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arXiv · 2107.07913

Time and its arrow: an empiricist's perspective

Stephen Boughn
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Abstract

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 essay concerns time in physics and I hope that the pragmatism of an experimental physicist might help provide a perspective that is often absent in treatises by contemporary philosophers and physicists. This is especially the case for the notion of the arrow of time. The paradox of the arrow of time arises because the laws of physics are invariably time reversal invariant, in which case we are led to ask what determines the direction of time. Investigations of time's arrow are usually framed in the context of a mathematical formalism where the parameter t represents time, and then proceed to logical analyses of how the direction of time emerges. The implicit assumption is that time is an ontological property of nature. On the other hand, for an empiricist like me, it is absolutely crucial to frame any such discussion in terms of direct human experience and not on a parameter in a mathematical model. This, in short, is the motivation for my essay and I conclude that the paradox of the arrow of time is an artificial problem that needs no resolution.

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Stephen Boughn. 2021-07-16. Time and its arrow: an empiricist's perspective. https://doi.org/10.13140/rg.2.2.13037.92641

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