Related papers: Three's a Crowd: On Causes, Entropy, and Physical …
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…
Recent intriguing discussion of heat death by Kutrovatz is critically examined. It is shown that there exists another way of answering the heat death puzzle, already present in the ancient philosophical tradition. This alternative route…
The puzzle of the thermodynamic arrow of time reduces to the question of how the universe could have had lower entropy in the past. I show that no special entropy lowering mechanism (or fluctuation) is necessary. As a consequence of…
In this paper we address the problem of the arrow of time from a cosmological point of view, rejecting the traditional entropic approach that defines the future direction of time as the direction of the entropy increase: from our…
A clear explanation is given on how the causal, psychological, and electrodynamic time arrows emerge from the thermodynamic time arrow.
It is argued that the observed Thermodynamic Arrow of Time must arise from the boundary conditions of the universe. We analyse the consequences of the no boundary proposal, the only reasonably complete set of boundary conditions that has…
What is the physical origin of the arrow of time? It is a commonly held belief in the physics community that it relates to the increase of entropy as it appears in the statistical interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics. At the…
The place of an anthropic argument in the discrimination between various cosmological models is to be reconsidered following the classic criticisms of Paul C. W. Davies and Frank J. Tipler. Different versions of the anthropic argument…
In several previous papers we have argued for a global and non-entropic approach to the problem of the arrow of time, according to which the ''arrow'' is only a metaphorical way of expressing the geometrical time-asymmetry of the universe.…
Most attempts to argue for the second law of thermodynamics fail because (1) they use the unviable frequency theory of probability and (2) they do not explain why the arrow of time seen in experiments is aligned with the thermodynamic arrow…
The paper discusses recent proposals by Carroll and Chen, as well as Barbour, Koslowski, and Mercati to explain the (thermodynamic) arrow of time without a Past Hypothesis, i.e., the assumption of a special (low-entropy) initial state of…
The relation between the thermodynamical and cosmological arrows of time is usually viewed in the context of the initial conditions of the Universe. It is a necessary but not sufficient condition for ensuring the thermodynamical arrow. We…
The thermodynamic arrow-of-time problem is thought to be resolved by the observation that our universe initially was---and still is---far from equilibrium. The psychological arrow-of-time problem is often attributed the same resolution, but…
Selection effects in cosmology are often invoked to "explain" why some of the fundamental constant of Nature, and in particular the cosmological constant, take on the value they do in our Universe. We briefly review this probabilistic…
For more than a century, physics has known of a puzzling conflict between the T-asymmetry of thermodynamic phenomena and the T-symmetry of the underlying microphysics on which these phenomena depend. This paper provides a guide to the…
Emergence of one-time-direction macroscopic evolution of a classical system of two mixed gases having different temperatures is derived and explained. The analysis performed at the microscopic level, where the time-symmetric laws of…
The second law of thermodynamics is asymmetric with respect to time as it says that the entropy of the universe must have been lower in the past and will be higher in the future. How this time-asymmetric law arises from the time-symmetric…
Ancient origins of a modern anthropic argument against cosmologies involving infinite series of past events are considered. It is shown that this argument - which in modern times has been put forward by distinguished cosmologists like Paul…
The universal validity of the second law of thermodynamics is widely attributed to a finely tuned initial condition of the universe. This creates a problem: why is the universe atypical? We suggest that the problem is an artefact created by…
Regardless of studies and debates over a century, the statistical origin of the second law of thermodynamics still remains illusive. One essential obstacle is the lack of a proper theoretical formalism for non-equilibrium entropy. Here I…