TIME-Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Fisica-Evento

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Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy TimeInternet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Print
Time
Time is what we use a clock to measure. Despite 2,500 years of investigation
into the nature of time, many issues about it are unresolved. Here is a list in
no particular order of the most important issues that are discussed in this
article: What time actually is; Whether time exists when nothing is
changing; What kinds of time travel are possible; How time is related to
mind; Why time has an arrow; Whether the future and past are as real as
the present; How to correctly analyze the metaphor of times flow;
Whether contingent sentences about the future have truth values
now; Whether future time will be infinite; Whether there was time before our Big Bang; Whether tensed
or tenseless concepts are semantically basic; What the proper formalism or logic is for capturing the special
role that time plays in reasoning; What neural mechanisms account for our experience of time; Which
aspects of time are conventional; and Whether there is a timeless substratum from which time emerges.
Consider this one issue upon which philosophers are deeply divided: What sort of ontological differences
are there among the present, the past and the future? There are three competing theories. Presentists argue
that necessarily only present objects and present experiences are real, and we conscious beings recognize
this in the special vividness of our present experience compared to our memories of past experiences and
our expectations of future experiences. So, the dinosaurs have slipped out of reality. However, according to
the growing-past theory, the past and present are both real, but the future is not real because the future is
indeterminate or merely potential. Dinosaurs are real, but our death is not. The third theory is that there
are no objective ontological differences among present, past, and future because the differences are merely
subjective. This third theory is called eternalism.
Table of Contents
1. What Should a Philosophical Theory of Time Do?
2. How Is Time Related to Mind?
3. What Is Time?
a. The Variety of Answers
b. Time vs. Time
c. Linear and Circular Time
d. The Extent of Time
e. Does Time Emerge from Something More Basic?
f. Time and Conventionality
4. What Does Science Require of Time?
5. What Kinds of Time Travel are Possible?
6. Does Time Require Change? (Relational vs. Substantival Theories)
7. Does Time Flow?
a. McTaggart's A-Series and B-Series
b. Subjective Flow and Objective Flow
8. What are the Differences among the Past, Present, and Future?
a. Presentism, the Growing-Past, Eternalism, and the Block-Universe
b. Is the Present, the Now, Objectively Real?
c. Persist, Endure, Perdure, and Four-Dimensionalism
d. Truth Values and Free Will
9. Are There Essentially-Tensed Facts?
10. What Gives Time Its Direction or Arrow?
http://www.iep.utm.edu/time/print
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a. Time without an Arrow

b. What Needs To Be Explained
c. Explanations or Theories of the Arrow
d. Multiple Arrows
e. Reversing the Arrow
11. What is Temporal Logic?
12. Supplements
a. Frequently Asked Questions
b. What Science Requires of Time
c. Special Relativity: Proper Times, Coordinate Systems, and Lorentz Transformations (by Andrew Holster)
13. References and Further Reading
1. What Should a Philosophical Theory of Time Do?

Philosophers of time tend to divide into two broad camps on some of the key philosophical issues, although
many philosophers do not fit into these pigeonholes. Members of the A-camp say that McTaggart's A-series is
the fundamental way to view time; events are always changing, the now is objectively real and so is time's
flow; ontologically we should accept either presentism or the growing-past theory; predictions are not true
or false at the time they are uttered; tenses are semantically basic; and the ontologically fundamental
entities are 3-dimensional objects. Members of the B-camp say that McTaggart's B-series is the
fundamental way to view time; events are never changing; the now is not objectively real and neither is
time's flow; ontologically we should accept eternalism and the block-universe theory; predictions are true
or false at the time they are uttered; tenses are not semantically basic; and the fundamental entities are 4dimensional events or processes. This article provides an introduction to this controversy between the
camps.
However, there are many other issues about time whose solutions do not fit into one or the other of the
above two camps. (i) Does time exist only for beings who have minds? (ii) Can time exist if no event is
happening anywhere? (iii) What sorts of time travel are possible? (iv) Why does time have an arrow? (v) Is
the concept of time inconsistent?
A full theory of time should address this constellation of philosophical issues about time. Narrower theories
of time will focus on resolving one or more members of this constellation, but the long-range goal is to knit
together these theories into a full, systematic, and detailed theory of time. Philosophers also ask whether to
adopt a realist or anti-realist interpretation of a theory of time, but this article does not explore this subtle
metaphysical question.
2. How Is Time Related to Mind?

Physical time is public time, the time that clocks are designed to measure. Biological time, by contrast, is
indicated by an organism's circadian rhythm or body clock, which is normally regulated by the pattern of
sunlight and darkness. Psychological time is different from both physical time and biological time.
Psychological time is private time. It is also called phenomenological time, and it is perhaps best understood
as awareness of physical time. Psychological time passes relatively swiftly for us while we are enjoying an
activity, but it slows dramatically if we are waiting anxiously for the pot of water to boil on the stove. The
slowness is probably due to focusing our attention on short intervals of physical time. Meanwhile, the clock
by the stove is measuring physical time and is not affected by any persons awareness or by any organism's
biological time.
When a physicist defines speed to be the rate of change of position with respect to time, the term time
refers to physical time, not psychological time or biological time. Physical time is more basic or fundamental
than psychological time for helping us understand our shared experiences in the world, and so it is more
useful for doing physical science, but psychological time is vitally important for understanding many
mental experiences.
Psychological time is faster for older people than for children, as you notice when your grandmother says,
"Oh, it's my birthday again." That is, an older person's psychological time is faster relative to physical time.
Psychological time is slower or faster depending upon where we are in the spectrum of conscious
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experience: awake normally, involved in a daydream, sleeping normally, drugged with anesthetics, or in a
coma. Some philosophers claim that psychological time is completely transcended in the mental state
called nirvana because psychological time slows to a complete stop. However, there is general agreement
among philosophers that, when we are awake normally, we experience time as being continuous; we do not
experience it as stopping and starting.
A major philosophical problem is to explain the origin and character of our temporal experiences.
Philosophers continue to investigate, but so far do not agree on, how our experience of temporal
phenomena produces our consciousness of our experiencing temporal phenomena. With the notable
exception of Husserl, most philosophers say our ability to imagine other times is a necessary ingredient in
our having any consciousness at all. Many philosophers also say people in a coma have a low level of
consciousness, yet when a person awakes from a coma they can imagine other times but have no good
sense about how long they've been in the coma.
We make use of our ability to imagine other times when we experience a difference between our present
perceptions and our present memories of past perceptions. Somehow the difference between the two gets
interpreted by us as evidence that the world we are experiencing is changing through time, with some
events succeeding other events. Locke said our train of ideas produces our idea that events succeed each
other in time, but he offered no details on how this train does the producing.
Philosophers also want to know which aspects of time we have direct experience of, and which we have only
indirect experience of. Is our direct experience only of the momentary present, as Aristotle, Thomas Reid,
and Alexius Meinong believed, or do we have direct experience of what William James called a "specious
present," a short stretch of physical time? James said, "The tiniest feeling that we can possibly have comes
with an earlier and a later part and with a sense of their continuous precession." Anything with an earlier
part and a later part cannot possibly be instantaneous in physical time. If a sequence of events occurs over a
short enough duration of physical time, then we experience all the events as being simultaneous in
psychological time. Among those accepting the notion of a specious present, there is continuing
controversy about whether the individual specious presents can overlap each other and about how the
individual specious presents combine to form our stream of consciousness.
The brain takes an active role in building a mental scenario of what is taking place beyond the brain. For
example, try tapping your nose with one hand and your knee with your other hand at the same time. Even
though it takes longer for the signal from your knee to reach your brain than the signal from your nose to
reach your brain, you will have the experience of the two tappings being simultaneousthanks to the
brain's manipulation of the data. Neuroscientists suggest that your brain waits about 80 milliseconds for all
the relevant input to come in before you experience a now. Craig Callender surveyed the psycho-physics
literature on human experience of the present, and concluded that, if the duration in physical time between
two experienced events is less than about a quarter of a second (250 milliseconds), then humans will say
both events happened simultaneously, and this duration is slightly different for different people but is
stable within the experience of any single person. Also, "our impression of subjective present-ness...can be
manipulated in a variety of ways" such as by what other sights or sounds are present at nearby times. See
(Callender 2003-4, p. 124) and (Callender 2008).
Within the field of cognitive science, researchers want to know what are the neural mechanisms that
account for our experience of timefor our awareness of change, for our sense of times flow, for our ability
to place events into the proper time order (temporal succession), and for our ability to notice, and often
accurately estimate, durations (persistence). The most surprising experimental result about our experience
of time is Benjamin Libets claim in the 1970s that his experiments show that the brain events involved in
initiating our free choice occur about a third of a second before we are aware of our choice. Before Libets
work, it was universally agreed that a person is aware of deciding to act freely, then later the body initiates
the action. Libet's work has been used to challenge this universal claim about decisions. However, Libet's
own experiments have been difficult to repeat because he drilled through the skull and inserted electrodes
to shock the underlying brain tissue. See (Damasio 2002) for more discussion of Libet's experiments.
Neuroscientists and psychologists have investigated whether they can speed up our minds relative to a
duration of physical time. If so, we might become mentally more productive, and get more high quality
decision making done per fixed amount of physical time, and learn more per minute. Several avenues have
been explored: using cocaine, amphetamines and other drugs; undergoing extreme experiences such as
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jumping backwards off a tall bridge with bungee cords attached to one's ankles; and trying different forms
of meditation. So far, none of these avenues have led to success productivity-wise.
Any organisms sense of time is subjective, but is the time that is sensed also subjective, a mind-dependent
phenomenon? Throughout history, philosophers of time have disagreed on the answer. Without minds in
the world, nothing in the world would be surprising or beautiful or interesting. Can we add that nothing
would be in time? The majority answer is "no." The ability of the concept of time to help us make sense of
our phenomenological evidence involving change, persistence, and succession of events is a sign that time
may be objectively real. Consider succession, that is, order of events in time. We all agree that our
memories of events occur after the events occur. If judgments of time were subjective in the way judgments
of being interesting vs. not-interesting are subjective, then it would be too miraculous that everyone can so
easily agree on the ordering of events in time. For example, first Einstein was born, then he went to school,
then he died. Everybody agrees that it happened in this order: birth, school, death. No other order. The
agreement on time order for so many events, both psychological events and physical events, is part of the
reason that most philosophers and scientists believe physical time is an objective and not dependent on
being consciously experienced.
Another large part of the reason to believe time is objective is that our universe has so many different
processes that bear consistent time relations, or frequency of occurrence relations, to each other. For
example, the frequency of rotation of the Earth around its axis is a constant multiple of the frequency of
oscillation of a fixed-length pendulum, which in turn is a constant multiple of the half life of a specific
radioactive uranium isotope, which in turn is a multiple of the frequency of a vibrating violin string; the
relationship of these oscillators does not change as time goes by (at least not much and not for a long time,
and when there is deviation we know how to predict it and compensate for it). The existence of these sorts
of relationships makes our system of physical laws much simpler than it otherwise would be, and it makes
us more confident that there is something objective we are referring to with the time-variable in those laws.
The stability of these relationships over a long time makes it easy to create clocks. Time can be measured
easily because we have access to long-term simple harmonic oscillators that have a regular period or
regular ticking. This regularity shows up in completely different stable systems: rotations of the Earth, a
swinging ball hanging from a string (a pendulum), a bouncing ball hanging from a coiled spring, revolutions
of the Earth around the Sun, oscillating electric circuits, and vibrations of a quartz crystal. Many of these
systems make good clocks. The existence of these possibilities for clocks strongly suggests that time is
objective, and is not merely an aspect of consciousness.
The issue about objectivity vs. subjectivity is related to another issue: realism vs. idealism. Is time real or
instead just a useful instrument or just a useful convention or perhaps an arbitrary convention? This issue
will appear several times throughout this article, including in the later section on conventionality.
raised this issue of the mind-dependence of time when he said, Whether, if soul (mind) did not
exist, time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count
there cannot be anything that can be counted (Physics, chapter 14). He does not answer his own
question because, he says rather profoundly, it depends on whether time is the conscious numbering of
movement or instead is just the capability of movements being numbered were consciousness to exist.
Aristotle
St. Augustine,
adopting a subjective view of time, said time is nothing in reality but exists only in the minds
apprehension of that reality. The 13th century philosophers Henry of Ghent and Giles of Rome said time
exists in reality as a mind-independent continuum, but is distinguished into earlier and later parts only by
the mind. In the 13th century, Duns Scotus clearly recognized both physical and psychological time.
At the end of the 18th century, Kant suggested a subtle relationship between time and mindthat our mind
actually structures our perceptions so that we can know a priori that time is like a mathematical line. Time
is, on this theory, a form of conscious experience, and our sense of time is a necessary condition of our
having experiences such as sensations. In the 19th century, Ernst Mach claimed instead that our sense of
time is a simple sensation, not an a priori form of sensation. This controversy took another turn when other
philosophers argued that both Kant and Mach were incorrect because our sense of time is, instead, an
intellectual construction (see Whitrow 1980, p. 64).
In the 20th century, the philosopher of science Bas van Fraassen described time, including physical time,
by saying, There would be no time were there no beings capable of reason just as there would be no food
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were there no organisms, and no teacups if there were no tea drinkers.

