Related papers: Time's Arrow and Simultaneity: A Critique of Rovel…

What is the physical origin of the arrow of time? It is a commonly held belief in the physics community that it relates to the increase of entropy as it appears in the statistical interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics. At the…

The only widely accepted explanation for the various arrows of time that everywhere and at all epochs point in the same direction is the `past hypothesis': the Universe had a very special low-entropy initial state. We present the first…

Entropy and the second law of thermodynamcs were discovered through study of the behaviour of gases in confined spaces. The related techniques developed in the kinetic theory of gases have failed to resolve the apparent conflict between the…

In [Sch05a], it is argued that Boltzmann's intuition, that the psychological arrow of time is necessarily aligned with the thermodynamic arrow, is correct. Schulman gives an explicit physical mechanism for this connection, based on the…

This essay offers a meta-level analysis in the sociology and history of physics in the context of the so-called "Arrow of Time Problem" or "Two Times Problem," which asserts that the empirically observed directionality of time is in…

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…

Quantum gravity, the initial low entropy state of the Universe, and the problem of time are interlocking puzzles. In this article, we address the origin of the arrow of time from a cosmological perspective motivated by a novel approach to…

In this paper we address the problem of the arrow of time from a cosmological point of view, rejecting the traditional entropic approach that defines the future direction of time as the direction of the entropy increase: from our…

J.M.R. Parrondo at al. in arXiv:0904.1573 continue numerous efforts to unify the concepts of the arrow of time and entropy production with the concept of time invariance in physics. This is a wrong way.

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…

I address the question whether the origin of the observed arrow of time can be derived from quantum cosmology. After a general discussion of entropy in cosmology and some numerical estimates, I give a brief introduction into quantum…

The second law of thermodynamics - the usual statement of the arrow of time - has been called the most fundamental law of physics. It is thus difficult to conceive that a single dynamical system could contain subsystems, in significant…

It is argued that the observed Thermodynamic Arrow of Time must arise from the boundary conditions of the universe. We analyse the consequences of the no boundary proposal, the only reasonably complete set of boundary conditions that has…

The laws of Physics are time-reversible, making no qualitative distinction between the past and the future -- yet we can only go towards the future. This apparent contradiction is known as the "arrow of time problem". Its current resolution…

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…

In several previous papers we have argued for a global and non-entropic approach to the problem of the arrow of time, according to which the ''arrow'' is only a metaphorical way of expressing the geometrical time-asymmetry of the universe.…

Living systems are fundamentally irreversible, breaking detailed balance and establishing an arrow of time. But how does the evident arrow of time for a whole system arise from the interactions among its multiple elements? We show that the…

In this paper I suggest a possible explanation for the asymmetry of time. In the case that I study, the dynamical laws and the boundary conditions are symmetric, but the behavior of time is not. The underlying mechanism is statistical and…

We investigate three aspects of the supposed problem of time: The disagreement between the treatments of time in general relativity and quantum theory, the problem of recovering time from within an isolated Universe and the prevalence of a…

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…