Is the Notion of Time Really Fundamental?

Symmetry

Florian Girelli¹  Stefano Liberati¹ 

[1] ¹School of Physics, The University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales 2006, Australia ²SISSA and INFN sezione di Trieste, Trieste 34014, Italy ³Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, Albert Einstein Institute, Am Mühlenberg 1, Golm 14467, Germany

关键词: emergent gravity;    scalar gravity;    signature change;   

DOI  :  10.3390/sym3030389

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

From the physics point of view, time is now best described through General Relativity as part of space-time, which is a dynamical object encoding gravity. Time possesses also some intrinsic irreversibility due to thermodynamics and quantum mechanical effects. This irreversibility can look puzzling since time-like loops (and hence time machines) can appear in General Relativity (for example in the Gödel universe, a solution of Einstein’s equations). We take this apparent discrepancy as a warning bell, pointing out that time as we understand it might not be fundamental and that whatever theory lying beyond General Relativity may not include time as we know it as a fundamental structure. We propose therefore, following the philosophy of analog models of gravity, that time and gravity might not be fundamental per se, but only emergent features. We illustrate our proposal using a toy-model where we show how the Lorentzian signature and Nordström gravity (a diffeomorphisms invariant scalar gravity theory) can emerge from a timeless non-dynamical space. This article received the fourth prize at the essay competition of the Foundational Questions Institute on the nature of time.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.