Related papers: A philosophical argument against time machines
We first see that the inertia of Newtonian mechanics is absolute and troublesome. General relativity can be viewed as Einstein's attempt to remedy, by making inertia relative, to matter---perhaps imperfectly though, as at least a couple of…
The basic tenet of the present work is the assumption of the lack of external and fixed time in the Universe. This assumption is best embodied by general relativity, which replaces the fixed space-time structure with the gravitational…
The formalism of quantum mechanics produces spectacular results, but its rules, its parameters are empirical, either deduced from classical physics, or from experimental results rather than from the postulates. Thus, quantum mechanics is…
The essay is devoted to the problem of time in the context of quantum cosmology, which acquires a philosophical level to date. At an example of the minisuperspace model, we show that this problem is illusive in the sense that it does not…
This is a philosophy paper rather than mathematical physics work. I will publish it in some other place.
Today's science provides quite a lean picture of time as a mere geometric evolution parameter. I argue that time is much richer. In particular, I argue that besides the geometric time, there is creative time, when objective chance events…
Civilization maintains an elaborate infrastructure devoted to the maintenance of synchronized time. Governments mandate daylight saving time. Standards bodies insert leap seconds into Coordinated Universal Time. Engineers debate leap…
Programs in quantum gravity often claim that time emerges from fundamentally timeless physics. In the semiclassical time program time arises only after approximations are taken. Here we ask what justifies taking these approximations and…
The picture of space-time that Minkowski created in 1907 has been followed by two important developments in physics not contained in the original picture: general relativity and quantum mechanics. We will argue that the use of concepts of…
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…
``No one has ever touched Zeno without refuting him''. We will not refute Zeno in this paper. Instead we review some unexpected encounters of Zeno with modern science. The paper begins with a brief biography of Zeno of Elea followed by his…
In this paper I argue that the fundamental aspect of our notion of time is that it defines an order relation, be it a total order relation between configurations of the world or just a partial order relation between events. This position is…
In the joint paper "Bridging the neuroscience and physics of time" Rovelli, as the physicist coauthor of neuroscientist Dean Buonomano, makes statements that rely on theoretical frameworks employed when the laws of thermodynamics and…
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…
As a neuroscientist and a theoretical physicist, both working on time, we have decided to open a direct dialogue to examine if the apparent discrepancies regarding the nature of time can be composed.
In this article, we argue that the theory of special relativity, as formulated by Einstein, is a philosophical rather than a scientific theory. What is scientific and experimentally supported is the formalism of the relativistic mechanics…
Huw Price has proposed an argument that suggests a time-symmetric ontology for quantum theory must necessarily be retrocausal, i.e. it must involve influences that travel backwards in time. One of Price's assumptions is that the quantum…
The quantization of time-reparametrization invariant systems such as general relativity is plagued by an ambiguity relating to the role of time in the theory. If one parametrizes observables by the (unobservable) time, and then relies on…
A resolution of the Loschmidt paradox on the Boltzmann H theorem is proposed, based on some new concepts concerning motion backwards in time. The key to this resolution, taken from our interpretation of motion backwards in time, is the…
General relativity predicts the existence of closed timelike curves (CTCs), along which an object could travel to its own past. A consequence of CTCs is the failure of determinism, even for classical systems: one initial condition can…