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About the Confusion Between the Course of Time and the Arrow of Time

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Abstract

A conclusion drawn after a conference devoted (in 1995) to the “arrow of time” was the following: “Indeed, it seems not a very great exaggeration to say that the main problem with “the problem of the direction of time” is to figure out exactly what the problem is supposed to be !” What does that mean? That more than 130 years after the work of Ludwig Boltzmann on the interpretation of irreversibility of physical phenomena, and that one century after Einstein’s formulation of Special Relativity, we are still not sure what we mean when we talk of “time” or “arrow of time”. We shall try to show that one source of this difficulty is our tendency to confuse, at least verbally, time and becoming, i.e. the course of time and the arrow of time, two concepts that the formalisms of modern physics are careful to distinguish.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Direction des Sciences de la Matière, Centre d’ Etudes de Saclay, F-91191, Gif sur Yvette cedex, France

    Étienne Klein

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  1. Étienne Klein
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Correspondence to Étienne Klein.

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Time’s Arrows Today: 1995,Recent Physical and Philosophical Work on the Direction of Time, Edited by Steven F. Savitt, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 19.

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Klein, É. About the Confusion Between the Course of Time and the Arrow of Time. Found Sci 12, 203–221 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-006-9103-2

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