Related papers: Eternalism and Everettian Quantum Mechanics
The extravagances of quantum mechanics never fail to enrich daily the debate around natural philosophy. Entanglement, non-locality, collapse, many worlds, many minds, and subjectivism have challenged generations of thinkers. Its approach…
Contrary to our immediate and vivid sensation of past, present, and future as continually shifting non-relational modalities, time remains as tenseless and relational as space in all of the established theories of fundamental physics. Here…
A model of a stationary universe is proposed. In this framework, time is defined as a local and quantum-mechanical notion in the sense that it is defined for each local and quantum-mechanical system consisting of finite number of particles.…
Since the advent of quantum mechanics we have mainly been concerned with its predictions from the perspective of an external observer. This is in strong contrast to the theory of general relativity, where the physics is governed by the…
Is reality three-dimensional and becoming real (Presentism), or is reality four-dimensional and becoming illusory (Eternalism)? Both options raise difficulties. I argue that we do not need to be trapped by this dilemma. There is a third…
After a brief introduction to issues that plague the realization of a theory of quantum gravity, I suggest that the main one concerns a quantization of the principle of relative simultaneity. This leads me to a distinction between time and…
The canonical answer to the question posed is "Yes." -- tacitly assuming that quantum theory and the concept of spacetime are to be unified by `quantizing' a theory of gravitation. Yet, instead, one may ponder: Could quantum mechanics arise…
The new orthodoxy of quantum mechanics (QM) based on the decoherence approach requires many-worlds as an essential ingredient for logical consistency, and one may wonder what status to give to all these "other worlds". Here we advocate that…
Because of the non-locality of quantum entanglement, realist approaches to completing quantum mechanics have implications for our conception of space. Quantum gravity also is expected to predict phenomena in which the locality of classical…
Although time is one of our most intuitive physical concepts, its understanding at the fundamental level is still an open question in physics. For instance, time in quantum mechanics and general relativity are two distinct and incompatible…
The linear mathematics of quantum mechanics gives many versions of reality instead of the single version we perceive, with the perceived version chosen at random according to a probability law. Because of these peculiarities, the theory…
Quantum gravity--the marriage of quantum physics with general relativity--is bound to contain deep and important lessons for the nature of physical time. Some of these lessons shall be canvassed here, particularly as they arise from quantum…
In quantum mechanics time usually appears as classical parameter which means that it is treated as being essentially different from spatial coordinates that are represented by operators. On the other hand, relativity theory demands to treat…
An Everett (`Many Worlds') interpretation of quantum mechanics due to Saunders and Zurek is presented in detail. This is used to give a physical description of the process of a quantum computation. Objections to such an understanding are…
A new formulation of relativistic quantum mechanics is presented and applied to a free, massive, and spin zero elementary particle in the Minkowski spacetime. The reformulation requires that time and space, as well as the timelike and…
In general relativity, the picture of spacetime assigns an ideal clock to each worldline. Being ideal, gravitational effects due to these clocks are ignored and the flow of time according to one clock is not affected by the presence of…
We observe a Quantum Brownian Motion (QBM) Model Universe in conjunction with recently established Entanglement Relativity and Parallel Occurrence of Decoherence. The Parallel Occurrence of Decoherence establishes the simultaneous…
By studying the set of correlations that are theoretically possible between physical systems without allowing for signalling of information backwards in time, we here identify correlations that can only be achieved if the time ordering…
The problem of understanding quantum mechanics is in large measure the problem of finding appropriate ways of thinking about the spatial and temporal aspects of the physical world. The standard, substantival, set-theoretic conception of…
I discuss three connections between Dummett's writings about time and philosophical aspects of physics. The first connection (Section 2) arises from remarks of Dummett's about the different relations of observation to time and to space. The…