Related papers: The Physics of 'Now'
The 2nd law of thermodynamics is used to shed light on present-day puzzles in cosmology. The universal law, given as an equation of motion, describes diverse systems when consuming free energy via various mechanisms to attain stationary…
Complex systems are characterized by specific time-dependent interactions among their many constituents. As a consequence they often manifest rich, non-trivial and unexpected behavior. Examples arise both in the physical and non-physical…
Microphysical laws are time reversible, but macrophysics, chemistry and biology are not. This chapter explores how this asymmetry (a classic example of a broken symmetry) arises due to the cosmological context, where a non-local Direction…
Observational cosmology is in its "golden age" with a vast amount of recent data on the distribution of matter and light in the universe. This data can be used to probe theories of the very early universe. It is small amplitude cosmological…
Physical geometry studies mutual disposition of geometrical objects and points in space, or space-time, which is described by the distance function d, or by the world function \sigma =d^{2}/2. One suggests a new general method of the…
A logical model of spatiotemporal structures is pictured as a succession of processes in time. One usual way to formalize time structure is to assume the global existence of time points and then collect some of them to form time intervals…
Epistemic interpretations of quantum mechanics fail to address the puzzle posed by the occurrence of probabilities in a fundamental physical theory. This is a puzzle about the physical world, not a puzzle about our relation to the physical…
It is widely believed that special initial conditions must be imposed on any time-symmetric law if its solutions are to exhibit behavior of any kind that defines an `arrow of time'. We show that this is not so. The simplest non-trivial…
This paper introduces an innovative framework for understanding the world, termed the "Three Realms and Six Layers Model". Based on the concept of scale, the world is divided into three realms, each encompassing six layers, with a…
We discuss views about whether the universe can be rationally comprehended, starting with Plato, then Leibniz, and then the views of some distinguished scientists of the previous century. Based on this, we defend the thesis that…
The brain is very often viewed as a network, be it at small scale made of cells, mostly neurons, or at larger scale made of neuronal assemblies. Here we introduce a conjecture, in the spirit of a philosophical though experiment, which…
The mysterious phenomenon of consciousness, after having been the subject of philosophic attention for few millennia, has drawn much scientific curiosity in recent decades; and many brilliant minds of various areas of sciences are trying to…
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…
After more than a century of concerted effort, physics still lacks basic principles of spontaneous self-organization. To appreciate why, we first state the problem, outline historical approaches, and survey the present state of the physics…
The article "Physics of Consciousness" treats mind as an abstract Hilbert space with a set of orthogonal base vectors to describe information like particles, which are considered to be the elementary excitation of a quantum field. A…
We present current theories about the structure of space and time, where the building blocks are some fundamental entities (yes-no experiment, quantum processes, spin net-work, preparticles) that do not presuppose the existence of space and…
The model of the homogenous and isotropic universe with two spaces is considered. The background space is a coordinate system of reference and defines the behaviour of the universe. The other space characterizes the gravity of the matter of…
The essence of the method of physics is inseparably connected with the problem of interplay between local and global properties of the universe. In the present paper we discuss this interplay as it is present in three major departments of…
We describe a new class of models of quantum space-time based on energetic causal sets and show that under natural conditions space-time emerges from them. These are causal sets whose causal links are labelled by energy and momentum and…
We show here that what we call visual space of consciousness, the space of what we see, is a specific space different from the purely physical one and that its properties imply that it cannot be reduced to or deduced from physical laws.…