Related papers: Einselection, Equilibrium and Cosmology
According to statistical mechanics, micro-states of an isolated physical system (say, a gas in a box) at time $t_0$ in a given macro-state of less-than-maximal entropy typically evolve in such a way that the entropy at time $t$ increases…
Scientists continue to wrestle with the enigma of time. Is time a dynamic or a fundamental property of spacetime? Why does it have an arrow pointing from past to future? Why are physical laws time-symmetric in a universe with broken…
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)…
The thermodynamic arrow-of-time problem is thought to be resolved by the observation that our universe initially was---and still is---far from equilibrium. The psychological arrow-of-time problem is often attributed the same resolution, but…
Environmentally-induced superselection or "einselection" has been proposed as an observer-independent mechanism by which apparently classical systems "emerge" from physical interactions between degrees of freedom described completely…
In a quantum universe with a strong arrow of time, it is standard to postulate that the initial wave function started in a particular macrostate--the special low-entropy macrostate selected by the Past Hypothesis. Moreover, there is an…
We discuss how quantum geometrodynamics, a conservative approach to quantum gravity, might explain the emergence of classical spacetime and, with it, the emergence of classical time and its arrow from the universal quantum state. This…
We find ourselves in an extended era of entropy production. Unlike most other observations, the arrow of time is usually regarded as a constraint on initial conditions. I argue, however, that it primarily constrains the vacuum structure of…
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…
We investigate implications of decoherence for quantum systems which are classically chaotic. We show that, in open systems, the rate of von Neumann entropy production quickly reaches an asymptotic value which is: (i) independent of the…
Deutsch and Aguirre have recently shown that the solutions of certain dynamical systems typically contain a point of minimum size that they identify as an entropy minimum and from which the size and entropy increase to infinity in both…
This paper is a natural continuation of our previous paper arXiv:1011.4173 . We illustrated earlier that in classical Hamilton mechanics, for overwhelming majority of real chaotic macroscopic systems, alignment of their thermodynamic time…
Although most fundamental laws are invariant under time reversal, experience exhibits the presence of irreversible phenomena -- the arrows of time. Their origin lies in cosmology, and I argue that only quantum cosmology can provide the…
We give a short account of the quantisation of the Szekeres spacetime by considering the symmetries of a reduced action principle. This is an alternative approach than the one followed in the literature for the study of inhomogeneities,…
Emergence of the classical world from the quantum substrate of our Universe is a long-standing conundrum. I describe three insights into the transition from quantum to classical that are based on the recognition of the role of the…
The paper discusses recent proposals by Carroll and Chen, as well as Barbour, Koslowski, and Mercati to explain the (thermodynamic) arrow of time without a Past Hypothesis, i.e., the assumption of a special (low-entropy) initial state of…
We examine the logical structure of the emergence of classical stochasticity for a quantum system governed by a Pauli-type master equation. It is well-known that while such equations describe the evolution of probabilities, they do not…
We consider the claim that decoherence explains the emergence of classicality in quantum systems, and conclude that it does not. We show that, given a randomly chosen universe composed of a variety of subsystems, some of which are…
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…
The extrinsic quantum mechanical arrow of time is understood to be a consequence of the interaction between quantum systems and their environment. A choice of boundary conditions for the Schr\"odinger equation results in a different time…