The controversy in metaphysics between idealism and realism is that, for the idealist, nothing exists
independently of the mind. If this controversy is settled in favor of idealism, then physical time, too, would
have that subjective feature.
It has been suggested by some philosophers that Einsteins theory of relativity, when confirmed, showed us
that physical time depends on the observer, and thus that physical time is subjective, or dependent on the
mind. This error is probably caused by Einsteins use of the term observer. Einsteins theory implies that
the duration of an event depends on the observers frame of reference or coordinate system, but what
Einstein means by observers frame of reference is merely a perspective or coordinate framework from
which measurements could be made. The observer need not have a mind. So, Einstein is not making a
point about mind-dependence.
To mention one last issue about the relationship between mind and time, if all organisms were to die, there
would be events after those deaths. The stars would continue to shine, for example, but would any of these
events be in the future? This is a controversial question because advocates of McTaggarts A-theory will
answer yes, whereas advocates of McTaggarts B-theory will answer no and say whose future?
For more on the consciousness of time and related issues, see the article Phenomenology and TimeConsciousness . For more on whether the present, as opposed to time itself, is subjective, see the section
called "Is the Present, the Now, Objectively Real?"
3. What Is Time?
seems to be objective, whereas psychological time is subjective. Many philosophers of science
argue that physical time is more fundamental even though psychological time is discovered first by each of
us during our childhood, and even though psychological time was discovered first as we human beings
evolved from our animal ancestors. The remainder of this article focuses more on physical time than
psychological time.
Physical time
Time is what we use a clock or calendar to measure. We can say time is composed of all the instants or all the
times, but that word "times" is ambiguous and also means measurements of time. Think of our placing a
coordinate system on our spacetime (this cannot be done successfully in all spacetimes) as our giving
names to spacetime points. The measurements we make of time are numbers variously called times, dates,
clock readings, and temporal coordinates; and these numbers are relative to time zones and reference
frames and conventional agreements about how to define the second, the conventional unit for measuring
time. It is because of what time is that we can succeed in assigning time numbers in this manner. Another
feature of time is that we can place all events in a single reference frame into a linear sequence one after the
other according to their times of occurrence; for any two instants, they are either simultaneous or else one
happens before the other but not vice versa. A third feature is that we can succeed in coherently specifying
with real numbers how long an event lasts; this is the duration between the event's beginning instant and
its ending instant. These are three key features of time, but they do not quite tell us what time itself is.
In discussion about time, the terminology is often ambiguous. We have just mentioned that care is often
not taken in distinguishing time from the measure of time. Here are some additional comments about
terminology: A moment is said to be a short time, a short event, and to have a short duration or short
interval ("length" of time). Comparing a moment to an instant, a moment is brief, but an instant is even
briefer. An instant is usually thought to have either a zero duration or else a duration so short as not to be
detectable.
a. The Variety of Answers

We cannot trip over a moment of time nor enclose it in a box, so what exactly are moments? Are they
created by humans analogous to how, according to some constructivist philosophers, mathematical objects
are created by humans, and once created then they have well-determined properties some of which might
be difficult for humans to discover? Or is time more like a Platonic idea? Or is time an emergent feature of
changes in analogy to how a sound wave is an emergent features the molecules of a vibrating tuning fork,
with no single molecule making a sound? When we know what time is, then we can answer all these
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questions.
One answer to our question, What is time? is that time is whatever the time variable t is denoting in the
best-confirmed and most fundamental theories of current science. Time is given an implicit definition this
way. Nearly all philosophers would agree that we do learn much about physical time by looking at the
behavior of the time variable in these theories; but they complain that the full nature of physical time can
be revealed only with a philosophical theory of time that addresses the many philosophical issues that
scientists do not concern themselves with.
Physicists often say time is a sequence of moments in a linear order. Presumably a moment is a
durationless instant. Michael Dummetts constructive model of time implies instead that time is a composition
of intervals rather than of durationless instants. The model is constructive in the sense that it implies there
do not exist any times which are not detectable in principle by a physical process.
One answer to the question "What is time?" is that it is a general feature of the actual changes in the
universe so that if all changes are reversed then time itself reverses. This answer is called "relationism" and
"relationalism." A competing answer is that time is more like a substance in that it exists independently of
relationships among changes or events. These two competing answers to our question are explored in a later
section.
A popular post-Einstein answer to "What is time?" is that time is a single dimension of spacetime.
Because time is intimately related to change, the answer to our question is likely to depend on our answer
to the question, "What is change?" The most popular type of answer here is that change is an alteration in
the properties of some enduring thing, for example, the alteration from green to brown of an enduring leaf. A
different type of answer is that change is basically a sequence of states, such as a sequence containing a
state in which the leaf is green and a state in which the leaf is brown. This issue won't be pursued here, and
the former answer will be presumed at several places later in the article.
Before the creation of Einstein's special theory of relativity, it might have been said that time must provide
these four things: (1) For any event, it specifies when it occurs. (2) For any event, it specifies its duration
how long it lasts. (3) For any event, it fixes what other events are simultaneous with it. (4) For any pair of
events that are not simultaneous, it specifies which happens first. With the creation of the special theory of
relativity in 1905, it was realized that these questions can get different answers in different frames of
reference.
Bothered by the contradictions they claimed to find in our concept of time, Zeno, Plato, Spinoza, Hegel, and
McTaggart answer the question, What is time? by replying that it is nothing because it does not exist
(LePoidevin and MacBeath 1993, p. 23). In a similar vein, the early 20th century English philosopher F. H.
Bradley argued, Time, like space, has most evidently proved not to be real, but a contradictory
appearance.The problem of change defies solution. In the mid-twentieth century, Gdel argued for the
unreality of time because Einstein's equations allow for physically possible worlds in which events precede
themselves. In the twenty-first century some physicists such as Julian Barbour say that in order to
reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics either time does not exist or else it is not fundamental
in nature; see (Callender 2010) for a discussion of this. However, most philosophers agree that time does
exist. They just can not agree on what it is.
Lets briefly explore other answers that have been given throughout history to our question, What is
time? Aristotle claimed that time is the measure of change (Physics, chapter 12). He never said space is a
measure of anything. Aristotle emphasized that time is not change [itself] because a change may be
faster or slower, but not time (Physics, chapter 10). For example, a specific change such as the descent of
a leaf can be faster or slower, but time itself can not be faster or slower. In developing his views about time,
Aristotle advocated what is now referred to as the relational theory when he said, there is no time apart from
change. (Physics, chapter 11). In addition, Aristotle said time is not discrete or atomistic but is
continuous. In respect of size there is no minimum; for every line is divided ad infinitum. Hence it is so
with time (Physics, chapter 11).
Ren Descartes had a very different answer to What is time? He argued that a material body has the
property of spatial extension but no inherent capacity for temporal endurance, and that God by his
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continual action sustains (or re-creates) the body at each successive instant. Time is a kind of sustenance or
re-creation ("Third Meditation" in Meditations on First Philosophy).
In the 17th century, the English physicist Isaac Barrow rejected Aristotles linkage between time and
change. Barrow said time is something which exists independently of motion or change and which existed
even before God created the matter in the universe. Barrows student, Isaac Newton, agreed with this
substantival theory of time. Newton argued very specifically that time and space are an infinitely large
container for all events, and that the container exists with or without the events. He added that space and
time are not material substances, but are like substances in not being dependent on anything except God.
Gottfried Leibniz objected. He argued that time is not an entity existing independently of actual events. He
insisted that Newton had underemphasized the fact that time necessarily involves an ordering of any pair of
non-simultaneous events. This is why time needs events, so to speak. Leibniz added that this overall
order is time. He accepted a relational theory of time and rejected a substantival theory.
In the 18th century, Immanuel Kant said time and space are forms that the mind projects upon the external
things-in-themselves. He spoke of our mind structuring our perceptions so that space always has a
Euclidean geometry, and time has the structure of the mathematical line. Kants idea that time is a form of
apprehending phenomena is probably best taken as suggesting that we have no direct perception of time
but only the ability to experience things and events in time. Some historians distinguish perceptual space
from physical space and say that Kant was right about perceptual space. It is difficult, though, to get a clear
concept of perceptual space. If physical space and perceptual space are the same thing, then Kant is
claiming we know a priori that physical space is Euclidean. With the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries
in the 1820s, and with increased doubt about the reliability of Kants method of transcendental proof, the
view that truths about space and time are a priori truths began to lose favor.
The above discussion does not exhaust all the claims about what time is. And there is no sharp line
separating a definition of time, a theory of time, and an explanation of time.
b. Time vs. Time

Whatever time is, it is not time. Time is the most common noun in all documents on the Internet's web
pages; time is not. Nevertheless, it might help us understand time if we improved our understanding of the
sense of the word time. Should the proper answer to the question What is time? produce a definition of
the word as a means of capturing its sense? No. At least not if the definition must be some analysis that
provides a simple paraphrase in all its occurrences. There are just too many varied occurrences of the word:
time out, behind the times, in the nick of time, and so forth.
But how about narrowing the goal to a definition of the word time in its main sense, the sense that most
interests philosophers and physicists? That is, explore the usage of the word time in its principal sense as
a means of learning what time is. Well, this project would require some consideration of the grammar of the
word time. Most philosophers today would agree with A. N. Prior who remarked that, there are genuine
metaphysical problems, but I think you have to talk about grammar at least a little bit in order to solve most
of them. However, do we learn enough about what time is when we learn about the grammatical intricacies
of the word? John Austin made this point in A Plea for Excuses, when he said, if we are using the analytic
method, the method of analysis of language, in order to sharpen our perception of the phenomena, then it
is plainly preferable to investigate a field where ordinary language is rich and subtle, as it is in the pressingly
practical matter of Excuses, but certainly is not in the matter, say, of Time. Ordinary-language
philosophers have studied time talk, what Wittgenstein called the language game of discourse about time.
Wittgensteins expectation is that by drawing attention to ordinary ways of speaking we will be able to
dissolve rather than answer our philosophical questions. But most philosophers of time are unsatisfied
with this approach; they want the questions answered, not dissolved, although they are happy to have help
from the ordinary language philosopher in clearing up misconceptions that may be produced by the way we
use the word in our ordinary, non-technical discourse.
c. Linear and Circular Time

