Related papers: The cut of time
Animals exploit time to survive in the world. Temporal information is required for higher-level cognitive abilities such as planning, decision making, communication, and effective cooperation. Since time is an inseparable part of cognition,…
Preparing general relativity for quantization in the Hamiltonian approach leads to the `problem of time,' rendering the world fundamentally timeless. One proposed solution is the `thermal time hypothesis,' which defines time in terms of…
This paper is about the metaphysical debate whether objects persist over time by the selfsame object existing at different times (nowadays called `endurance' by metaphysicians), or by different temporal parts, or stages, existing at…
Time, space, and matter are categories of our reasoning, whose properties appear to be fundamental. However, these require a scrutiny as in the extreme regime of the primordial universe these present quantum properties. What does it mean…
In analogy with crystalline solids around us, Wilczek recently proposed the idea of "time crystals" as phases that spontaneously break the continuous time translation into a discrete subgroup. The proposal stimulated further studies and…
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 motions and on the strength of the…
The puzzle of the thermodynamic arrow of time reduces to the question of how the universe could have had lower entropy in the past. I show that no special entropy lowering mechanism (or fluctuation) is necessary. As a consequence of…
We review the idea, due to Einstein, Eddington, Hoyle and Ballard, that time is a subjective label, whose primary purpose is to order events, perhaps in a higher-dimensional universe. In this approach, all moments in time exist…
In a purely relational theory there exists a tension between the relational character of the theory and the existence of quantities like distance and duration. We review this issue in the context of the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence. We…
We review the problem of time-critical action and discuss a reformulation that shifts knowledge acquisition from the assessment of complex temporal probabilistic dependencies to the direct assessment of time-dependent utilities over key…
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…
In this paper I suggest a possible explanation for the asymmetry of time. In the case that I study, the dynamical laws and the boundary conditions are symmetric, but the behavior of time is not. The underlying mechanism is statistical 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…
An assessment of the present status of the theory, some immediate tasks which are suggested thereby and some questions whose answers may require a longer breath since they relate to significant changes in the conceptual and mathematical…
This paper is a discussion about the relationship between time and information. We argue that the direction of arrow of time is related to the directivity of information copying that occurs in Nature.
It is widely thought that the quantum theory of de Sitter space requires the existence of a physical observer in the static patch. What exactly is meant by an observer is unclear; it could be anything from a few photons with energy just…
The interface between classical physics and quantum physics is explained from the point of view of quantum information theory (Feynman Processes). The interpretation depends on a hefty sacrifice: the classical determinism or the arrow of…
Active matter encompasses systems whose individual consituents dissipate energy to exert propelling forces on their environment. This rapidly developing field harbors a dynamical phenomenology with no counterpart in passive systems. The…
This paper examines the various arguments that have been put forward suggesting either that time does not exist, or that it exists but its flow is not real. I argue that (i) time both exists and flows; (ii) an Evolving Block Universe…
The emergence of a direction of time in statistical mechanics from an underlying time-reversal-invariant dynamics is explained by examining a simple model. The manner in which time-reversal symmetry is preserved and the role of initial…