Philosophers
Mortimer Adler Rogers Albritton Alexander of Aphrodisias Samuel Alexander William Alston Anaximander G.E.M.Anscombe Anselm Louise Antony Thomas Aquinas Aristotle David Armstrong Harald Atmanspacher Robert Audi Augustine J.L.Austin A.J.Ayer Alexander Bain Mark Balaguer Jeffrey Barrett William Barrett William Belsham Henri Bergson George Berkeley Isaiah Berlin Richard J. Bernstein Bernard Berofsky Robert Bishop Max Black Susanne Bobzien Emil du Bois-Reymond Hilary Bok Laurence BonJour George Boole Émile Boutroux Daniel Boyd F.H.Bradley C.D.Broad Michael Burke Lawrence Cahoone C.A.Campbell Joseph Keim Campbell Rudolf Carnap Carneades Nancy Cartwright Gregg Caruso Ernst Cassirer David Chalmers Roderick Chisholm Chrysippus Cicero Tom Clark Randolph Clarke Samuel Clarke Anthony Collins Antonella Corradini Diodorus Cronus Jonathan Dancy Donald Davidson Mario De Caro Democritus Daniel Dennett Jacques Derrida René Descartes Richard Double Fred Dretske John Dupré John Earman Laura Waddell Ekstrom Epictetus Epicurus Austin Farrer Herbert Feigl Arthur Fine John Martin Fischer Frederic Fitch Owen Flanagan Luciano Floridi Philippa Foot Alfred Fouilleé Harry Frankfurt Richard L. Franklin Bas van Fraassen Michael Frede Gottlob Frege Peter Geach Edmund Gettier Carl Ginet Alvin Goldman Gorgias Nicholas St. John Green H.Paul Grice Ian Hacking Ishtiyaque Haji Stuart Hampshire W.F.R.Hardie Sam Harris William Hasker R.M.Hare Georg W.F. Hegel Martin Heidegger Heraclitus R.E.Hobart Thomas Hobbes David Hodgson Shadsworth Hodgson Baron d'Holbach Ted Honderich Pamela Huby David Hume Ferenc Huoranszki Frank Jackson William James Lord Kames Robert Kane Immanuel Kant Tomis Kapitan Walter Kaufmann Jaegwon Kim William King Hilary Kornblith Christine Korsgaard Saul Kripke Thomas Kuhn Andrea Lavazza Christoph Lehner Keith Lehrer Gottfried Leibniz Jules Lequyer Leucippus Michael Levin Joseph Levine George Henry Lewes C.I.Lewis David Lewis Peter Lipton C. Lloyd Morgan John Locke Michael Lockwood Arthur O. Lovejoy E. Jonathan Lowe John R. Lucas Lucretius Alasdair MacIntyre Ruth Barcan Marcus Tim Maudlin James Martineau Nicholas Maxwell Storrs McCall Hugh McCann Colin McGinn Michael McKenna Brian McLaughlin John McTaggart Paul E. Meehl Uwe Meixner Alfred Mele Trenton Merricks John Stuart Mill Dickinson Miller G.E.Moore Thomas Nagel Otto Neurath Friedrich Nietzsche John Norton P.H.Nowell-Smith Robert Nozick William of Ockham Timothy O'Connor Parmenides David F. Pears Charles Sanders Peirce Derk Pereboom Steven Pinker U.T.Place Plato Karl Popper Porphyry Huw Price H.A.Prichard Protagoras Hilary Putnam Willard van Orman Quine Frank Ramsey Ayn Rand Michael Rea Thomas Reid Charles Renouvier Nicholas Rescher C.W.Rietdijk Richard Rorty Josiah Royce Bertrand Russell Paul Russell Gilbert Ryle Jean-Paul Sartre Kenneth Sayre T.M.Scanlon Moritz Schlick John Duns Scotus Arthur Schopenhauer John Searle Wilfrid Sellars David Shiang Alan Sidelle Ted Sider Henry Sidgwick Walter Sinnott-Armstrong Peter Slezak J.J.C.Smart Saul Smilansky Michael Smith Baruch Spinoza L. Susan Stebbing Isabelle Stengers George F. Stout Galen Strawson Peter Strawson Eleonore Stump Francisco Suárez Richard Taylor Kevin Timpe Mark Twain Peter Unger Peter van Inwagen Manuel Vargas John Venn Kadri Vihvelin Voltaire G.H. von Wright David Foster Wallace R. Jay Wallace W.G.Ward Ted Warfield Roy Weatherford C.F. von Weizsäcker William Whewell Alfred North Whitehead David Widerker David Wiggins Bernard Williams Timothy Williamson Ludwig Wittgenstein Susan Wolf Scientists David Albert Michael Arbib Walter Baade Bernard Baars Jeffrey Bada Leslie Ballentine Marcello Barbieri Gregory Bateson Horace Barlow John S. Bell Mara Beller Charles Bennett Ludwig von Bertalanffy Susan Blackmore Margaret Boden David Bohm Niels Bohr Ludwig Boltzmann Emile Borel Max