Is time more like a straight line or instead more like a circle? If your personal time were circular, then
eventually you would be reborn. With circular time, the future is also in the past, and every event occurs
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before itself. If your time is like this, then the question arises as to whether you would be born an infinite
number of times or only once. The argument that you'd be born only once appeals to Leibnizs Principle of the
Identity of Indiscernibles : each supposedly repeating state of the world would occur just once because each
state would not be discernible from the state that recurs. The way to support the idea of eternal recurrence
or repeated occurrence seems to be to presuppose a linear ordering in some "hyper" time of all the cycles so
that each cycle is discernible from its predecessor because it occurs at a different hyper time.
During history (and long before Einstein made a distinction between proper time and coordinate time), a
variety of answers were given to the question of whether time is like a line or, instead, closed like a circle.
The concept of linear time first appeared in the writings of the Hebrews and the Zoroastrian Iranians. The
Roman writer Seneca also advocated linear time. Plato and most other Greeks and Romans believed time to
be motion and believed cosmic motion was cyclical, but this was not envisioned as requiring any detailed
endless repetition such as the multiple rebirths of Socrates. However, the Pythagoreans and some Stoic
philosophers such as Chrysippus did adopt this drastic position. The idea was picked up again by Nietzsche in
1882. Scholars do not agree on whether Nietzsche meant his idea of circular time to be taken literally or
merely for a moral lesson about how you should live your life if you knew that you'd live it over and over.
Islamic and Christian theologians adopted the ancient idea that time is linear plus the Jewish-Zoroastrian
idea that the universe was created at a definite moment in the past. Augustine emphasized that human
experience is a one-way journey from Genesis to Judgment, regardless of any recurring patterns or cycles in
nature. In the Medieval period, Thomas Aquinas agreed. Nevertheless, it was not until 1602 that the concept
of linear time was more clearly formulatedby the English philosopher Francis Bacon. In 1687, Newton
advocated linear time when he represented time mathematically by using a continuous straight line. The
concept of linear time was promoted by Barrow, Newton, Leibniz, Locke and Kant. Kant argued that it is a
matter of necessity. In 19th century Europe, the idea of linear time became dominant in both science and
philosophy. However, in the twentieth century, Gdel and several others discovered solutions to the
equations of Einsteins general theory of relativity that allowed closed loops of proper time (closed time-like
curves). Each event in the loop lies in its own causal history. These causal loops or closed curves in spacetime
allow you to go forward continuously in time until you arrive back into your past. The idea is that time is not
ordered globally, but only locally, that is, for short durations. As far as we can tell today, our universe does
not exemplify any of these solutions to Einsteins equations.
There are many mathematically possible topologies for time. Time could be linear or closed (circular).
Linear time might have a beginning or have no beginning; it might have an ending or no ending. There
could be two disconnected time streams, in two parallel worlds; perhaps one would be linear and the other
circular. There could be branching time, in which time is like the letter "Y", and there could be a fusion time
in which two different time streams are separate for some durations but merge into one for others. Time
might be two dimensional instead of one dimensional. For all these topologies, there could be discrete time
or, instead, continuous time. That is, the micro-structure of time's instants might be analogous to a
sequence of integers or, instead, analogous to a continuum of real numbers. For physicists, if time were
discrete or quantized, their favorite lower limit on a possible duration is the Planck time of about 104 3 seconds.
d. The Extent of Time

In ancient Greece, Plato and Aristotle agreed that the past is eternal. Aristotle claimed that time had no
beginning because, for any time, we always imagine an earlier time. The Medieval philosopher Thomas
Aquinas objected to Aristotle's position, saying that, although the world could have existed infinitely into
the past, in fact it did not, and our imagination cannot always be trusted to tell us how things are. Instead,
the past is finite because time began with Gods creation of Earth a finite time ago. In the late 17th century,
Newton declared that time is infinite in both the past and future. Then, in the 18th century, Kant argued
that this is not an empirical matter but rather a matter of necessity.
It is still an open question physics whether past time was finite or infinite, but it is generally agreed that
future time is infinite.
In the most well accepted version of the Big Bang Theory in the field of astrophysics, about 13.8 billion
years ago our universe had a nearly infinitesimal size and a nearly infinite gravitational field. Nearly all
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physicists believe the extent of past time is at least 13.8 billion years. Many physicists believe that past time
is infinite, and many physicists believe instead that time began 13.8 billion years ago. This is still an
unsettled issue. There are solutions to Einstein's equations of relativity in which spacetime is infinite and
other solutions in which spacetime is finite. In the Big Bang theory that is generated by the Russian
physicist Alexander Friedmanns solution to Einsteins equations of general relativity, if we follow time
backwards from the present, there was a time when the universe began with zero volume, infinite density
and infinite temperature. The universe has been expanding and cooling ever since. Nearly all physicists
believe that Friedmanns solution cannot be trusted for the earliest times when the diameter of the universe
is so small that quantum theory must be taken into account.
In the more popular version of the Big Bang theory, the Big Bang theory with inflation, the universe once
was an extremely tiny bit of explosively inflating material. About 10-36 second later, this inflationary
material underwent an accelerating expansion that lasted for 10-30 seconds during which the universe
expanded by a factor of 1078. Once this brief period of inflation ended, the volume of the universe was the
size of an orange, and the energy causing the inflation was transformed into a dense gas of expanding hot
radiation. This expansion has never stopped. But with expansion came cooling, and this allowed individual
material particles to condense and eventually much later to clump into stars and galaxies. The mutual
gravitational force of the universes matter and energy decelerated the expansion, but seven billion years
after our Big Bang, the universes dark energy became especially influential and started to accelerate the
expansion again, although not at the explosive rate of the initial inflation. This more recent inflation of the
universe will continue forever at an exponentially accelerating rate, turning space into an almost perfect
vacuum as the remaining matter-energy becomes more and more diluted.
The Big Bang Theory with or without inflation is challenged by other theories such as a cyclic theory in
which every trillion years the expansion changes to contraction until the universe becomes infinitesimal, at
which time there is a bounce or new Big Bang. The cycles of Bang and Crunch continue forever, and they
might or might not have existed forever. For the details, see (Steinhardt 2012). A promising but as yet
untested theory called "eternal inflation" implies that our particular Big Bang is one among many other Big
Bangs that occurred within a background spacetime that is actually infinite in space and in past time and
future time.
Consider this challenging argument from (Newton-Smith 1980, p. 111) that claims time cannot have had a
finite past: As we have reasons for supposing that macroscopic events have causal origins, we have reason
to suppose that some prior state of the universe led to the product of [the Big Bang]. So the prospects for
ever being warranted in positing a beginning of time are dim. The usual response to Newton-Smith here is
two-fold. First, our Big Bang is a microscopic event, not a macroscopic event. Second, if a confirmed
cosmological theory implies there is a first event, we can say this event is an exception to the metaphysical
assumption that every event has a prior cause.
When we discuss whether time was infinite in the past or will be in the future, we are presuming an
ordinary scale of time, one for which it is easy to find periodic processes to use in building clocks. However,
if we alter this scale of time t by using a logarithmic scale, we can turn the finite into the infinite. With a
scale change from time t to log t, a finite event lasting from year 0 to year 1 becomes an infinite event lasting
from - to 0 because the log 0 = - and log 1 = 0.
e. Does Time Emerge from Something More Basic?

Is time a fundamental feature of nature, or does it emerge from more basic timeless featuresin analogy to
the way the smoothness of water flow emerges from the complicated behavior of the underlying molecules,
none of which is properly called "smooth"? That is, is time ontologically basic (fundamental), or does it
depend on something even more basic? We might rephrase this question more technically by asking
whether facts about time supervene on more basic facts. Facts about sound supervene on, or are a product
of, facts about changes in the molecules of the air, so molecular change is more basic than sound.
Minkowski argued in 1908 that we should believe spacetime is more basic than time, and this argument is
generally well accepted. However, is this spacetime itself basic? Some physicists argue that spacetime is the
product of some more basic micro-substrate at the level of the Planck length, although there is no agreedupon theory of what the substrate is. Other physicists say space is not basic, but time is. In 2004, after
winning the Nobel Prize in physics, David Gross expressed this viewpoint:
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Everyone in string theory is convincedthat spacetime is doomed. But we dont know what its
replaced by. We have an enormous amount of evidence that space is doomed. We even have
examples, mathematically well-defined examples, where space is an emergent concept. But in my
opinion the tough problem that has not yet been faced up to at all is, How do we imagine a
dynamical theory of physics in which time is emergent? All the examples we have do not have an
emergent time. They have emergent space but not time. It is very hard for me to imagine a
formulation of physics without time as a primary concept because physics is typically thought of as
predicting the future given the past. We have unitary time evolution. How could we have a theory of
physics where we start with something in which time is never mentioned?
The discussion in this section about whether time is ontologically basic has no implications for whether the
word time is semantically basic or whether the idea of time is basic to concept formation.
f. Time and Conventionality

It is an arbitrary convention that our civilizations designs clocks to count up to higher numbers rather than
down to lower numbers as time goes on. It is just a matter of convenience that we agree to the convention
of re-setting our clock by one hour as we cross a time-zone. It is an arbitrary convention that there
are twenty-four hours in a day instead of ten, that there are sixty seconds in a minute rather than twelve,
that a second lasts as long as it does, and that the origin of our coordinate system for time is associated with
the birth of Jesus on some calendars but the entry of Mohammed into Mecca on other calendars.
According to relativity theory, if two events couldn't have had a causal effect on each other, then we analysts
are free to choose a reference frame in which one of the events happens first, or instead the other event
happens first, or instead the two events are simultaneous. But once a frame is chosen, this fixes the time
order of any pair of events. This point is discussed further in the next section.
In 1905, the French physicist Henri Poincar argued that time is not a feature of reality to be discovered, but
rather is something we've invented for our convenience. Because, he said, possible empirical tests cannot
determine very much about time, he recommended the convention of adopting the concept of time that
makes for the simplest laws of physics. Opposing this conventionalist picture of time, other philosophers of
science have recommended a less idealistic view in which time is an objective feature of reality. These
philosophers are recommending an objectivist picture of time.
Can our standard clock be inaccurate? Yes, say the objectivists about the standard clock. No, say the
conventionalists who say that the standard clock is accurate by convention; if it acts strangely, then all
clocks must act strangely in order to stay in synchrony with the standard clock that tells everyone the
correct time. A closely related question is whether, when we change our standard clock, from being the
Earth's rotation to being an atomic clock, or just our standard from one kind of atomic clock to another kind
of atomic clock, are we merely adopting constitutive conventions for our convenience, or in some objective
sense are we making a more correct choice?
Consider how we use a clock to measure how long an event lasts, its duration. We always use the following
method: Take the time of the instant at which the event ends, and subtract the time of the instant when the
event starts. To find how long an event lasts that starts at 3:00 and ends at 5:00, we subtract and get the
answer of two hours. Is the use of this method merely a convention, or in some objective sense is it the only
way that a clock should be used? The method of subtracting the start time from the end time is called the
"metric" of time. Is there an objective metric, or is time "metrically amorphous," to use a phrase from Adolf
Grnbaum, because there are alternatively acceptable metrics, such as subtracting the square roots of those
times, or perhaps using the square root of their difference and calling this the "duration"?
There is an ongoing dispute about the extent to which there is an element of conventionality in Einsteins
notion of two separated events happening at the same time. Einstein said that to define simultaneity in a
single reference frame you must adopt a convention about how fast light travels going one way as opposed to
coming back (or going any other direction). He recommended adopting the convention that light travels the
same speed in all directions (in a vacuum free of the influence of gravity). He claimed it must be a
convention because there is no way to measure whether the speed is really the same in opposite directions
since any measurement of the two speeds between two locations requires first having synchronized clocks
at those two locations, yet the synchronization process will presuppose whether the speed is the same in
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both directions. The philosophers B. Ellis and P. Bowman in 1967 and D. Malament in 1977 gave different
reasons why Einstein is mistaken. For an introduction to this dispute, see the Frequently Asked Questions . For
more discussion, see (Callender and Hoefer 2002).
4. What Does Science Require of Time?

