Related papers: Skeptical Notes on a Physics of Passage
Discussion of some aspects of the concept of time for a general audience: nature of time, A- and B-series, time in physics, the "now", measurement of time, definition of time units, time's arrow, relativity of time, relativity of…
Entertaining the possibility of time travel will invariably challenge dearly held concepts of fundamental physics. It becomes relatively easy to construct multiple logical contradictions using differing starting points from various…
After stating the measurement problem, physicists usually assume the problem to be coming from the measurement part. Since classical probabilities also collapse when updating information, there is nothing special about quantum state…
A New Mathematico-Physical and Information Theoretic Approach Examination of the available hard core information to firm up the process of unification of quantum and gravitational physics leads to the conclusion that for achieving this…
We present some novel results indicating that time's description in present-day physics is deficient. We use Hawking's information-erasure hypothesis to counter his own claim that time's arrow depends only on initial conditions. Next, we…
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…
A new dynamical paradigm merging quantum dynamics with cosmology is discussed. Time evolution involves a genuine passage of time, which distinguishes the formalism from those where dynamics in space is equivalent to statics in space-time.…
The notions of time in the theories of Newton and Einstein are reviewed so that certain of their assumptions are clarified. These assumptions will be seen as the causes of the incompatibility between the two different ways of understanding…
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…
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…
Theories in physics usually do not address ``the present''or ``the now''. However, they usually have a precise notion of an ``instant'' (or state). I review how this notion appears in relational point mechanics and how it suffices to…
In recent publications in physics and mathematics, concerns have been raised about the use of real numbers to describe quantities in physics, and in particular about the usual assumption that physical quantities are infinitely precise. In…
The Nelson stochastic mechanics is derived as a consequence of the basic physical principles such as the principle of relativity of observations and the invariance of the action quantum. The unitary group of quantum mechanics is represented…
Contemporary research programs in fundamental physics appear to suggest that there could be two (physical) times---or none at all. This essay articulates these possibilities in the context of quantum gravity, and in particular of…
The representations of the world around in physics built with help of causality are analyzed and seems incomplete. The observer's causal representations form a closed logical system, i.e. the compact group related to cause-effect chains.…
Relational mechanics is a reformulation of mechanics (classical or quantum) for which space is relational. This means that the configuration of an $N$-particle system is a shape, which is what remains when the effects of rotations,…
In the paper we consider an interesting possibility of a time as a stochastic process in quantum mechanics.In order to do it we reconsider time as a mechanical quantity in classical mechanics and afterwards we quantize it. We consider…
This paper discusses how the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics can provide for a natural account of the emergence of spacetime events from a quantum substratum. In this account, spacetime is not a substantive manifold that…
I suggest that measurement in quantum theory should be regarded as a sense of time (of things happening), which is as important as the conventional relativistic notion of time. A key question -- of basic physical interest whether one…
Dynamics, the study of change, is normally the subject of mechanics. Whether the chosen mechanics is ``fundamental'' and deterministic or ``phenomenological'' and stochastic, all changes are described relative to an external time. Here we…