Related papers: Past events never come back
It is often claimed that the fundamental laws of physics are deterministic and time-symmetric and that therefore our experience of the passage of time is an illusion. This paper will critically discuss these claims and show that they are…
Rebilas argues that time-reversal can occur even in an indeterministic system. This hypothesis is untestable, hence lying beyond physics.
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…
Dynamics, the study of change, is normally the subject of mechanics. Whether the chosen mechanics is ``fundamental'' and deterministic or ``phenomenological'' and stochastic, all changes are described relative to an external time. Here we…
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…
It is a remarkable fact that all processes occurring in the observable Universe are irreversible, whereas the equations through which the fundamental laws of physics are formulated are invariant under time reversal. The emergence of…
It is recalled that closed (isolated) systems are essentially reversible whilst open systems like the Earth, or living beings on it, are irreversible because they are not isolated. Earth and life irreversibility derives from the evolution…
Time's apparent passage has long been debated by philosophers, with no decisive argument for or against its objective existence. In this paper we show that introducing the issue of determinism gives the debate a new, empirical twist. We…
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…
A physical system is called quasi-isolated if it subject to small random uncontrollable perturbations. Such a system is, in general, stochastically unstable. Moreover, its phase-space volume at asymptotically large time expands. This can be…
We argue that (1) our perception of time through change and (2) the gap between reality and our observation of it are at the heart of both quantum mechanics and the dynamical mechanism of physical systems. We suggest that the origin of…
Our main purpose here is to study some qualitative aspects of space and time. These include the notion of space and time regarded as the containers of respectively bodies and events, the divisibility of space, and the unrepeatability of…
In a recent paper, I argued against backward in time effects used by several authors to explain delayed choice experiments. I gave an explanation showing that there is no physical influence propagating from the present to the past and…
Although the laws of classical physics are deterministic, thermodynamics gives rise to an arrow of time through irreversible processes. In quantum mechanics the unitary nature of the time evolution makes it intrinsically reversible, however…
The time evolution of the universe is usually mathematically described under a continuous time and thus time reversible. Here, the consequences of studying the evolution of a homogenous isotropic universe by time continuous reversible…
I compare the role of the information in the classical and quantum dynamics by examining the relation between information flows in measurements and the ability of observers to reverse evolutions. I show that in the Newtonian dynamics…
Time is one of the undisputed foundations of our life in the real world. Here it is argued that inside small isolated quantum systems, time does not pass as we are used to, and it is primarily in this sense that quantum objects enjoy only…
The fluctuation relations, which characterize irreversible processes in Nature, are among the most important results in non-equilibrium physics. In short, these relations say that it is exponentially unlikely for us to observe a…
We argue against current proposals concerning the non-existence of time. We point out that a large number of these proposals rely, at least implicitly, on the assumption of `closure' (or `partial closure') of the laws of Physics. I.e. the…
Current theoretical physics suggests the flow of time is an illusion: the entire universe just is, with no special meaning attached to the present time. This paper points out that this view, in essence represented by usual space-time…