Physics, including astronomy, is the only science that explicitly studies time, although all sciences use the
concept. Yet different physical theories place different demands on this concept. So, let's discuss time from
the perspective of current science.
Physical theories treat time as being another dimension, analogous to a spatial dimension, and they
describe an event as being located at temporal coordinate t, where t is a real number. Each specific temporal
coordinate is called a "time." An instantaneous event is a moment and is located at just one time, or one
temporal coordinate, say t1 . It is said to last for an "instant." If the event is also a so-called "point event,"
then it is located at a single spatial coordinate, say <x1 , y1 , z1 >. Locations constitute space, and times
constitute time.
The fundamental laws of science do not pick out a present moment or present time. This fact is often
surprising to a student who takes a science class and notices all sorts of talk about the present. Scientists
frequently do apply some law of science while assigning, say, t0 to be the name of the present moment, then
calculate this or that. This insertion of the fact that t0 is the present is an initial condition of the situation to
which the law is being applied, and is not part of the law itself. The laws themselves treat all moments
equally.
Science does not require that its theories have symmetry under time-translation, but this is a goal that
physicists do pursue for their basic (fundamental) theories. If a theory has symmetry under timetranslation, then the laws of the theories do not change. The law of gravitation in the 21st century is the
same law that held one thousand centuries ago.
Physics also requires that almost all the basic laws of science to be time symmetric. This means that a law, if
it is a basic law, must not distinguish between backward and forward time directions.
In physics we need to speak of one event happening pi seconds after another, and of one event happening
the square root of three seconds after another. In ordinary discourse outside of science we would never
need this kind of precision. The need for this precision has led to requiring time to be a linear continuum,
very much like a segment of the real number line. So, one requirement that relativity, quantum mechanics
and the Big Bang theory place on any duration is that is be a continuum. This implies that time is not
quantized, even in quantum mechanics. In a world with time being a continuum, we cannot speak of some
event being caused by the state of the world at the immediately preceding instant because there is no
immediately preceding instant, just as there is no real number immediately preceding pi.
Einstein's theory of relativity has had the biggest impact on our
understanding of time. But Einstein was not the first physicist to appreciate
the relativity of motion. Galileo and Newton would have said speed is
relative to reference frame. Einstein would agree but would add that
durations and occurrence times are also relative. For example, any observer
fixed to a moving railroad car in which you are seated will say your speed is
zero, whereas an observer fixed to the train station will say you have a
positive speed. But as Galileo and Newton understood relativity, both
observers will agree about the time you had lunch on the train. Einstein
would say they are making a mistake about your lunchtime; they should
disagree about when you had lunch. For Newton, the speed of anything,
including light, would be different in the two frames that move relative to
each other, but Einstein said Maxwells equations require the speed of light
to be invariant. This implies that the Galilean equations of motion are incorrect. Einstein figured out how to
change the equations; the consequence is the Lorentz transformations in which two observers in relative
motion will have to disagree also about the durations and occurrence times of events. What is happening
here is that Einstein is requiring a mixing of space and time; Minkowski said it follows that there is a
spacetime which divides into its space and time differently for different observers.
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One consequence of this is that relativity's spacetime is more fundamental than either space or time alone.
Spacetime is commonly said to be four-dimensional, but because time is not space it is more accurate to
think of spacetime as being (3 + 1)-dimensional. Time is a distinguished, linear subspace of fourdimensional spacetime.
Time is relative in the sense that the duration of an event depends on the reference frame used in
measuring the duration. Specifying that an event lasted three minutes without giving even an implicit
indication of the reference frame is like asking someone to stand over there and not giving any indication of
where there is. One implication of this is that it becomes more difficult to defend McTaggart's A-theory
which says that properties of events such as "happened twenty-three minutes ago" and "is happening now"
are basic properties of events and are not properties relative to chosen reference frames.
Another profound idea from relativity theory is that accurate clocks do not tick the same for everyone
everywhere. Each object has its own proper time, and so the correct time shown by a clock depends on its
history (in particular, it history of speed and gravitational influence). Relative to clocks that are stationary
in the reference frame, clocks in motion run slower, as do clocks in stronger gravitational fields. In general,
two synchronized clocks do not stay synchronized if they move relative to each other or undergo different
gravitational forces. Clocks in cars driving by your apartment building run slower than your apartments
clock.
Suppose there are two twins. One stays on Earth while the other twin zooms away in a spaceship and
returns ten years later according to the spaceships clock. That same arrival event could be twenty years
later according to an Earth-based clock, provided the spaceship went fast enough. The Earth twin would
now be ten years older than the spaceship twin. So, one could say that the Earth twin lived two seconds for
every one second of the spaceship twin.
According to relativity theory, the order of events in time is only a partial order because for any event e,
there is an event f such that e need not occur before f, simultaneous with f, nor after f. These pairs of events
are said to be in each others absolute elsewhere, which is another way of saying that neither could
causally affect each other because even a light signal could not reach from one event to the other. Adding a
coordinate system or reference frame to spacetime will force the events in all these pairs to have an order
and so force the set of all events to be totally ordered in time, but what is interesting philosophically is that
there is a leeway in the choice of the frame. For any two specific events e and f that could never causally
affect each other, the analyst may choose a frame in which e occurs first, or choose another frame in which f
occurs first, or instead choose another frame in which they are simultaneous. Any choice of frame will be
correct. Such is the surprising nature of time according to relativity theory.
General relativity places other requirements on events that are not required in special relativity. Unlike in
Newton's physics and the physics of special relativity, in general relativity the spacetime is not a passive
container for events; it is dynamic in the sense that any change in the amount and distribution of matterenergy will change the curvature of spacetime itself. Gravity is a manifestation of the warping of spacetime.
In special relativity, its Minkowski spacetime has no curvature. In general relativity a spacetime with no
mass or energy might or might not have curvature, so the geometry of spacetime is not always determined
by the behavior of matter and energy.
In 1611, Bishop James Ussher declared that the beginning of time occurred on October 23, 4004 B.C.E.
Today's science disagrees. According to one interpretation of the Big Bang theory of cosmology, the
universe began 13.8 billion years ago as spacetime started to expand from an infinitesimal volume; and the
expansion continues today, with the volume of space now doubling in size about every ten billion years.
The amount of future time is a potential infinity (in Aristotle's sense of the term) as opposed to an actual
infinity. For more discussion of all these compressed remarks, see What Science Requires of Time.
5. What Kinds of Time Travel are Possible?

Most philosophers and scientists believe time travel is physically possible. To define the term, we can say
that in time travel, the travelers journey as judged by the traveler's correct clock takes a different amount of
time than the journey does as judged by the correct clocks of those who do not take the journey. The
physical possibility of travel to the future is well accepted, but travel to the past is more controversial, and
time travel that changes the future or the past is generally considered to be impossible.
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According to relativity theory, there are two ways to travel into the future using time dilationeither by
moving at high speed or by taking advantage of the presence of an intense gravitational field. If you move at
extremely high speed, you can travel into the future to the year 2,300 on Earth (as measured by Earthbased clocks or by clocks elsewhere that are not moving relative to Earth) while your personal clock
measures that only ten years have elapsed. You can participate in that future, not just view it. But you can
not get back to the twenty-first century on Earth by reversing your velocity. It's not that you suddenly jump
into the Earth's future of the year 2,300; you have continually been traveling forward in both your personal
time and the world's external time, and you could have been continuously observed from Earth. But as
judged by the world's external time you do have a much longer lifetime than your biological twin whom you
left back on Earth long ago. (See the discussion of the twin paradox for the solution to the famous paradox
involving time dilation.)
In addition to time dilation due to high speed, there is time dilation due to being in the presence of a
gravitation field; this is called gravitational time dilation or gravitational red shift. Because of Earth's gravity,
people who live in the ground floor apartment age slower than their twin who lives in the top floor
apartment of the same building. This kind of time travel is more noticeable if the younger twin lives near a
black hole where the gravity is much stronger than on Earth.
You may have heard the remark that you have no time to take a spaceship ride across the galaxy since it is
100,000 light years across. So, even if you were to travel at just under the speed of light, it would take you
over 100,000 years. Who has that kind of time? This remark contains a misunderstanding about time
dilation. This is 100,000 years as judged by clocks that are stationary relative to Earth, not as judged by
your clock. If you were in the spaceship that accelerated quickly to just under the speed of light, then you
and your clock might age hardly at all as you traveled across the galaxy. In fact, with a very fast spaceship,
you have plenty of time to go anywhere in the universe you wish to go.
How about travel to the past, the more interesting kind of time travel? This is not allowed by either
Newton's physics or Einstein's special relativity, but is allowed by general relativity. In 1949, Kurt Gdel
discovered a solution to Einsteins field equations that allows continuous, closed future-directed timelike
curves. To say this more simply, Gdel discovered that in some possible worlds that obey the theory of
general relativity, you can continually travel forward in your personal time but eventually arrive into your
own past. In this unusual non-Minkowski spacetime, the universe as a whole is the time machine; no one
needs to build a device in order to travel this way.
The situation required for travel to the past is much more exotic than merely having a fast spaceship, but
scientists do know how you could get back to Hitlers office in Berlin in a manner consistent with the laws of
science. Unfortunately, you cannot do anything that hasnt already been done, or else there would be a
contradiction. In fact, if you did go back, then you would already have been back there. So, you can
participate in a Hitler assassination attempt, but you cannot change its outcome. For the same reason, you
cannot kill your childhood self no matter how hard you try. Also, when you travel to the past, you do not
suddenly fade out of the present and into some past time, although this is how time travel is so often
portrayed in films.
There are several well known philosophical arguments against past-directed time travel. None are generally
considered to be decisive. Here are the arguments:
1. Time travel is impossible because if it were possible we should have seen many time travelers by now, but nobody
has encountered any time travelers.
2. If there were time travel, then when time travelers go back and attempt to change history they must always botch
their attempts to change anything, and it will appear to anyone watching them at the time as if nature is conspiring
against them. Since observers have never witnessed this apparent conspiracy of nature, there is no time travel.
3. If there were travel to the past along a closed timelike curve, then these events would occur before themselves and
after themselves, but this violates our definition of the word before.
4. Travel to the past is impossible because it allows the gaining of information for free. For example, buy a copy of
Darwin's book The Origin of Species, that was published in 1859. In the 21st century, enter a time machine with it,
go back to 1855 and give the book to Darwin himself. He could use your copy in order to write his manuscript which
he sends off to the publisher. If so, who first came up with the knowledge about evolution? Because this scenario
contradicts what we know about where knowledge comes from, past-directed time travel isn't really possible.
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5. Suppose you enter a time machine and bring along several male and female squirrels of one species. You take these
back to the time of the dinosaurs. The squirrels begin breeding, the dinosaurs die out, and the species of squirrel
survives into modern times. Since this scenario allows a species to come into existence without its going through the
process of Darwinian evolution, time travel is impossible.
6. In 1972, John Earman described a rocket ship that carries a time machine capable of firing a probe (perhaps a
smaller rocket) into its recent past. The ship is programmed to fire the probe at a certain time unless a safety switch
is on at that time. Suppose the safety switch is programmed to be turned on if and only if the return or impending
arrival of the probe is (or has been) detected by a sensing device on the ship. Does the probe get launched? At first
glance it seems to be launched if and only if it is not launched. Is this like designing a gun that shoots if and only if it
does not shoot? Not quite. The argument of this paradox depends on the assumptions that the rocket ship does work
as intendedthat people are able to build the computer program, the probe, the safety switch, and an effective
sensing device. Earman himself says all these premises are acceptable and so the only weak point in the reasoning to
the paradoxical conclusion is the assumption that travel to the past is physically possible.
These six complaints are a mixture of arguments that past-directed time travel is not logically possible, that
it is not physically possible, that it is not technologically possible with current technology, and that it is
unlikely, given today's empirical evidence.
For more discussion of time travel, see the encyclopedia article Time Travel.
6. Does Time Require Change? (Relational vs. Substantival

