Related papers: Three's a Crowd: On Causes, Entropy, and Physical …

One of the most difficult problems in the foundations of physics is what gives rise to the arrow of time. Since the fundamental dynamical laws of physics are (essentially) symmetric in time, the explanation for time's arrow must come from…

Cosmic inflation claims to make the initial conditions of the standard big bang "generic". But Boltzmann taught us that the thermodynamic arrow of time arises from very non-generic ("low entropy") initial conditions. I discuss how to…

Deutsch and Aguirre have recently shown that the solutions of certain dynamical systems typically contain a point of minimum size that they identify as an entropy minimum and from which the size and entropy increase to infinity in both…

The second law of thermodynamics - the usual statement of the arrow of time - has been called the most fundamental law of physics. It is thus difficult to conceive that a single dynamical system could contain subsystems, in significant…

Quantum gravity, the initial low entropy state of the Universe, and the problem of time are interlocking puzzles. In this article, we address the origin of the arrow of time from a cosmological perspective motivated by a novel approach to…

Our observed Universe has a very strong arrow of time rooted in its low entropy starting point. This low entropy start can be related to various "tuning puzzles" about the early state of the Universe. Here we explore the relationship…

We analyze spacetimes with horizons and study the thermodynamic aspects of causal horizons, suggesting that the resemblance between gravitational and thermodynamic systems has a deeper quantum mechanical origin. We find that the observer…

If one introduces causality into quantum cosmology, then the prescription for the no-boundary universe should be revised. We show that the thermodymanic arrow of time associated with the perturbation modes should be reversed at the maximum…

Existing accounts of the cosmological arrow of time face a dilemma: generalist approaches that posit time-asymmetric laws lack independent motivation, while particularist approaches that invoke a Past Hypothesis face serious conceptual and…

Entropy and the second law of thermodynamcs were discovered through study of the behaviour of gases in confined spaces. The related techniques developed in the kinetic theory of gases have failed to resolve the apparent conflict between the…

In this paper I suggest a possible explanation for the asymmetry of time. In the case that I study, the dynamical laws and the boundary conditions are symmetric, but the behavior of time is not. The underlying mechanism is statistical and…

In the understanding of the fundamental interactions, the origin of an arrow of time is viewed as problematic. However, quantum field theory has an arrow of causality, which tells us which time direction is the past lightcone and which is…

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…

The nature of time has beguiled philosophers for nearly three millennia. There are myriad types of time including cosmological time, biological time, psychological time, physical time, historical time, and even theological time. My brief…

A modern assessment of the classical Boltzmann-Schuetz argument for large-scale entropy fluctuations as the origin of our observable cosmological domain is given. The emphasis is put on the central implication of this picture which flatly…

In this work, we use an observational approach and dynamical system analysis to study the cosmological model recently proposed by Saridakis (2020), which is based on the modification of the entropy-area black hole relation proposed by…

We believe the following three ingredients are enough to explain the mystery of the arrow of time: (1). equations of dynamics of gas molecules, (2). chaotic instabilities of the equations of dynamics, (3). unavoidable perturbations to the…

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…

It is often argued that superluminal velocities and nontrivial spacetime topologies, allowed by the theory of relativity, may lead to causal paradoxes. By emphasizing that the notion of causality assumes the existence of a time arrow (TA)…

We basis our initial analysis of the arrow of time on a relationship between the time evolution operator of quantum system and the time-independent density operator which describes the equilibrium state of a many-particle system at…