Born Satyendra Nath Bose Walther Bothe Jean Bricmont Hans Briegel Leon Brillouin Stephen Brush Henry Thomas Buckle S. H. Burbury Melvin Calvin Donald Campbell Sadi Carnot Anthony Cashmore Eric Chaisson Gregory Chaitin Jean-Pierre Changeux Rudolf Clausius Arthur Holly Compton John Conway Jerry Coyne John Cramer Francis Crick E. P. Culverwell Antonio Damasio Olivier Darrigol Charles Darwin Richard Dawkins Terrence Deacon Lüder Deecke Richard Dedekind Louis de Broglie Stanislas Dehaene Max Delbrück Abraham de Moivre Bernard d'Espagnat Paul Dirac Hans Driesch John Eccles Arthur Stanley Eddington Gerald Edelman Paul Ehrenfest Manfred Eigen Albert Einstein George F. R. Ellis Hugh Everett, III Franz Exner Richard Feynman R. A. Fisher David Foster Joseph Fourier Philipp Frank Steven Frautschi Edward Fredkin Benjamin Gal-Or Howard Gardner Lila Gatlin Michael Gazzaniga Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen GianCarlo Ghirardi J. Willard Gibbs James J. Gibson Nicolas Gisin Paul Glimcher Thomas Gold A. O. Gomes Brian Goodwin Joshua Greene Dirk ter Haar Jacques Hadamard Mark Hadley Patrick Haggard J. B. S. Haldane Stuart Hameroff Augustin Hamon Sam Harris Ralph Hartley Hyman Hartman Jeff Hawkins John-Dylan Haynes Donald Hebb Martin Heisenberg Werner Heisenberg John Herschel Basil Hiley Art Hobson Jesper Hoffmeyer Don Howard John H. Jackson William Stanley Jevons Roman Jakobson E. T. Jaynes Pascual Jordan Eric Kandel Ruth E. Kastner Stuart Kauffman Martin J. Klein William R. Klemm Christof Koch Simon Kochen Hans Kornhuber Stephen Kosslyn Daniel Koshland Ladislav Kovàč Leopold Kronecker Rolf Landauer Alfred Landé Pierre-Simon Laplace Karl Lashley David Layzer Joseph LeDoux Gerald Lettvin Gilbert Lewis Benjamin Libet David Lindley Seth Lloyd Werner Loewenstein Hendrik Lorentz Josef Loschmidt Alfred Lotka Ernst Mach Donald MacKay Henry Margenau Owen Maroney David Marr Humberto Maturana James Clerk Maxwell Ernst Mayr John McCarthy Warren McCulloch N. David Mermin George Miller Stanley Miller Ulrich Mohrhoff Jacques Monod Vernon Mountcastle Emmy Noether Donald Norman Alexander Oparin Abraham Pais Howard Pattee Wolfgang Pauli Massimo Pauri Wilder Penfield Roger Penrose Steven Pinker Colin Pittendrigh Walter Pitts Max Planck Susan Pockett Henri Poincaré Daniel Pollen Ilya Prigogine Hans Primas Zenon Pylyshyn Henry Quastler Adolphe Quételet Pasco Rakic Nicolas Rashevsky Lord Rayleigh Frederick Reif Jürgen Renn Giacomo Rizzolati A.A. Roback Emil Roduner Juan Roederer Jerome Rothstein David Ruelle David Rumelhart Robert Sapolsky Tilman Sauer Ferdinand de Saussure Jürgen Schmidhuber Erwin Schrödinger Aaron Schurger Sebastian Seung Thomas Sebeok Franco Selleri Claude Shannon Charles Sherrington Abner Shimony Herbert Simon Dean Keith Simonton Edmund Sinnott B. F. Skinner Lee Smolin Ray Solomonoff Roger Sperry John Stachel Henry Stapp Tom Stonier Antoine Suarez Leo Szilard Max Tegmark Teilhard de Chardin Libb Thims William Thomson (Kelvin) Richard Tolman Giulio Tononi Peter Tse Alan Turing C. S. Unnikrishnan Francisco Varela Vlatko Vedral Vladimir Vernadsky Mikhail Volkenstein Heinz von Foerster Richard von Mises John von Neumann Jakob von Uexküll C. H. Waddington John B. Watson Daniel Wegner Steven Weinberg Paul A. Weiss Herman Weyl John Wheeler Jeffrey Wicken Wilhelm Wien Norbert Wiener Eugene Wigner E. O. Wilson Günther Witzany Stephen Wolfram H. Dieter Zeh Semir Zeki Ernst Zermelo Wojciech Zurek Konrad Zuse Fritz Zwicky Presentations Biosemiotics Free Will Mental Causation James Symposium |
The Arrow of Time
The laws of nature, except the second law of thermodynamics, are symmetric in time. Reversing the time in the dynamical equations of motion simply describes everything going backwards. The second law is different. Entropy must never decrease in time, except statistically and briefly.