Theories)
By "time requires change," we mean that for time to exist something must change
its properties over
time. We don't mean, change it properties over space as in change color from top to bottom. There are two
main philosophical theories about whether time requires change, relational theories and substantival
theories.
In a relational theory of time, time is defined in terms of relationships among objects, in particular their
changes. Substantival theories are theories that imply time is substance-like in that it exists independently
of changes; it exists independently of all the spacetime relations exhibited by physical processes. This theory
allows "empty time" in which nothing changes. On the other hand, relational theories do not allow this.
They imply that at every time something is happeningsuch as an electron moving through space or a tree
leaf changing its color. In short, no change implies no time. Some substantival theories describe spacetime
as being like a container for events. The container exists with or without events in it. Relational theories
imply there is no container without contents. But the substance that substantivalists have in mind is more
like a medium pervading all of spacetime and less like an external container. The vast majority of
relationists present their relational theories in terms of actually instantiated relations and not merely
possible relations.
Everyone agrees time cannot be measured without there being changes, because we measure time by
observing changes in some property or other, but the present issue is whether time exists without changes.
On this issue, we need to be clear about what sense of change and what sense of property we are intending.
For the relational theory, the term "property" is intended to exclude what Nelson Goodman called grue-like
properties. Let us define an object to be grue if it is green before the beginning of the year 1888 but is blue
thereafter. Then the worlds chlorophyll undergoes a change from grue to non-grue in 1888. Wed naturally
react to this by saying that change in chlorophyll's grue property is not a real change in the worlds
chlorophyll.
Does Queen Annes death change when I forget about it? Yes, but the debate here is whether the events
intrinsic properties can change, not merely its non-intrinsic properties such as its relationships to us. This
special intrinsic change is called by many names: secondary change and second-order change and
McTaggartian change and McTaggart change. Second-order change is the kind of change that A-theorists
say occurs when Queen Anne's death recedes ever farther into the past. The objection from the B-theorists
here is that this is not a "real, objective, intrinsic change" in her death. First-order change is ordinary
change, the kind that occurs when a leaf changes from green to brown, or a person changes from sitting to
standing.
Einstein's general theory of relativity does imply it is possible for spacetime to exist while empty of events.
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This empty time is permissible according to the substantival theory but not allowed by the relational theory.
Yet Einstein considered himself to be a relationalist.
Substantival theories are sometimes called "absolute theories." Unfortunately the term "absolute theory" is
used in two other ways. A second sense of " to be absolute" is to be immutable, or changeless. A third sense
is to be independent of observer or reference frame. Although Einsteins theory implies there is no absolute
time in the sense of being independent of reference frame, it is an open question whether relativity theory
undermines absolute time in the sense of substantival time; Einstein believed it did, but many philosophers
of science do not.
The first advocate of a relational theory of time was Aristotle. He said, neither does time exist without
change. (Physics, book IV, chapter 11, page 218b) However, the battle lines were most clearly drawn in the
early 18th century when Leibniz argued for the relational position against Newton, who had adopted a
substantival theory of time. Leibnizs principal argument against Newton is a reductio ad absurdum.
Suppose Newtons space and time were to exist. But one could then imagine a universe just like ours except
with everything shifted five kilometers east and five minutes earlier. However, there would be no reason
why this shifted universe does not exist and ours does. Now we have arrived at a contradiction because, if
there is no reason for there to be our universe rather than the shifted universe, then we have violated
Leibnizs Principle of Sufficient Reason: that there is an understandable reason for everything being the way it
is. So, by reductio ad absurdum, Newtons substantival space and time do not exist. In short, the trouble
with Newtons theory is that it leads to too many unnecessary possibilities.
Newton offered this two-part response: (1) Leibniz is correct to accept the Principle of Sufficient Reason
regarding the rational intelligibility of the universe, but there do not have to be knowable reasons for
humans; God might have had His own sufficient reason for creating the universe at a given place and time
even though mere mortals cannot comprehend His reasons. (2) The bucket thought-experiment shows
that acceleration relative to absolute space is detectable; thus absolute space is real, and if absolute space is
real, so is absolute time. Here's how to detect absolute space. Suppose we tie a buckets handle to a rope
hanging down from a tree branch. Partially fill the bucket with water, and let it come to equilibrium. Notice
that there is no relative motion between the bucket and the water, and in this case the water surface is flat.
Now spin the bucket, and keep doing this until the angular velocity of the water and the bucket are the
same. In this second case there is again no relative motion between the bucket and the water, but now the
water surface is concave. So spinning makes a difference, but how can a relational theory explain the
difference in the shape of the surface? It can not, says Newton. When the bucket and water are spinning,
what are they spinning relative to? Because we can disregard the rest of the environment including the tree
and rope, says Newton, the only explanation of the difference in surface shape between the non-spinning
case and the spinning case is that when it is not spinning there is no motion relative to space, but when it is
spinning there is motion relative to a third thing, space itself, and space itself is acting upon the water
surface to make it concave. Alternatively expressed, the key idea is that the presence of centrifugal force is a
sign of rotation relative to absolute space. Leibniz had no rebuttal. So, for over two centuries after this
argument was created, Newtons absolute theory of space and time was generally accepted by European
scientists and philosophers.
One hundred years later, Kant entered the arena on the side of Newton. In a space containing only a single
glove, said Kant, Leibniz could not account for its being a right-handed glove versus a left-handed glove
because all the internal relationships would be the same in either case. However, we all know that there is a
real difference between a right and a left glove, so this difference can only be due to the gloves relationship
to space itself. But if there is a space itself, then the absolute or substantival theory is better than the
relational theory.
Newtons theory of time was dominant in the 18th and 19th centuries, even though during those centuries
Huygens, Berkeley, and Mach had entered the arena on the side of Leibniz. Mach argued that it must be the
remaining matter in the universe, such as the "fixed" stars, which causes the water surface in the bucket to
be concave, and that without these stars or other matter, a spinning bucket would have a flat surface. In the
20th century, Hans Reichenbach and the early Einstein declared the special theory of relativity to be a victory
for the relational theory, in large part because a Newtonian absolute space would be undetectable. Special
relativity, they also said, ruled out a space-filling ether, the leading candidate for substantival space, so the
substantival theory was incorrect. And the response to Newtons bucket argument is to note Newtons error
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in not considering the environment. Einstein agreed with Mach that, if you hold the bucket still but spin the
background stars in the environment, then the water will creep up the side of the bucket and form a
concave surfaceso the bucket thought experiment does not require absolute space.
Although it was initially believed by Einstein and Reichenbach that relativity theory supported Mach
regarding the bucket experiment and the absence of absolute space, this belief is controversial. Many
philosophers argue that Reichenbach and the early Einstein have been overstating the amount of
metaphysics that can be extracted from the physics. There is substantival in the sense of independent of
reference frame and substantival in the sense of independent of events. Isn't only the first sense ruled out
when we reject a space-filling ether? The critics admit that general relativity does show that the curvature of
spacetime is affected by the distribution of matter, so today it is no longer plausible for a substantivalist to
assert that the container is independent of the behavior of the matter it contains. But, so they argue,
general relativity does not rule out a more sophisticated substantival theory in which spacetime exists even
if it is empty and in which two empty universes could differ in the curvature of their spacetime. For this
reason, by the end of the 20th century, substantival theories had gained some ground.
In 1969, Sydney Shoemaker presented an argument attempting to establish the understandability of time
existing without change, as Newtons absolutism requires. Divide all space into three disjoint regions, called
region 3, region 4, and region 5. In region 3, change ceases every third year for one year. People in regions 4
and 5 can verify this and then convince the people in region 3 of it after they come back to life at the end of
their frozen year. Similarly, change ceases in region 4 every fourth year for a year; and change ceases in
region 5 every fifth year. Every sixty years, that is, every 3 x 4 x 5 years, all three regions freeze
simultaneously for a year. In year sixty-one, everyone comes back to life, time having marched on for a year
with no change. Note that even if Shoemakers scenario successfully shows that the notion of empty time is
understandable, it does not show that empty time actually exists. If we accept that empty time occasionally
exists, then someone who claims the tick of the clock lasts one second could be challenged by a skeptic who
says perhaps empty time periods occur randomly and this supposed one-second duration contains three
changeless intervals each lasting one billion years, so the duration is really three billion and one second
rather than one second. However, we usually prefer the simpler of two competing hypotheses.
Empty time isn't directly detectable by those who are frozen, but it may be indirectly detectable, perhaps in
the manner described by Shoemaker or by signs in advance of the freeze:
Suppose that immediately prior to the beginning of a local freeze there is a period of "sluggishness"
during which the inhabitants of the region find that it makes more than the usual amount of effort for
them to move the limbs of their bodies, and we can suppose that the length of this period of
sluggishness is found to be correlated with the length of the freeze. (Shoemaker 1969, p. 374)
Is the ending of the freeze causeless, or does something cause the freeze to end? Perhaps the empty time
itself causes the freeze to end. Yet if a period of empty time, a period of "mere" passage of time, is somehow
able to cause something, then, argues Ruth Barcan Marcus, it is not clear that empty time can be dismissed
as not being genuine change. (Shoemaker 1969, p. 380)
7. Does Time Flow?

