Related papers: Time and its arrow: an empiricist's perspective
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…
All the laws of physics are time-reversible. Time arrow emerges only when ensembles of classical particles are treated probabilistically, outside of physics laws, and the entropy and the second law of thermodynamics are introduced. In…
Time is absolute in standard quantum theory and dynamical in general relativity. The combination of both theories into a theory of quantum gravity leads therefore to a "problem of time". In my essay I shall investigate those consequences…
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…
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…
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…
The concept of time mostly plays a subordinate role in finance and economics. The assumption is that time flows continuously and that time series data should be analyzed at regular, equidistant intervals. Nonetheless, already nearly 60…
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…
From the Physics point of view, time is now best described through General Relativity, as part of space-time which is a dynamical object encoding gravity. Time possesses also some intrinsic irreversibility due to thermodynamics, quantum…
We demonstrate that the cosmological arrow of time is the cause for the arrow of time associated with the retarded radiation. This implies that the proposed mathematical model serves to confirm the hypothesis of Gold and Wheeler that the…
In this paper I argue that the fundamental aspect of our notion of time is that it defines an order relation, be it a total order relation between configurations of the world or just a partial order relation between events. This position is…
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…
Emergence of one-time-direction macroscopic evolution of a classical system of two mixed gases having different temperatures is derived and explained. The analysis performed at the microscopic level, where the time-symmetric laws of…
The connection between the micro and macro-arrow of time is discussed in the frame of the stochastic quantum hydrodynamic analogy (SQHA). The presence of fluctuations that in the case on non-linear interactions leads to the breaking of the…
The aim of this work is to review the concepts of time in quantum mechanics and general relativity to show their incompatibility. We show that the absolute character of Newtonian time is present in quantum mechanics and also partially in…
The notions of time in the theories of Newton and Einstein are reviewed so that certain of their assumptions are clarified. These assumptions will be seen as the causes of the incompatibility between the two different ways of understanding…
It was previously argued that the phenomenon of quantum gravitational decoherence described by the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is responsible for the emergence of the arrow of time. Here we show that the characteristic spatio-temporal scales 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…
The arrow of time and the accelerated expansion are two fundamental empirical facts of the Universe. We advance the viewpoint that the dark energy (positive cosmological constant) accelerating the expansion of the Universe also supports the…
The physical nature of numerous of the nonlinear phenomena in optics is explained by inequality of forward and reversed optical transitions, that corresponds to a principle of time invariance violation in electromagnetic interactions. The…