Related papers: The Temporal Continuum
According to Aristotle "time is the number of change with respect to the before and after". That's certainly a vague concept, but at the same time it's both simple and satisfying from a philosophical point of view: things do not change…
It took two millennia after Euclid and until in the early 1880s, when we went beyond the ancient axiom of parallels, and inaugurated geometries of curved spaces. In less than one more century, General Relativity followed. At present,…
There are several ideal boundaries and completions in General Relativity sharing the topological property of being sequential, i.e., determined by the convergence of its sequences and, so, by some limit operator $L$. As emphasized in a…
Causality is a non-obvious concept that is often considered to be related to temporality. In this paper we present a number of past and present approaches to the definition of temporality and causality from philosophical, physical, and…
This paper discusses how the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics can provide for a natural account of the emergence of spacetime events from a quantum substratum. In this account, spacetime is not a substantive manifold that…
We study the topology associated with physical vector and scalar fields. A mathematical object, e.g., a ball, can be continuously deformed, without tearing or gluing, to make other topologically equivalent objects, e.g., a cube or a solid…
After mathematicians and physicists had learned that the structure of physical space was not necessarily Euclidean, it became conceivable that the global topological structure of space was non-trivial. In the context of the late 19th…
Since the early days of the theory of electromagnetism and of gravity the idea of space, then space-time, as a sort of physical continuum hovered the scientific community. Actually general relativity shows the strong similarity that exists…
Physics is formulated in terms of timeless classical mathematics. A formulation on the basis of intuitionist mathematics, built on time-evolving processes, would offer a perspective that is closer to our experience of physical reality.
Lower bounds on fluctuations of thermodynamic currents depend on the nature of time: discrete or continuous. To understand the physical reason, we compare current fluctuations in discrete-time Markov chains and continuous-time master…
Constructor theory seeks to express all fundamental scientific theories in terms of a dichotomy between possible and impossible physical transformations - those that can be caused to happen and those that cannot. This is a departure from…
Temporal networks are a class of time-varying networks, which change their topology according to a given time-ordered sequence of static networks (known as subsystems). This paper investigates the reachability and controllability of…
Dennis Dieks advanced the view that the idea of flow of time is implemented in the theory of relativity. The 'flow' results from the successive happening/becoming of events along the time-like worldline of a material system. This leads to a…
Many branches of theoretical and applied mathematics require a quantifiable notion of complexity. One such circumstance is a topological dynamical system - which involves a continuous self-map on a metric space. There are many notions of…
In directed graphs, a cycle can be seen as a structure that allows its vertices to loop back to themselves, or as a structure that allows pairs of vertices to reach each other through distinct paths. We extend these concepts to temporal…
The time irreversibility problem is the dichotomy of the reversible microscopic dynamics and the irreversible macroscopic physics. This problem was considered by Boltzmann, Poincar\'e, Bogolyubov and many other authors and though some…
From antiquity the conceptual perception of space changed painfully and at a relatively slow pace. It went through mythological descriptions, religious beliefs, metaphysical worldviews and cosmological models with a mechanistic structure,…
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…
We develop new aspects of the the of numerosity theory; more exactly, we emphasize its relation with the ordinal numbers, cardinal numbers, hyperreal numbers and surreal numbers. In particular, we combine the notion of numerosity with the…
We show that there exists a canonical topology, naturally connected with the causal site of J. D. Christensen and L. Crane, a pointless algebraic structure motivated by quantum gravity. Taking a causal site compatible with Minkowski space,…