Time seems to flow or pass in the sense that future events become present events and then become past
events, just like a runner who passes us by and then recedes farther and farther from us. In 1938, the
philosopher George Santayana offered this description of the flow of time: The essence of nowness runs
like fire along the fuse of time. The converse image of time's flowing past us is our advancing through time.
Time definitely seems to flow, but there is philosophical disagreement about whether it really does flow, or
pass. Is the flow objectively real? The dispute is related to the dispute about whether McTaggart's A-series
or B-series is more fundamental.
a. McTaggart's A-Series and B-Series

In 1908, the philosopher J. M. E. McTaggart proposed two ways of linearly ordering all events in time by
placing them into a series according to the times at which they occur. But this ordering can be created in two
ways, an A way and a B way. Consider two past events a and b, in which b is the most recent of the two. In
McTaggart's B-series, event a happens before event b in the series because the time of occurrence of event
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a is less than the time of occurrence of event b. But when ordering the same events into McTaggart's Aseries, event a happens before event b for a different reasonbecause event a is more in the past than event
b. Both series produce exactly the same ordering of events. Here is a picture of the ordering. c is another
event that happens after a and b.
There are many other events that are located within the series at event a's location, namely all events
simultaneous with event a. If we were to consider an instant of time to be a set of simultaneous events,
then instants of time are also linearly ordered into an A-series and a B-series. McTaggart himself believed
the A-series is paradoxical [for reasons that will not be explored in this article], but McTaggart also believed
the A-properties such as being past are essential to our current concept of time, so for this reason he
believed our current concept of time is incoherent.
Let's suppose that event c occurs in our present after events a and b. The information that c occurs in the
present is not contained within either the A-series or the B-series. However, the information that c is in the
present is used to create the A-series; it is what tells us to place c to the right of b. That information is not
used to create the B-series.
Metaphysicians dispute whether the A-theory or instead the B-theory is the correct theory of reality. The Atheory comprises two theses, each of which is contrary to the B-theory: (1) Time is constituted by an Aseries in which any event's being in the past (or in the present or in the future) is an intrinsic, objective,
monadic property of the event itself and not merely a subjective relation between the event and us who
exist. (2) The second thesis of the A-theory is that events change. In 1908, McTaggart described the special
way that events change:
Take any eventthe death of Queen Anne, for exampleand consider what change can take place in its
characteristics. That it is a death, that it is the death of Anne Stuart, that it has such causes, that it has
such effectsevery characteristic of this sort never changes.... But in one respect it does change. It
began by being a future event. It became every moment an event in the nearer future. At last it was
present. Then it became past, and will always remain so, though every moment it becomes further and
further past.
This special change is called secondary change and second-order change and also McTaggartian change.
The B-theory disagrees with both thesis (1) and thesis (2) of the A-theory. According to the B-theory, the Bseries and not the A-series is fundamental; fundamental temporal properties are relational; McTaggartian
change is not an objective change and so is not metaphysically basic or ultimately real. The B-theory implies
that an event's property of occurring in the past (or occurring twenty-three minutes ago, or now, or in a
future century) is merely a subjective relation between the event and us because, when analyzed, it will be
seen to make reference to our own perspective on the world. Here is how it is subjective, according to the Btheory. Queen Anne's death has the property of occurring in the past because it occurs in our past as
opposed to, say, Aristotle's past; and it occurs in our past rather than our present or our future because it
occurs at a time that is less than the time of occurrence of some event that we (rather than Aristotle) would
say is occurring. The B-theory is committed to there being no objective distinction among past, present and
future. Both the A-theory and B-theory agree, however, that it would be a mistake to say of some event that
it happens on a certain date but then later it fails to happen on that date.
The B-theorists complain that thesis (1) of the A-theory implies that an events being in the present is an
intrinsic property of that event, so it implies that there is an absolute, global present for all of us. The Btheorist points out that according to Einsteins Special Theory of Relativity there is no global present. An
event can be in the present for you and not in the present for me. An event can be present in a reference
frame in which you are a fixed observer, but if you are moving relative to me, then that same event will not
be present in a reference frame in which I am a fixed observer. So, being present is not a property of an
event, as the A theory implies. According to relativity theory, what is a property of an event is being present
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in a chosen reference frame, and this implies that being present is relative to us who are making the choice
of reference frame.
When discussing the A-theory and the B-theory, metaphysicians often speak of
A-series and B-series, of
A-theory and B-theory, of
A-facts and B-facts, of
A-terms and B-terms, of
A-properties and B-properties, of
A-predicates and B-predicates, of
A-statements and B-statements, and of the
A-camp and B-camp.
Here are some examples. Typical B-series terms are relational; they are relations between events: "earlier
than," "happens twenty-three minutes after," and "simultaneous with." Typical A-theory terms are
monadic, they are one-place qualities of events: "the near future," "twenty-three minutes ago," and
"present." The B-theory terms represent distinctively B-properties; the A-theory terms represent
distinctively A-properties. The B-fact that event a occurs before event b will always be a fact, but the A-fact
that event a occurred about an hour ago soon wont be a fact. Similarly the A-statement that
event a occurred about an hour ago will, if true, soon become false. However, B-facts are not transitory, and
B-statements have fixed truth values. For the B-theorist, the statement "Event a occurs an hour before b"
will, if true, never become false. The A-theory usually says A-facts are the truthmakers of true A-statements
and so A-facts are ontologically fundamental; the B-theorist appeals instead to B-facts, insofar as one
accepts facts into ones ontology, which is metaphysically controversial. According to the B-theory, when
the A-theorist correctly says "It began snowing twenty-three minutes ago," what really makes it true isn't
the A-fact that the event of the snow's beginning has twenty-three minutes of pastness; what makes it true
is that the event of uttering the sentence occurs twenty-three minutes after the event of it beginning to
snow. Notice that "occurs ... after" is a B-term. Those persons in the A-camp and B-camp recognize that in
ordinary speech we are not careful to use one of the two kinds of terminology, but each camp believes that it
can best explain the terminology of the other camp in its own terms.
b. Subjective Flow and Objective Flow

There are two primary theories about times flow: (A) the flow is objectively real. (B) the flow is a myth or
else is merely subjective. Often theory A is called the dynamic theory or the A-theory while theory B is
called the static theory or B-theory.
The static theory implies that the flow is an illusion, the product of a faulty metaphor. The defense of the
theory goes something like this. Time exists, things change, but time does not change by flowing. The
present does not move. We all experience this flow, but only in the sense that we all frequently misinterpret
our experience. There is some objective feature of our brains that causes us to believe we are experiencing a
flow of time, such as the fact that we have different perceptions at different times and the fact
that anticipations of experiences always happen before memories of those experiences; but the flow itself is
not objective. This kind of theory of time's flow is often characterized as a myth-of-passage theory. The
myth-of-passage theory is more likely to be adopted by those who believe in McTaggarts B-theory. One
point offered in favor of the myth-of-passage theory is to ask about the rate at which time flows. It would be
a rate of one second per second. But that is silly. One second divided by one second is the number one.
Thats not a coherent rate. There are other arguments, but these won't be explored here.
Physicists sometimes speak of time flowing in another sense of the term "flow." This is the sense in which
change is continuous rather than discrete. That is not the sense of flow that philosophers normally use
when debating the objectivity of time's flow.
There is another uncontroversial sense of flowwhen physicists say that time flows differently for the two
twins in Einstein's twin paradox . All the physicists mean here is that time is different in different reference
frames that are moving relative to each other; they need not be promoting the dynamic theory over the
static theory.
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Physicists sometimes carelessly speak of time flowing in yet another sensewhen what they mean is that
time has an arrow, a direction from the past to the future. But again this is not the sense of flow that
philosophers use when speaking of the dynamic theory of time's flow.
There is no doubt that time seems to pass, so a B-theorist might say the flow is subjectively real but not
objectively real. There surely is some objective feature of our brains, say the critics of the dynamic theories,
that causes us to mistakenly believe we are experiencing a flow of time, such as the objective fact that we
have different perceptions at different times and that anticipations of experiences always happen before
memories of those experiences, but the flow itself is not objectively real.
According to the dynamic theories, the flow of time is objective, a feature of our mind-independent reality.
A dynamic theory is closer to common sense, and has historically been the more popular theory among
philosophers. It is more likely to be adopted by those who believe that McTaggart's A-series is a
fundamental feature of time but his B-series is not.
One dynamic theory implies that the flow is a matter of events changing from being future, to being
present, to being past, and they also change in their degree of pastness and degree of presentness. This kind
of change is often called McTaggart's second-order change to distinguish it from more ordinary, first-order
change as when a leaf changes from a green state to a brown state. For the B-theorist the only proper kind
of change is when different states of affairs obtain at different times.
A second dynamic theory implies that the flow is a matter of events changing from being indeterminate in
the future to being determinate in the present and past. Times flow is really events becoming determinate,
so these dynamic theorists speak of times flow as temporal becoming.
Opponents of these two dynamic theories complain that when events are said to change, the change is not a
real change in the events essential, intrinsic properties, but only in the events relationship to the observer.
For example, saying the death of Queen Anne is an event that changes from present to past is no more of an
objectively real change in her death than saying her death changed from being approved of to being
disapproved of. This extrinsic change in approval does not count as an objectively real change in her death,
and neither does the so-called second-order change from present to past or from indeterminate to
determinate. Attacking the notion of times flow in this manner, Adolf Grnbaum said: Events simply are
or occurbut they do not advance into a pre-existing frame called time. An event does not move and
neither do any of its relations.
A third dynamic theory says time's flow is the coming into existence of facts, the actualization of new states
of affairs; but, unlike the first two dynamic theories, there is no commitment to events changing. This is the
theory of flow that is usually accepted by advocates of presentism.
A fourth dynamic theory suggests the flow is (or is reflected in) the change over time of truth values of
declarative sentences. For example, suppose the sentence, It is now raining, was true during the rain
yesterday but has changed to false on todays sunny day. That's an indication that time flowed from
yesterday to today, and these sorts of truth value changes are at the root of the flow. In response, critics
suggest that the temporal indexical sentence, It is now raining, has no truth value because the reference
of the word now is unspecified. If it can not have a truth value, it can not change its truth value. However,
the sentence is related to a sentence that does have a truth value, the sentence with the temp0ral indexical
replaced by the date that refers to a specific time and with the other indexicals replaced by names of
whatever they refer to. Supposing it is now midnight here on April 1, 2007, and the speaker is in
Sacramento, California, then the indexical sentence, It is now raining, is intimately related to the more
complete or context-explicit sentence, It is raining at midnight on April 1, 2007 in Sacramento, California.
Only these latter, non-indexical, non-context-dependent, complete sentences have truth values, and these
truth values do not change with time so they do not underlie any flow of time. Fully-described events do not
change their properties and so time does not flow because complete or "eternal" sentences do not change
their truth values.
Among B-theorists, Hans Reichenbach has argued that the flow of time is produced by the collapse of the
quantum mechanical wave function. Another dynamic theory is promoted by advocates of the B-theory
who add to the block-universe a flowing present which "spotlights" the block at a particular slice at any time.
This is often called the moving spotlight view.
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John Norton (Norton 2010) argues that time's flow is objective but so far is beyond the reach of our
understanding. Tim Maudlin argues that the objective flow of time is fundamental and unanalyzable. He is
happy to say time does indeed pass at the rate of one hour per hour. (Maudlin 2007, p. 112)
Regardless of how we analyze the metaphor of times flow, it flows in the direction of the future, the
direction of the arrow of time, and we need to analyze this metaphor of time's arrow.
8. What are the Differences among the Past, Present, and

