Related papers: Time as Change
The problem of time is a deep paradox in our physical description of the world. According to Aristotle's relational theory, time is a measure of change and does not exist on its own. In contrast, quantum mechanics, just like Newtonian…
The paper puts forward a conceptual framework in which the phenomenon of time can be presented and discussed in a proper way. We argue that change is ontologically and epistemologically a more basic phenomenon than time. Time is an abstract…
Time plays a fundamental role in our ability to make sense of the physical laws in the world around us. The nature of time has puzzled people -- from the ancient Greeks to the present day -- resulting in a long running debate between…
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…
It is rarely emphasized in modern physics textbooks that our definitions of space and time have to reflect their complete interdependence. Our intuitive methods of always picturing one-dimensional space as a sum of unit-length rods and of…
"It is utterly beyond our power to measure the changes of things by time. Quite the contrary, time is an abstraction at which we arrive through the changes of things." Ernst Mach [1]. What change? Three answers to this are `any change'…
Have our fundamental theories got time right? Does size really matter? Or is physics all in the eyes of the beholder? In this essay, we question the origin of time and scale by reevaluating the nature of measurement. We then argue for a…
The conceptual definition and understanding of the nature of time, both qualitatively and quantitatively is of the utmost difficulty and importance, and plays a fundamental role in physics. Physical systems seem to evolve in paths of…
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 motion and on the strength of the…
Space and time are central concepts for understanding our World. They are important ingredients at the core of every scientific theory and subject of intense debate in philosophy. Albert Einstein's Special and General theories of Relativity…
Time is a parameter playing a central role in our most fundamental modeling 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 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…
A review of some basic facts of classical dynamics shows that time, or precisely duration, is redundant as a fundamental concept. Duration and the behaviour of clocks emerge from a timeless law that governs change.
Time is one of those issues about which many thinkers and scientists have tried to pronounce their finest thoughts, but the discourse about time has remained vague and often inconsistent. In this paper we put forward a conceptual framework…
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…
A geometric illustration of the Lorentz transformations is given. According to similarity between space and time and correspondence between a ruler and a clock, like the division number in a moving ruler, the tick number of a moving clock…
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…
In a way similar to classical mechanics where we have the concept of inertial time as expressed in the motions of bodies, in the (special) theory of relativity we can regard the inertial time as the only notion of time at play. The inertial…
The problem of the Nature of Time is twofold: whether or not time is a fundamental quantity of Nature, and how does clock time of metrology emerge in the experimental description of dynamics. This work strongly supports the fundamental…
Attempts to quantize general relativity encounter an odd problem. The Hamiltonian that normally generates time evolution vanishes in the case of general relativity as a result of diffeomorphism invariance. The theory seems to be saying that…