Again, the ‘now’ which seems to bound the past and the future – does it always remain one and the same or is it always other and other? It is hard to say.
Aristotle.
Abstract
The idea of a moving present or ‘now’ seems to form part of our most basic beliefs about reality. Such a present, however, is not reflected in any of our theories of the physical world. I show in this article that presentism, the doctrine that only what is present exists, is in conflict with modern relativistic cosmology and recent advances in neurosciences. I argue for a tenseless view of time, where what we call ‘the present’ is just an emergent secondary quality arising from the interaction of perceiving self-conscious individuals with their environment. I maintain that there is no flow of time, but just an ordered system of events.
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Notes
The curvature is represented by the Riemann tensor \(R_{abcd}\), formed with second derivatives of the metric (see, e.g. Hawking and Ellis 1973).
For a complete account of causality as a relation between events see Bunge (1979).
My italics.
Although I am considering the momentum, a conserved quantity, in this example, conservation laws do not seem to play a role in the phenomenon, since these kind of correlations are observed in the polarization of photons, which certainly in not a conserved quantity (see Maudlin 2002).
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Romero, G.E. Present Time. Found Sci 20, 135–145 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-014-9356-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-014-9356-0