Related papers: Time Really Passes, Science Can't Deny That
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 establish the general conditions under which evolution in the laws of physics and matter creation or destruction are closely intertwined. They make use of global time variables canonically dual to the constants of Nature. Such times flow…
Arising out of an attempt at a new foundations of mathematics, in which relations are more primitive than sets, and out of the theoretical physicists' concept of underlying causes of empirical phenomena, the idea of a purely mathematical…
The scientific process is a means to turn the results of experiments into knowledge about the world in which we live. Much research effort has been directed toward automating this process. To do this, one needs to formulate the scientific…
The concept of the space-time as emerging in the world phase transition, vs. a priori existing, is put forward. The theory of gravity with two basic symmetries, the global affine one and the general covariance, is developed. Implications…
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…
General relativity does not prohibit the existence of space-times that describe time travel. Consideration of such spaces gives rise to a lot of questions and paradoxes, among which there are thermodynamic ones. This paper considers two…
I argue that scientific determinism is not supported by facts, but results from the elegance of the mathematical language physicists use, in particular from the so-called real numbers and their infinite series of digits. Classical physics…
The nature of time in quantum mechanics is closely related to the use of a complex, rather than say real, Hilbert space. This becomes particularly clear when considering quantum field theory in time dependent backgrounds, such as in…
Even though the concepts of time and space are basic concepts of physics, they have not been vouchsafed a constructive definition. As to space, this is no wonder because a correct notion of space cannot be formed in the frame of the…
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…
Creativity is perhaps what most differentiates humans from other species. It involves the capacity to shift between divergent and convergent modes of thought in response to task demands. Divergent thought has been characterized as the kind…
The paper starts with the proposal that the cause of the apparent insolubility of the free-will problem are several popular but strongly metaphysical notions and hypotheses. To reduce the metaphysics, some ideas are borrowed from physics. A…
In general-covariant theories the Hamiltonian is a constraint, and hence there is no time evolution; this is the problem of time. In the subcritical free string, the Hamiltonian ceases to be a constraint after quantization due to conformal…
It is recalled that closed (isolated) systems are essentially reversible whilst open systems like the Earth, or living beings on it, are irreversible because they are not isolated. Earth and life irreversibility derives from the evolution…
After the advent of the theory of special relativity, the existence of absolute time in nature was rejected within the society of physics. In recent decades, William Lane Craig has endeavoured to offer an interpretation of the empirical…
When addressing the notion of proper time in the theory of relativity, it is usually taken for granted that the time read by an accelerated clock is given by the Minkowski proper time. However, there are authors like Harvey Brown that…
Physics is formulated in terms of timeless classical mathematics. A formulation on the basis of intuitionist mathematics, built on time-evolving processes, would offer a perspective that is closer to our experience of physical reality.
Our laws of nature and our cosmos appear to be delicately fine-tuned for life to emerge, in a way that seems hard to attribute to chance. In view of this, some have taken the opportunity to revive the scholastic Argument from Design,…
What is the productivity of Science? Can we measure an evolution of the production of mathematicians over history? Can we predict the waiting time till the proof of a challenging conjecture such as the P-versus-NP problem? Motivated by…