Future?
a. Presentism, the Growing-Past, Eternalism and the Block-Universe
Have dinosaurs slipped out of existence? More generally, we are asking whether the past is part of reality.
How about the future? Philosophers are divided on the question of the reality of the past, present, and
future. (1): According to presentism, if something is real, then it is real now; all and only things that exist
now are real. The presentist maintains that the past and the future are not real, so if a statement about the
past is true, this must be because some present facts make it true. Heraclitus, Duns Scotus, A. N. Prior, and
Ned Markosian are presentists. Presentists belong in the A-camp because presentism implies that being
present is an intrinsic property of an event; it's a property that the event has independent of our being alive
now.
(2): Advocates of a growing-past agree with the presents that the present is special ontologically, but they
argue that, in addition to the present, the past is also real and is growing bigger all the time. C. D. Broad,
Richard Jeffrey, and Michael Tooley have defended this view. They claim the past and present are real, but
the future is not real. William James famously remarked that the future is so unreal that even God cannot
anticipate it. It is not clear whether Aristotle accepted the growing-past theory or accepted a form of
presentism; see (Putnam 1967), p. 244 for commentary.
(3): Proponents of eternalism oppose presentism and the growing-past theory. Bertrand Russell, J. J. C.
Smart, W. V. O. Quine, Adolf Grnbaum, and Paul Horwich object to assigning special ontological status to
the past, the present, or the future. Advocates of eternalism do not deny the reality of the events that we
classify as being in our past, present or future, but they say there is no objective ontological difference
among the past, the present, and the future, just as there is no objective ontological difference among here,
there, and far. Yes, we thank goodness that the threat to our safety is there rather than here, and that it is
past rather than present, but these differences are subjective, being dependent on our point of view. The
classification of events into past, or present, or future is a subjective classification, not an objective one.
Eternalism is closely associated with the block-universe theory and so is four-dimensionalism. Fourdimensionalism implies that the ontologically basic (that is, fundamental) objects in the universe are fourdimensional rather than three-dimensional. Here, time is treated as being somewhat like a fourth
dimension of space, though strictly speaking time is not a dimension of space. On the block theory, time is
like a very special extra dimension of space, as in a Minkowski diagram, and for this reason the block theory is
said to promote the spatialization of time. If time has an infinite future or infinite past, or if space has an
infinite extent, then the block is infinitely large along those dimensions.
The block-universe theory implies that reality is a single block of spacetime with its time slices (planes of
simultaneous events) ordered by the happens-before relation. Four-dimensionalism adds that every object
that lasts longer than an instant is in fact a four-dimensional object with an infinite number of time-slices
or temporal parts. Adults are composed of their infancy time-slices, plus their childhood time-slices, plus
their teenage time-slices, and so forth.
The block itself has no distinguished past, present, and future, but any chosen reference frame has its own
past, present, and future. The future, by the way, is the actual future, not all possible futures. William
James coined the term block-universe. The growing-past theory is also called the growing-block theory.
All three ontologies about the past, present, and future agree that we only ever experience the present. One
of the major issues for presentism is how to ground true propositions about the past. What makes it true
that U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated? Some presentists will say what makes it true are
only features of the present way things are, but other presentists will say that true propositions about the
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past are made true by abstract times, objects, events, persons, and so forth. A second issue is that the
presentist must account for causation, for the fact that April showers caused May flowers. Effects happen
after their causes. A survey of defenses of presentism can be found in (Markosian 2003), but opponents of
presentism need to be careful not to beg the question.
The presentist and the advocate of the growing-past will usually unite in opposition to eternalism on three
grounds: (i) The present is so much more vivid to a conscious being than are memories of past experiences
and expectations of future experiences. (No one can stand outside time and compare the vividness of
present experience with the vividness of future experience and past experience.) (ii) Eternalism misses the
special open and changeable character of the future. In the block-universe, which is the ontological
theory promoted by most eternalists, there is only one future, so this implies the future exists already, but
we know this determinsm and its denial of free will is incorrect. (iii) A present event "moves" in the sense
that a moment later it is no longer present, having lost its property of presentness.
The counter from the defenders of eternalism and the block-universe is that, regarding (i), the now is
significant but not objectively real. Regarding (ii) and the open future, the block theory allows determinism
and fatalism but does not require either one. Eventually there will be one future, regardless of whether that
future is now open or closed, and that is what constitutes the future portion of the block. Finally, don't we
all fear impending doom? But according to presentism and the growing-block theory, why should we have
this fear if the doom is known not to exist? The best philosophy of time will not make our different attitudes
toward future and past danger be so mysterious.
The advocates of the block-universe attack both presentism and the growing-past theory by claiming that
only the block-universe can make sense of the special theory of relativitys implication that, if persons A
and B are separated but in relative motion, an event in person As present can be in person Bs future, yet
this implies that advocates of presentism and the growing-past theories must suppose that this event is
both real and unreal because it is real for A but not real for B. Surely that conclusion is unacceptable, claim
the eternalists. Two key assumptions of the block theory here are, first, that relativity does provide an
accurate account of the spatiotemporal relations among events, and, second, that if there is some frame of
reference in which two events are simultaneous, then if one of the events is real, so is the other.
Opponents of the block-universe counter that block theory does not provide an accurate account of the way
things are because the block theory considers the present to be subjective, and not part of objective reality,
yet the present is known to be part of objective reality. If science doesn't use the concept of the present in its
basic laws, then this is one of science's faults. For a review of the argument from relativity against
presentism, and for criticisms of the block theory, see (Putnam 1967) and (Saunders 2002).
b. Is the Present, the Now, Objectively Real?

A calendar does not tell us which day is the present day. The calendar leaves out the "now." All philosophers
agree that we would be missing some important information if we did not know what time it is now, but
these philosophers disagree over just what sort of information this is. Proponents of the objectivity of the
present are committed to claiming the universe would have a present even if there were no conscious
beings. This claim is controversial. For example, in 1915, Bertrand Russell objected to giving the present
any special ontological standing:
In a world in which there was no experience, there would be no past, present, or future, but there might
well be earlier and later. (Russell 1915, p. 212)
The debate about whether the present is objectively real is intimately related to the metaphysical dispute
between McTaggart's A-theory and B-theory. The B-theory implies that the present is either non-existent or
else mind-dependent, whereas the A-theory does not. The principal argument for believing in the
objectivity of the now is that the now is so vivid to everyone; the present stands out specially among all
times. If science doesn't explain this vividness, then there is a defect within science. A second argument
points out that there is so much agreement among people around us about what is happening now and
what is not. So, isn't that a sign that the concept of the now is objective, not subjective, and existent rather
than non-existent? A third argument for objectivity of the now is that when we examine ordinary language
we find evidence that a belief in the now is ingrained in our language. Notice all the present-tensed
terminology in the English language. It is unlikely that it would be so ingrained if it were not correct to
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believe it.
One criticism of the first argument, the argument from vividness, is that the now is vivid but so is the
"here," yet we don't conclude from this that the here is somehow objective geographically. Why then
assume that the vividness of the now points to it being objective temporally? A second criticism is that we
cannot now step outside our present experience and compare its vividness with experience now of future
time and past times. What is being compared when we speak of "vividness" is our present experience with
our memories and expectations.
A third criticism of the first argument regarding vividness points out that there are empirical studies by
cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists showing that our judgment about what is vividly happening
now is plastic and can be affected by our expectations and by what other experiences we are having at the
time. For example, we see and hear a woman speaking to us from across the room; then we construct an
artificial now in which hearing her speak and seeing her speak happen at the same time, whereas the
acoustic engineer tells us we are mistaken because the sound traveled much slower than the light.
According to McTaggart's A-camp, there is a global now shared by all of us. The B-camp disagrees and says
this belief is a product of our falsely supposing that everything we see is happening now; we are not
factoring in the finite speed of light. Proponents of the subjectivity of the present frequently claim that a
proper analysis of time talk should treat the phrases "the present" and "now" as indexical terms which refer
to the time at which the phrases are uttered or written by the speaker, so their relativity to us speakers
shows the essential subjectivity of the present. The main positive argument for subjectivity, and against the
A-camp, appeals to the relativity of simultaneity, a feature of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity of
1905. The argument points out that in this theory there is a block of space-time in which past events are
separated from future events by a plane or "time slice" of simultaneous, presently-occurring
instantaneous events, but this time slice is different in different reference frames . For example, take a
reference frame in which you and I are not moving relative to each other; then we will easily agree on what
is happening nowthat is, on the 'now' slice of spacetimebecause our clocks tick at the same rate. Not so
for someone moving relative to us. If that other person is far enough away from us (that any causal
influence of Beethoven's death couldn't have reached that person) and is moving fast enough away from
us, then that person might truly say that Beethoven's death is occurring now! Yet if that person were
moving rapidly towards us, they might truly say that our future death is happening now. Because the
present is frame relative, the A-camp proponent of an objective now must select a frame and thus one of
these different planes of simultaneous events as being "what's really happening now," but surely any such
choice is just arbitrary, or so Einstein would say. Therefore, if we aren't going to reject Einstein's
interpretation of his theory of special relativity, then we should reject the objectivity of the now. Instead we
should think of every event as having its own past and future, with its present being all events that are
simultaneous with it. For further discussion of this issue see (Butterfield 1984).
There are interesting issues about the now even in theology. Norman Kretzmann has argued that if God is
omniscient, then He knows what time it is, and so must always be changing. Therefore, there is an
incompatibility between God's being omniscient and God's being immutable.
c. Persist, Endure, Perdure, and Four-Dimensionalism

