Related papers: Indefinite global time
Eternalism, the view that what we regard locally as being located in the past, the present and the future equally exists, is the best ontological account of temporal existence in line with special and general relativity. However, special…
I explain in what sense the structure of space and time is probably vague or indefinite, a notion I define. This leads to the mathematical representation of location in space and time by a vague interval. From this, a principle of…
Time can be defined as the duration between events. It is irreversible. When used as a variable in quantifying the changing properties of matter, this irreversibility of time is incompatible with Newton's deterministic mechanics and with…
Inter-universal entanglement may even exist in a multiverse in which there is no common space-time among the universes. In particular, the entanglement between the expanding and contracting branches of the universe might have observable…
In this review paper, we consider the fundamental nature of time and causality, most particularly, in the context of the theories of special and general relativity. We also discuss the issue of closed timelike curves in the context of…
Discussion of physical realization of coordinates demonstrates that the quantum theory of gravity (still absent) should be non-local and, probably, non-commutative as well.
It is known that the global state of a composite quantum system can be completely determined by specifying correlations between measurements performed on subsystems only. Despite the fact that the quantum correlations thus suffice to…
It is often conjectured that a choice of time function merely sets up a frame for the quantum evolution of gravitational field, meaning that all choices should be in some sense compatible. In order to explore this conjecture (and the…
The perspective is advanced that the time parameter in quantum mechanics corresponds to the time coordinate in a Minkowski flat spacetime local approximation to the actual dynamical curved spacetime of General Relativity, rather than to an…
In non relativistic physics it is assumed that both chronological ordering and causal ordering of events (telling whether there exists a causal relationship between two events or not) are absolute, observer independent properties. In…
We introduce a formalism for time-dependent correlation functions for systems whose evolutions are governed by non-Hermitian Hamiltonians of general type. It turns out that one can define two different types of time correlation functions.…
This paper investigates the relationship between subsystems and time in a closed nonrelativistic system of interacting bosons and fermions. It is possible to write any state vector in such a system as an unentangled tensor product of…
The process of identifying a time variable in time reparameterization invariant theories results in great ambiguities about the actual laws of physics described by a given theory. A theory set up to describe one set of physical laws can…
The rules of quantum mechanics require a time coordinate for their formulation. However, a notion of time is in general possible only when a classical spacetime geometry exists. Such a geometry is itself produced by classical matter…
When gravity is sourced by a quantum system, there is tension between its role as the mediator of a fundamental interaction, which is expected to acquire nonclassical features, and its role in determining the properties of spacetime, which…
Many important results in modern quantum information theory have been obtained for an idealized situation when the spacetime dependence of quantum phenomena is neglected. However the transmission and processing of (quantum) information is a…
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…
There are several indications (from different approaches) that Spacetime at the Plank Scale could be discrete. One approach to Quantum Gravity that takes this most seriously is the Causal Sets Approach. In this approach spacetime is…
In modern physics only relative quantities are considered to have physical significance. For example, position assigned to a system depends on the choice of coordinates, and only relative distances between different systems have physical…
Time does not obviously appear amongst the coordinates on the constrained phase space of general relativity in the Hamiltonian formulation. Recent work in finite-dimensional models claims that topological obstructions generically make the…