Related papers: Demystifying Arrow of Time
Most existing proposals to explain the temporal asymmetries we see around us are sited within an approach to physics based on time evolution, and thus they typically put the asymmetry in at the beginning of time in the form of a special…
We find ourselves in an extended era of entropy production. Unlike most other observations, the arrow of time is usually regarded as a constraint on initial conditions. I argue, however, that it primarily constrains the vacuum structure of…
In contrast to claims by Barbour, Koslowski and Mercati, their "Janus point solution" does require a very improbable selection condition. While gravitational contraction in an expanding universe may then represent the master arrow of time,…
It is generally believed that a cosmological arrow of time must be associated with entropy production. Indeed, in his seminal work on cyclic cosmology, Tolman introduced a viscous fluid in order to make successive expansion/contraction…
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…
The problem of time, considered as a problem in the usual physical context, is reflected in relation with the paper by Kauffman and Smolin (gr-qc/9703026). It is shown that the problem is a misposed problem in the sense that it was raised…
The essay is devoted to the problem of time in the context of quantum cosmology, which acquires a philosophical level to date. At an example of the minisuperspace model, we show that this problem is illusive in the sense that it does not…
It is widely accepted that temporal asymmetry is largely a cosmological problem; the task of explaining temporal asymmetry reduces in the main to that of explaining an aspect of the condition of the early universe. However, cosmologists who…
Certain intriguing consequences of the discreteness of time on the time evolution of dynamical systems are discussed. In the discrete-time classical mechanics proposed here, there is an {\it arrow of time} that follows from the fact that…
This article aims at applying the approaches peculiar to analytic philosophy to the question about representation of the concept of time as a symbol which can reflect the bases of the modern natural sciences, social sciences and humanities.…
We formalize the concept of subtime -- a reversible mode of information interchange within entangled systems -- and show how classical time emerges as an asymptotic limit through decoherence. Building on the photon clock model, in which a…
Despite the fact that the fundamental physical laws are symmetric in time, most observed processes do not show this symmetry. Especially the phenomenon of decay seems to involve a kind of irreversibility that makes the definition of a…
This paper presents a unified formulation of the origin of the arrow of time in classical and quantum mechanics. We begin with a mechanical analysis of a one-dimensional three-particle system, which provides a concrete example in which…
Irreversibility is one of the most intriguing concepts in physics. While microscopic physical laws are perfectly reversible, macroscopic average behavior has a preferred direction of time. According to the second law of thermodynamics, this…
The existence of a thermodynamic arrow of time in the present universe implies that the initial state of the observable portion of our universe at (or near) the ``big bang'' must have been very ``special''. We argue that it is not plausible…
We discuss how the classical notions of time and causal structure may emerge together with quantum-mechanical probabilities from a universal quantum state. For this, the process of decoherence between semiclassical branches is important.…
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…
In this paper we lay out an argument that generically the psychological arrow of time should align with the thermodynamic arrow of time where that arrow is well-defined. This argument applies to any physical system that can act as a memory,…
The recent surge of interest in the origin of the temporal asymmetry of thermodynamical systems (including the accessible part of the universe itself) put forward two possible explanatory approaches to this age-old problem. Hereby we show…
There is an incompatibility between the symmetries of causal structure in relativity theory and the signaling abilities of probabilistic devices with inputs and outputs: while time-reversal in relativity will not introduce the ability to…