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Do Time-Asymmetric Laws call for Time-Asymmetric Spacetime Structure? Cover

Do Time-Asymmetric Laws call for Time-Asymmetric Spacetime Structure?

By: Daniel Peterson  
Open Access
|Dec 2018

Abstract

Many philosophers of physics take the failure of the laws of physics to be invariant under the time reversal transformation to give us good reason to think that spacetime is temporally anisotropic, yet the details of this inference are rarely made explicit. I discuss two reasonable ways of filling in the details of this inference, the first of which utilizes a symmetry principle proposed by John Earman and the second of which utilizes Harvey Brown’s account of spacetime. I contend that neither of the resulting arguments is sound.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/disp-2017-0028 | Journal eISSN: 2182-2875 | Journal ISSN: 0873-626X
Language: English, Portuguese
Page range: 75 - 98
Submitted on: Jul 30, 2016
Accepted on: Feb 7, 2017
Published on: Dec 31, 2018
Published by: University of Lisbon
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
Publication frequency: 4 issues per year

© 2018 Daniel Peterson, published by University of Lisbon
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.