Related papers: Arrow of time and quantum physics

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…

In general relativity, cosmology and quantum field theory, spacetime is assumed to be an orientable manifold endowed with a Lorentz metric that makes it spatially and temporally orientable. The question as to whether the laws of physics…

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…

This study proposes a time-symmetric framework for quantum measurement that restores microscopic reversibility at the level of the dynamical description while remaining compatible with causality and thermodynamic consistency. Instead of…

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…

The existence of small amounts of advanced radiation, or a tilt in the arrow of time, makes the basic equations of physics mixed-type functional differential equations. The novel features of such equations point to a microphysical structure…

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…

The basic tenet of the present work is the assumption of the lack of external and fixed time in the Universe. This assumption is best embodied by general relativity, which replaces the fixed space-time structure with the gravitational…

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…

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…

Frauchiger and Renner recently cast doubt on the universal applicability of Quantum Mechanics [1]. In the following, it is pointed out that their conclusion of one of three common-sense conditions, demanded for Quantum Mechanics, being…

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…

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…

We demonstrate that in quantum many-body systems, local arrows of time can differ from the global time $t$ induced by Hamiltonian evolution. That is, within a quantum many-body system, the flow of time can be relative to each observer or by…

The existence of a non-thermodynamic arrow of time was demonstrated in a recent paper (Mod.Phys.Lett. A13, 1265 (1998)), in which a model of non-local Quantum Electrodynamics was formulated through the principle of gauge invariance. In this…

We introduce a self-adjoint operator that indicates the direction of time within the framework of standard quantum mechanics. That is, as a function of time its expectation value decreases monotonically for any initial state. This operator…

Fundamental interactions are either fully or nearly symmetric under time reversal. But macroscopic phenomena have a definite arrow of time. Though there is no convergence on the origin of time's preferential direction, many researchers…

The algebra of observables associated with a quantum field theory is invariant under the connected component of the Lorentz group and under parity reversal, but it is not invariant under time reversal. If we take general covariance…

In quantum gravity there is no notion of absolute time. Like all other quantities in the theory, the notion of time has to be introduced "relationally", by studying the behavior of some physical quantities in terms of others chosen as a…

Quantum non-local correlations and the acausal, spooky action at a distance suggest a discord between quantum theory and special relativity. We propose a resolution for this discord by first observing that there is a problem of time in…