However, many natural processes are apparently irreversible. Irreversibility is intimately connected to the direction of time. Identifying the physical reasons for the observed irreversibility, the origin of irreversibility, would contribute greatly to understanding the apparent asymmetry of nature in time, despite nature's apparently perfect symmetry in space.
Arthur Stanley Eddington coined the term "Arrow of Time" in his 1927 Gifford Lectures and his 1928 book The Nature of the Physical World. He connected "Time's Arrow" to the one-way direction of increasing entropy required by the second law of thermodynamics. This is now known as the "thermodynamic arrow."
In his later work, Eddington identified a "cosmological arrow," the direction in which the universe is expanding, as shown by Edwin Hubble about the time Eddington first defined the thermodynamic arrow. There are now at least five other proposed arrows of time (discussed below). We can ask whether one arrow is a "master arrow" that all the others are following, or perhaps time itself is just a given property of nature that is otherwise irreducible to something more basic, as is space. Given the four-dimensional space-time picture of special relativity, and given that the laws of nature are symmetric in space, we may expect the laws to be invariant under a change in time direction. The laws do not depend on position or direction in space, they are invariant under translations and rotations, since space is assumed uniform and isotropic. But time is not just another spatial dimension. It enters into calculations of event separations as an imaginary term (multiplied by the square root of minus 1). Nevertheless, all the dynamical laws of motion are symmetric under time reversal. So the basic problem is - how can macroscopic irreversibility result from microscopic processes that are fundamentally reversible? Long before Eddington, scientists asked deep questions about the direction of time. Perhaps the first to explore the connection with physics was Ludwig Boltzmann, who with James Clerk Maxwell investigated the statistical motions of the atoms and molecules of gases. If the laws of nature are time symmetric, perhaps the "arrow of time" is to be found in the "initial" conditions, although this may be a circular concept, since "initial,"current," and "final" states are all defined with respect to time. Since the dynamical laws are time reversible, scientists as early as Isaac Newton understood that one could calculate all the motions of a system by assuming "final conditions" and working backwards in time. Many physicists assume the universe must have begun in a highly ordered (low entropy) state and it has been "running down" (entropy or disorder increasing) ever since. In the nineteenth century, Hermann von Helmholtz called this the "heat death" of the universe. This view has the unfortunate implication that all the information in the current universe was present at the beginning, which is friendly to some theological ideas like pre-destination, but distinctly unfriendly to ideas of human free will.
Free Will, Determinism, and the Direction of Time
Besides being time reversible, the classical (Newtonian) laws of physics are also deterministic. As made famous by Pierre-Simon Laplace, perfect knowledge of the positions and momenta of all the particles in the universe could tell an infinite intelligence those positions and momenta at every time in the past and the future.
The laws of physics were perfectly compatible with the idea of an omniscient God. That all the information about the current universe was thought present at the origin supports the concept of pre-destination!
Boltzmann assumed that the universe was infinitely old and that our current state is the consequence of a massive statistical fluctuation away from equilibrium and maximum entropy, a condition to which we must ultimately return.
Would time itself be reversed if we could make the entropy decrease? That is unlikely, since entropy decrease anywhere (creating negative entropy or negentropy, a term coined by Leon Brillouin) must be accompanied by an increase elsewhere, to satisfy the second law. Otherwise we could use the local reduction in the entropy to build a perpetual motion machine.
Put another way, if we could reverse the time, would entropy decrease? What can time reversal really mean? A thought experiment suggests not. Consider a closed perfume bottle inside a large empty container. Remove the bottle top and what would happen assuming that time is flowing backwards? It seems likely that the perfume molecules would leave the bottle whatever "time" is doing.
Cosmologists ask whether the universe might stop expanding and start contracting. Would time then go backwards? That seems unikely.
For ">Aristotle, time was a measure of motion and change. For practical purposes, many scientists have thought that time reversal is approximated by the reversal of all the velocities or momenta of material particles at an instant, starting from their current positions.
If we could reverse the motions of every material body (a practical impossibility, and perhaps a violation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle), would that make the entropy decrease? Ludwig Boltzmann agreed that it could, but only for a while. His intuition was that a system could not return to a highly ordered original state, such as every molecule going back into the perfume bottle.
J. Willard Gibbs thought otherwise. If the detailed path information in all the macroscopic motions is still available as microscopic information (if information is a conserved quantity), then reversal of all the motions should be exactly like a movie played backwards.
