Related papers: Copernicanism and the Typicality in Time

Time has always played a crucial role in cosmology. I review some of the aspects of the present cosmological model which are more directly related to time, such as: the definition of a cosmic time; the existence of typical timescales and…

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…

Our main purpose here is to study some qualitative aspects of space and time. These include the notion of space and time regarded as the containers of respectively bodies and events, the divisibility of space, and the unrepeatability of…

We summarize the arguments that space and time are likely to be emergent notions; i.e. they are not present in the fundamental formulation of the theory, but appear as approximate macroscopic concepts. Along the way we briefly review…

Time is, figuratively and literally, becoming the new dimension for crystalline matter. As such, rapid recent progress on time-varying media gave rise to the notion of temporal and spatiotemporal crystals. Fundamentally rethinking the role…

Time is a parameter playing a central role in our most fundamental modeling of natural laws. Relativity theory shows that the comparison of times measured by different clocks depends on their relative motions and on the strength of the…

Extracting predictions from cosmological theories that describe a multiverse, for what we are likely to observe in our domain, is crucial to establishing the validity of these theories. One way to extract such predictions is from…

Time is a parameter playing a central role in our most fundamental modelling of natural laws. Relativity theory shows that the comparison of times measured by different clocks depends on their relative motion and on the strength of the…

This contribution argues that the notion of time used in the scientific modeling of reality deprives time of its real nature. Difficulties from logic paradoxes to mathematical incompleteness and numerical uncertainty ensue. How can the…

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…

The assumption that we are typical observers plays a core role in attempts to make multiverse theories empirically testable. A widely shared worry about this assumption is that it suffers from systematic ambiguity concerning the reference…

After commenting briefly on the role of the typicality assumption in science, we advocate a phenomenological approach to the cosmological measure problem. Like any other theory, a measure should be simple, general, well-defined, and…

Confusion and disagreement around the notion of time is due to the fact that we often fail to recognize that we call 'time' a variety of distinct notions, only partially related to one another. Many apparently obvious properties of time are…

In the absence of a fundamental theory that precisely predicts values for observable parameters, anthropic reasoning attempts to constrain probability distributions over those parameters in order to facilitate the extraction of testable…

Special relativity is most naturally formulated as a theory of space-time geometry, but within the space-time framework probability apears to be at best an epistemic notion - a matter of what can be known, not of the status of events in…

Arguments are given that time must be defined in an operative manner,i.e., by constructing devices which can serve as clocks.The investigation of such devices leads to the conclusion that there is a principal uncertainity of time if one…

This essay examines our fundamental conceptions of time, spacetime, the asymmetry of time, and the motion of a quantum mechanical particle. The concept of time has multiple meanings and these are often confused in the literature and must be…

We argue against current proposals concerning the non-existence of time. We point out that a large number of these proposals rely, at least implicitly, on the assumption of `closure' (or `partial closure') of the laws of Physics. I.e. the…

The Copernican principle, stating that we do not occupy any special place in our universe, is usually taken for granted in modern cosmology. However recent observational data of supernova indicate that we may live in the under-dense center…

Modern physics, via the standard model with Higgs mechanism and string theory for example, has supplied ether-like models and emergent general relativity scenarios that substantially weaken the usual defense of orthodox relativity and…