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Fundamentality and Time’s Arrow

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Christian Loew
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Abstract

The distribution of matter in our universe is strikingly time asymmetric. Most famously, the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that entropy tends to increase toward the future but not toward the past. But what explains this time-asymmetric distribution of matter? In this article, I explore the idea that time itself has a direction by drawing from recent work on grounding and metaphysical fundamentality. I will argue that positing such a direction of time, in addition to time-asymmetric boundary conditions (such as the so-called past hypothesis), enables a better explanation of the thermodynamic asymmetry than is available otherwise.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 85 , Issue 3 , July 2018 , pp. 483 - 500
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†.

I am grateful to Eddy Keming Chen, Florian Fischer, Roman Frigg, Richard Healey, Andreas Hüttemann, David Glick, Marc Lange, Tim Maudlin, Carlo Rovelli, and two anonymous referees for this journal for their helpful comments and suggestions. Special thanks to Siegfried Jaag for helpful discussion and for comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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