Related papers: Time's Arrow and Self-Locating Probability

The arrow of time dilemma: the laws of physics are invariant for time inversion, whereas the familiar phenomena we see everyday are not (i.e. entropy increases). I show that, within a quantum mechanical framework, all phenomena which leave…

We discuss the arrow of time in terms of the increase of correlations between the system and its environment. Here we show that the existence of the arrow of time, based on deleting correlations, requires a strict absence of initial…

The spread of the time arrows from the environment to an observed subsystem is followed within a harmonic model. A similarity is pointed out between irreversibility and a phase with spontaneously broken symmetry. The causal structure of…

We believe the following three ingredients are enough to explain the mystery of the arrow of time: (1). equations of dynamics of gas molecules, (2). chaotic instabilities of the equations of dynamics, (3). unavoidable perturbations to the…

We argue that it is a fluctuational underpinning of the Quantum vacuum which on the one hand gives a stochastic character to the conservation laws, and on the other is required for explaining the recently observed acceleration of the…

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.…

This paper relates both to the metaphysics of probability and to the physics of time asymmetry. Using the formalism of decoherent histories, it investigates whether intuitions about intrinsic time directedness that are often associated with…

Different approaches to quantum gravity, such as loop quantum cosmology and group field theory, predict the resolution of the initial cosmological singularity via a bounce: a regular spacetime region that connects the expanding branch of…

We argue that in Universes where future and past differ only by the entropy content a psychological arrow of time pointing in the direction of entropy increase can arise from natural selection in biological evolution. We show that this…

It is widely accepted that temporal asymmetry is largely a cosmological problem; the task of explaining temporal asymmetry reduces in the main to that of explaining an aspect of the condition of the early universe. However, cosmologists who…

Arrows of time - thermodynamical, cosmological, electromagnetic, quantum mechanical, psychological - are basic properties of Nature. For a quantum system-bath closed system the de-correlated initial conditions and no-memory (Markovian)…

Fisher's arrow of `time' in a cosmological phase space defined as in quantum optics (i.e., whose points are coherent states) is introduced as follows. Assuming that the phase space evolution of the universe starts from an initial squeezed…

The epistemic arrow of time is the fact that our knowledge of the past seems to be both of a different kind and more detailed than our knowledge of the future. Just like with the other arrows of time, it has often been speculated that the…

Despite the importance of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, it is not absolute. Statistical mechanics implies that, given sufficient time, systems near equilibrium will spontaneously fluctuate into lower-entropy states, locally reversing…

Microphysical laws are time reversible, but macrophysics, chemistry and biology are not. This chapter explores how this asymmetry (a classic example of a broken symmetry) arises due to the cosmological context, where a non-local Direction…

This is the first of five papers comprising The Semantic Arrow of Time. The argument begins with a claim: computing's arrow of time is semantic, not thermodynamic. The direction in which meaning is preserved or destroyed across transactions…

There is a widespread assumption that the universe in general, and the Earth's biosphere in particular, is becoming more complex over time. This paper formulates this assumption as a macroscopic law, the law of increasing complexity, for a…

Conceptual problems regarding the arrow of time in classical physics, quantum physics, cosmology, and quantum gravity are discussed. Particular attention is paid to the dynamical role of the quantum indeterminism, and to various concepts of…

This paper is a continuation of the paper gr-qc/0203045 and is devoted to the problem of the arrow of time. A deterministic past-directed dynamics is constructed, which results in the retrodictive universe. A future-directed dynamics of the…

In this paper we discuss the traditional approaches to the problem of the arrow of time. On the basis of this discussion we adopt a global and non-entropic approach, according to which the arrow of time has a global origin and is an…