Is the notion of time really fundamental?

Details Is the notion of time really fundamental? Is the notion of time really fundamental?

2009-03-27

arxiv.org/abs/0903.4876v1

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

9 pages, 2 figures. Fourth prize essay for the competition of the Foundational Questions Institute (fqxi.org) on the Nature of

Scientific paper

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, 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 Goedel universe, a solution of Einstein's equations). We take this apparent discrepancy as a warning bell pointing to us 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 Nordstroem gravity (a diffeomorphisms invariant scalar gravity theory) can emerge from a timeless non-dynamical space.

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