Related papers: Time's arrow and life's origin
Modern physics has unlocked a number of mysteries regarding the early Universe, such as the baryogenesis, the unification of the strong and electroweak forces and the nucleosynthesis. However, understanding the very early Universe, close to…
We show that quantum chaotic many-body systems possess the thermodynamic arrow of time in the thermodynamic limit. Berry's conjecture in quantum chaotic systems and equivalence of ensembles imply the Kelvin statement of the second law of…
A global definition of time-asymmetry is presented. Schulman's two arrows of time model is criticized.
Life is a complex biological phenomenon represented by numerous chemical, physical and biological processes performed by a biothermodynamic system/cell/organism. Both living organisms and inanimate objects are subject to aging, a biological…
In the early 2000s, the study of time operators advanced as one of the methods to understand the problem of time as mathematical science. However, the starting point for the time operator is to understand time as a problem of observation…
Fundamental interactions are either fully or nearly symmetric under time reversal. But macroscopic phenomena have a definite arrow of time. Though there is no convergence on the origin of time's preferential direction, many researchers…
The quest for life in the Universe is often affected by the free use of extrapolations of our phenomenological geocentric knowledge. We point out that the existence of a living organism, and a population of organisms, requires the existence…
This paper is devoted to discussing the topological structure of the arrow of time. In the literature, it is often accepted that its algebraic and topological structures are that of a one-dimensional Euclidean space $\mathbb{E}^1$, although…
The problem of the Nature of Time is twofold: whether or not time is a fundamental quantity of Nature, and how does clock time of metrology emerge in the experimental description of dynamics. This work strongly supports the fundamental…
It is demonstrated how a convenient choice of the mathematical structure of the quantum cosmology superspace, precisely the definition of a convenient regular state superspace and the restriction of the dynamics to this space, yields…
In contemporary physics space and time are intertwined entities so that kinematical and dynamical quantities are expressed in the four-dimensional space-time. This formulation seems to contradict our every-day experience and perception…
We discuss how the classical notions of time and causal structure may emerge together with quantum-mechanical probabilities from a universal quantum state. For this, the process of decoherence between semiclassical branches is important.…
Time-asymmetric behavior as embodied in the second law of thermodynamics is observed in {\it individual macroscopic} systems. It can be understood as arising naturally from time-symmetric microscopic laws when account is taken of a) the…
The universe is certainly not yet in total thermodynamical equilibrium,so clearly some law telling about special initial conditions is needed. A universe or a system imposed to behave periodically gets thereby required ``initial…
At very small scales, thermodynamic energy exchanges like work and heat become comparable to thermal energy of the system, which leads to unusual phenomena like the transient violations of Second Law. We explore the generic characters of…
We investigate the thermodynamic arrow of time in a time-symmetrically recollapsing universe by calculating quantum mechanically the entropy production of a massive scalar field. It is found that even though the Hamiltonian has a…
The classical evolution of the universe can be seen as a parametrised worldline of the minisuperspace, with the time variable $t$ the parameter that parametrises the worldline. The time reversal symmetry of the field equations implies that…
Phenomenological arrows of time can be traced to a past low-entropy state. Does this imply the universe was in an improbable state in the past? I suggest a different possibility: past low-entropy depends on the coarse-graining implicit in…
The origin of life occupies a very important place in the study of the evolution. Its liminal location between life and non-life poses special challenges to researchers who study this subject. Current approaches in studying the origin and…
The path toward the emergence of life in our biosphere involved several key events allowing for the persistence, reproduction and evolution of molecular systems. All these processes took place in a given environmental context and required…