Related papers: Now, Factuality and Conditio Humana
What is time? Why does it "flow" and why are we sure that it flows from past towards future? Why is there such a gigantic distinction between the Past of our world, which we believe to be fixed, and the Future, which we consider…
A review of some basic facts of classical dynamics shows that time, or precisely duration, is redundant as a fundamental concept. Duration and the behaviour of clocks emerge from a timeless law that governs change.
A particular science is not only defined by its object of study, but also by the point of view and method under which it considers that same object. Taking space and time as an illustrative example, our main aim here is to bring out an…
Preparing general relativity for quantization in the Hamiltonian approach leads to the `problem of time,' rendering the world fundamentally timeless. One proposed solution is the `thermal time hypothesis,' which defines time in terms of…
The idea of a moving present or `now' seems to form part of our most basic beliefs about reality. Such a present, however, is not reflected in any of our theories of the physical world. I show in this article that presentism, the doctrine…
We argue that (1) our perception of time through change and (2) the gap between reality and our observation of it are at the heart of both quantum mechanics and the dynamical mechanism of physical systems. We suggest that the origin of…
In this review paper, we consider the fundamental nature of time and causality, most particularly, in the context of the theories of special and general relativity. We also discuss the issue of closed timelike curves in the context of…
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…
The logic--linguistic structure of quantum physics is analysed. The role of formal systems and interpretations in the representation of nature is investigated. The problems of decidability, completeness, and consistency can affect quantum…
We propose a new point of view regarding the problem of time in quantum mechanics, based on the idea of replacing the usual time operator $\mathbf{T}$ with a suitable real-valued function $T$ on the space of physical states. The proper…
We bring together two topics (quantum mechanics and time passage) with the goal of clarifying questions about each. Specifically, we claim that the formalism of quantum mechanics provides an answer to the question: "What is time passage?".
In this article we study the nature of time in Mechanics. The fundamental principle, according to which a mechanical system evolves governed by a second order differential equation, implies the existence of an absolute time-duration in the…
Many important results in modern quantum information theory have been obtained for an idealized situation when the spacetime dependence of quantum phenomena is neglected. However the transmission and processing of (quantum) information is a…
With the theory of special relativity, time has been linked with space into a four-dimensional space-time from which a basic question must be asked: can space be really transformed into time and vice-versa? The response is affirmative if…
On one popular view, the general covariance of gravity implies that change is relational in a strong sense, such that all it is for a physical degree of freedom to change is for it to vary with regard to a second physical degree of freedom.…
We address the relation between two apparently distinct problems: The quest for a deeper understanding of the nature of consciousness and the search for time and space as emergent structures in the quantum mechanical world. We also advance…
In this paper I discuss the concept of time in physics. I consider the thermal time hypothesis and I claim that thermal clocks and atomic clocks measure different physical times, whereby thermal time and relativistic time are not compatible…
A quantum mechanical theory is proposed which abandons an external parameter ``time'' in favor of a self-adjoint operator on a Hilbert space whose elements represent measurement events rather than system states. The standard quantum…
In quantum gravity there is no notion of absolute time. Like all other quantities in the theory, the notion of time has to be introduced "relationally", by studying the behavior of some physical quantities in terms of others chosen as a…
Ever since Schrodinger, Time in quantum theory is postulated Newtonian for every reference frame. With the help of certain known mathematical results, we show that the concept of the so-called Local Time allows avoiding the postulate. In…