying relativity and quantum mechanics, and particles with de Broglie waves. It also appears to provide a truly unified physical basis for…
In five dimensional cosmological models, the convention is to include the fifth dimension in a way similar to the other space dimensions. In this work we attempt to introduce the fifth dimension in a way that a time dimension would be…
Our purpose here is to introduce the idea of viewing the spacetime as a macroscopic complex system which, consequently, cannot be directly quantized. It should be thought of as a collection of more fundamental "microscopical" entities…
Although time is one of our most intuitive physical concepts, its understanding at the fundamental level is still an open question in physics. For instance, time in quantum mechanics and general relativity are two distinct and incompatible…
Is presentism compatible with relativity ? This question has been much debated since the argument first proposed by Rietdijk and Putnam. The goal of this text is to study the implications of relativity and quantum mechanics on presentism,…
Two people may claim both to be naturalists, but have divergent conceptions of basic elements of the natural world which lead them to mean different things when they talk about laws of nature, or states, or the role of mathematics in…
From antiquity the conceptual perception of space changed painfully and at a relatively slow pace. It went through mythological descriptions, religious beliefs, metaphysical worldviews and cosmological models with a mechanistic structure,…
This paper explores the status of some notions which are usually associated to time, like datations, chronology, durations, causality, cosmic time and time functions in the Einsteinian relativistic theories. It shows how, even if some of…
Since antiquity, from Euclid of Alexandria to Galileo Galilei to Immanuel Kant to Hermann Minkowksi to Albert Einstein, the question of the nature of space and time has occupied scientists and philosophers. In the four-dimensional…
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…
Given a generic Cremonian space-time, its three spatial dimensions are shown to exhibit an intriguing, "two-plus-one" partition with respect to standard observers. Such observers are found to form three distinct, disjoint groups based on…