The fundamental question of information philosophy is cosmological and ultimately metaphysical. What is the process that creates information structures in the universe?
Given the second law of thermodynamics, which says that any system will over time approach a thermodynamic equilibrium of maximum disorder or entropy, in which all information is lost, and given the best current model for the origin of the universe, which says everything began in a state of equilibrium some 13.75 billion years ago, how can it be that living beings are creating and communicating new information every day? Why are we not still in that state of thermal equilibrium?It is perhaps easier for us to see the increasing complexity and order of information structures on the earth than it is to notice the increase in chaos that comes with increasing entropy, since the entropy is radiated away from the earth into the night sky, then away to the cosmic microwave background sink of deep space. David Layzer is a Harvard cosmologist who in the early 1970's made it clear that in an expanding universe the entropy would increase, as required by the second law of thermodynamics, but that the maximum possible entropy of the universe might increase faster than the actual entropy increase. This would leave room for an increase of order or information at the same time the entropy is increasing! Layzer pointed out that if the equilibration rate of the matter (the speed with which matter redistributes itself randomly among all the possible states) was slower than the rate of expansion, then the "negative entropy" or "order" (defined as the difference between the maximum possible entropy and the actual entropy) would also increase. Claude Shannon identified this negative entropy with information, though visible structural information in the universe may be less than this "potential" for information. Layzer called the direction of information increase the "historical arrow." In a 1975 article for Scientific American called The Arrow of Time, Layzer wrote: the complexity of the astronomical universe seems puzzling.In his 1989 book The Emperor's New Mind, Roger Penrose speculated on the connection between information, entropy, and the arrow of time. Recall that the primordial fireball was a thermal state — a hot gas in expanding thermal equilibrium. Recall, also, that the term 'thermal equilibrium' refers to a state of maximum entropy. (This was how we referred to the maximum entropy state of a gas in a box.) However, the second law demands that in its initial state, the entropy of our universe was at some sort of minimum, not a maximum! What has gone wrong? One 'standard' answer would run roughly as follows:Penrose's "standard" answer is a clear reference to the pioneering work of Harvard cosmologist David Layzer, especially his 1975 Scientific American article "The Arrow of Time." Layzer explained the the growth of order in the universe as the maximum possible entropy of the expanding universe increasing faster than the actual entropy, because the equilibration rates for matter and radiation are slower than the expansion rate.True, the fireball was effectively in thermal equilibrium at the beginning, but the universe at that time was very tiny. The fireball represented the state of maximum entropy that could be permitted for a universe of that tiny size, but the entropy so permitted would have been minute by comparison with that which is allowed for a universe of the size that we find it to be today. As the universe expanded, the permitted maximum entropy increased with the universe's size, but the actual entropy in the universe lagged well behind this permitted maximum. The second law arises because the actual entropy is always striving to catch up with this permitted maximum.
Other Arrows of Time
The Radiation Arrow
Whether they be electromagnetic waves or waves in water, we only observe wavelike disturbances that propagate outwards in space away from the disturbance. These waves are described by what is called the retarded potential. In his 1909 discussion of waves and particles, Albert Einstein described the possibility of incoming spherical waves:
According to our prevailing theory, an oscillating ion generates a spherical wave that propagates outwards. The inverse process does not exist as an elementary process. A converging spherical wave is mathematically possible, to be sure; but to approach its realization requires a vast number of emitting entities. The elementary process of emission is not invertible. In this, I believe, our oscillation theory does not hit the mark. Newton's emission theory of light seems to contain more truth with respect to this point than the oscillation theory since, first of all, the energy given to a light particle is not scattered over infinite space, but remains available for an elementary process of absorption.In 1945, John Wheeler and his student Richard Feynman attempted to symmetrize Maxwell's equations for electromagnetic fields with an "Absorber Theory of Radiation," that combined retarded (outgoing waves) and advanced potentials (incoming spherical waves) for radiation. They later described the theory as a mistake.
The Cosmological Arrow (expansion of the universe)
We can define a cosmological direction of time as the direction in which the universe is expanding. There are excellent reasons for seeing this as the most fundamental of all arrows, even the one driving some of the others. Without expansion, a static universe would settle into thermal equilibrium and there would be no changes. There would be no entropy increase to show Eddington's thermodynamic arrow. There would be no information increase, as seen in Layzer's historical arrow.
Without the cosmological arrow, all the other arrows could not be realized.
References
Davies, P.C.W 1977 The Physics of Time Asymmetry, University of California Press.
Gold, T. 1967 The Nature of Time, Cornell University Press.
Reichenbach, H, 1956 The Direction of Time, University of California Press.
Zeh, H.D. 2010 The Physical Basis of the Direction of Time 5th ed., Springer-Verlag Berlin.
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