Some objects last longer than others. They persist longer. But there is philosophical disagreement about
how to understand persistence. Objects considered four-dimensionally are said to persist by perduring
rather than enduring. Think of events and processes as being four-dimensional. The more familiar threedimensional objects such as chairs and people are usually considered to exist wholly at a single time and are
said to persist by enduring through time. Advocates of four-dimensionalism endorse perduring objects
rather than enduring objects as the metaphysically basic entities. All events, processes and other physical
objects are four-dimensional sub-blocks of the block-universe. The perduring object persists by being the
sum or fusion of a series of its temporal parts (also called its temporal stages and temporal slices and time
slices). For example, a middle-aged man can be considered to be a four-dimensional perduring object
consisting of his childhood, his middle age and his future old age. These are three of his infinitely many
temporal parts.
One argument against four-dimensionalism is that it allows an object to have too many temporal parts.
Four-dimensionalism implies that, during every second in which an object exists, there are at least as many
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temporal parts of the object as there are sub-intervals of the mathematical line in the interval from zero to
one. According to (Thomson 1983), this is too many parts for any object to have. Thomson also says that as
the present moves along, present temporal parts move into the past and go out of existence while some
future temporal parts "pop" into existence, and she complains that this popping in and out of existence is
implausible. The four-dimensionalist can respond to these complaints by remarking that the present
temporal parts do not go out of existence when they are no longer in the present; instead, they simply do
not presently exist. Similarly dinosaurs have not popped out of existence; they simply do not exist
presently.
According to David Lewis in On the Plurality of Worlds, the primary argument for perdurantism is that it
has an easy time of solving what he calls the problem of temporary intrinsics, of which the Heraclitus
paradox is one example. The Heraclitus Paradox is the problem, first introduced by Heraclitus, of explaining
our not being able to step into the same river twice because the water is different the second time. The
mereological essentialist agrees with Heraclitus, but our common sense says Heraclitus is mistaken. The
advocate of endurance has trouble showing that Heraclitus is mistaken for the following reason: We do not
step into two different rivers, do we? Yet the river has two different intrinsic properties, namely being two
different collections of water; but, by Leibnizs Law of the Indiscernibility of Identicals, identical objects
cannot have different properties. A 4-dimensionalist who advocates perdurance says the proper
metaphysical analysis of the Heraclitus paradox is that we can step into the same river twice by stepping
into two different temporal parts of the same 4-d river. Similarly, we cannot see a football game at a
moment; we can see only a momentary temporal part of the 4-d game. For more discussion of this topic in
metaphysics, see (Carroll and Markosian 2010, pp. 173-7).
Eternalism differs from 4-dimensionalism. Eternalism says the present, past, and future are equally real,
whereas 4-dimensionalism says the basic objects are 4-dimensional. Most 4-dimensionalists accept
eternalism and four-dimensionalism and McTaggart's B-theory.
One of A. N. Priors criticisms of the B-theory involves the reasonableness of our saying of some painful,
past event, Thank goodness that is over. Prior says the B-theorist cannot explain this reasonableness
because no B-theorist should thank goodness that the end of their pain happens before their present
utterance of "Thank goodness that is over," since that B-fact or B-relationship is timeless or tenseless; it has
always held and always will. The only way then to make sense of our saying Thank goodness that is over is
to assume we are thankful for the A-fact that the pain event has pastness. But if so, then the A-theory is
correct and the B-theory is incorrect.
One B-theorist response is discussed in a later section, but another response is simply to disagree with Prior
that it is improper for a B-theorist to thank goodness that the end of their pain happens before their present
utterance, even though this is an eternal B-fact. Still another response from the B-theorist comes from the
4-dimensionalist who says that as 4-dimensional beings it is proper for us to care more about our later
time-slices than our earlier time-slices. If so, then it is reasonable to thank goodness that the time slice at
the end of the pain occurs before the time slice that is saying, "Thank goodness that is over." Admittedly
this is caring about an eternal B-fact. So Priors premise [that the only way to make sense of our saying
Thank goodness that is over is to assume we are thankful for the A-fact that the pain event has pastness]
is a faulty premise, and Priors argument for the A-theory is invalid.
Four-dimensionalism has implications for the philosophical problem of personal identity. According to
four-dimensionalism, you as a teenager and you as a child are not the same person but rather are two
different parts of one 4-dimensional person.
d. Truth Values and Free Will

The philosophical dispute about presentism, the growing-past theory, and the block theory or eternalism
has taken a linguistic turn by focusing upon a question about language: Are predictions true or false at the
time they are uttered? Those who believe in the block-universe (and thus in the determinate reality of the
future) will answer Yes while a No will be given by presentists and advocates of the growing-past. The
issue is whether contingent sentences uttered now about future events are true or false now rather than
true or false only in the future at the time the predicted event is supposed to occur.
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Suppose someone says, Tomorrow the admiral will start a sea battle. And suppose that tomorrow the
admiral orders a sneak attack on the enemy ships which starts a sea battle. Advocates of the block-universe
argue that, if so, then the above quoted sentence was true at the time it was uttered. Truth is eternal or
fixed, they say, and is true is a tenseless predicate, not one that merely says is true now. These
philosophers point favorably to the ancient Greek philosopher Chrysippus who was convinced that a
contingent sentence about the future is true or false. If so, the sentence cannot have any other value such
as indeterminate or "neither true or false now." Many other philosophers, usually in McTaggart's B-camp,
agree with Aristotle's suggestion that the sentence is not true until it can be known to be true, namely at the
time at which the sea battle occurs. The sentence was not true before the battle occurred. In other words,
predictions have no (classical) truth values at the time they are uttered. Predictions fall into the truth value
gap. This position that contingent sentences have no classical truth values is called the Aristotelian
position because many researchers throughout history have taken Aristotle to be holding the position in
chapter 9 of On Interpretationalthough today it is not so clear that Aristotle himself held the position.
The principal motive for adopting the Aristotelian position arises from the belief that if sentences about
future human actions are now true, then humans are determined to perform those actions, and so humans
have no free will. To defend free will, we must deny truth values to predictions.
This Aristotelian argument against predictions being true or false has been discussed as much as any in the
history of philosophy, and it faces a series of challenges. First, if there really is no free will, or if free will is
compatible with determinism, then the motivation to deny truth values to predictions is undermined.
Second, according to the compatibilist, your choices affect the world, and if it is true that you will perform
an action in the future, it does not follow that now you will not perform it freely, nor that you are not free to
do otherwise if your intentions are different, but only that you will not do otherwise. For more on this point
about modal logic, see Foreknowledge and Free Will.
A third challenge, from Quine and others, claims the Aristotelian position wreaks havoc with the logical
system we use to reason and argue with predictions. For example, here is a deductively valid argument:
There will be a sea battle tomorrow.
If there will be a sea battle tomorrow, then we should wake up the admiral.
So, we should wake up the admiral.
Without the premises in this argument having truth values, that is, being true or false, we cannot properly
assess the argument using the usual standards of deductive validity because this standard is about the
relationships among truth values of the component sentencesthat a valid argument is one in which it is
impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion to be false. Unfortunately, the Aristotelian
position says that some of these component sentences are neither true nor false, so Aristotles position is
implausible.
In reaction to this third challenge, proponents of the Aristotelian argument claim that if Quine would
embrace tensed propositions and expand his classical logic to a tense logic, he could avoid those difficulties
in assessing the validity of arguments that involve sentences having future tense.
Quine has claimed that the analysts of our talk involving time should in principle be able to eliminate the
temporal indexical words such as "now" and "tomorrow" because their removal is needed for fixed truth and
falsity of our sentences [fixed in the sense of being eternal sentences whose truth values are not relative to
the situation because the indexicals and indicator words have been replaced by times, places and names,
and whose verbs are treated as tenseless], and having fixed truth values is crucial for the logical system
used to clarify science. To formulate logical laws in such a way as not to depend thus upon the assumption
of fixed truth and falsity would be decidedly awkward and complicated, and wholly unrewarding, says
Quine.
Philosophers are still divided on the issues of whether only the present is real, what sort of deductive logic
to use for reasoning about time, and whether future contingent sentences have truth values.
9. Are There Essentially-Tensed Facts?

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Using a tensed verb is a grammatical way of locating an event in time. All the worlds cultures have a
conception of time, but in only half the worlds languages is the ordering of events expressed in the form of
grammatical tenses. For example, the Chinese, Burmese and Malay languages do not have any tenses. The
English language expresses conceptions of time with tensed verbs but also in other ways, such as with the
adverbial time phrases now and twenty-three days ago, and with the adjective phrases "brand-new" and
"ancient," and with the prepositions "until" and "since." Philosophers have asked what we are basically
committed to when we use tense to locate an event in the past, in the present, or in the future.
There are two principal answers or theories. One is that tense distinctions represent objective features of
reality that are not captured by eternalism and the block-universe approach. This theory is said to "take tense
seriously" and is called the tensed theory of time, or the A-theory. This theory claims that when we learn the
truth values of certain tensed sentences we obtain knowledge that tenseless sentences do not provide, for
example, that such and such a time is the present time. Perhaps the tenseless theory rather than the tensed
theory can be more useful for explaining human behavior than a tensed theory. Tenses are the same as
positions in McTaggart's A-series, so the tensed theory is commonly associated with the A-camp that was
discussed earlier in this article.
A second, contrary answer to the question of the significance of tenses is that tenses are merely subjective
features of the perspective from which the speaking subject views the universe. Using a tensed verb is a
grammatical way, not of locating an event in the A-series, but rather of locating the event in time relative to
the time that the verb is uttered or written. Actually this philosophical disagreement is not just about tenses
in the grammatical sense. It is primarily about the significance of the distinctions of past, present, and
future which those tenses are used to mark. The main metaphysical disagreement is about whether times
and events have non-relational properties of pastness, presentness, and futurity. Does an event have or not
have the property of, say, pastness independent of the event's relation to us and our temporal location?
On the tenseless theory of time, or the B-theory, whether the death of U. S. Lieutenant Colonel George
Armstrong Custer occurred here depends on the speakers relation to the death event (Is the speaker
standing at the battle site in Montana?); similarly, whether the death occurs now is equally subjective (Is it
now 1876 for the speaker?). The proponent of the tenseless view does not deny the importance or
coherence of talk about the past, but will say it should be analyzed in terms of talk about the speaker's
relation to events. My assertion that the event of Custer's death occurred in the past might be analyzed by
the B-theorist as asserting that Custer's death event happens before the event of my writing this sentence.
This latter assertion does not explicitly use the past tense. According to the classical B-theorist, the use of
tense is an extraneous and eliminable feature of language, as is all use of the terminology of the A-series.
This controversy is often presented as a dispute about whether tensed facts exist, with advocates of the
tenseless theory objecting to tensed facts and advocates of the tensed theory promoting them as essential.
The primary function of tensed facts is to make tensed sentences true. For the purposes of explaining this
dispute, let us uncritically accept the Correspondence Theory of Truth and apply it to the following sentence:
Custer died in Montana.
If we apply the Correspondence Theory directly to this sentence, then the tensed theory or A-theory implies
The sentence Custer died in Montana is true because it corresponds to the tensed fact that Custer
died in Montana.
The old tenseless theory or B-theory, created by Bertrand Russell (1915), would give a different analysis
without tensed facts. It would say that the Correspondence Theory should be applied only to the result of
first analyzing away tensed sentences into equivalent sentences that do not use tenses. Proponents of this
classical tenseless theory prefer to analyze our sentence Custer died in Montana as having the same
meaning as the following eternal sentence:
There is a time t such that Custer dies in Montana at time t, and time t is before the time of the
writing of the sentence Custer died in Montana by B. Dowden in the article Time in the Internet
Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
In this analysis, the verb dies is logically tenseless (although grammatically it is in the present tense just like
the "is" in "7 plus 5 is 12"). Applying the Correspondence Theory to this new sentence then yields:
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The sentence Custer died in Montana is true because it corresponds to the tenseless fact that there
is a time t such that Custer dies in Montana at time t, and time t is before the time of your reading
the sentence Custer died in Montana by B. Dowden in the article Time in the Internet
Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
This Russell-like analysis is less straight-forward than the analysis offered by the tensed theory, but it does
not use tensed facts.
This B-theory analysis is challenged by proponents of the tensed A-theory on the grounds that it can
succeed only for utterances or readings or inscriptions, but a sentence can be true even if never read or
inscribed. There are other challenges. Roderick Chisholm and A. N. Prior claim that the word is in the
sentence It is now midnight is essentially present tensed because there is no adequate translation using
only tenseless verbs. Trying to analyze it as, say, There is a time t such that t = midnight is to miss the
essential reference to the present in the original sentence because the original sentence is not always true,
but the sentence There is a time t such that t = midnight is always true. So, the tenseless analysis fails.
There is no escape from this criticism by adding and t is now because this last indexical still needs
analysis, and we are starting a vicious regress.
(Prior 1959) supported the tensed A-theory by arguing that after experiencing a painful event,
one says, e.g., Thank goodness thats over, and [this]says something which it is impossible that
any use of a tenseless copula with a date should convey. It certainly doesnt mean the same as, e.g.,
Thank goodness the date of the conclusion of that thing is Friday, June 15, 1954, even if it be said
then. (Nor, for that matter, does it mean Thank goodness the conclusion of that thing is
contemporaneous with this utterance. Why should anyone thank goodness for that?).
D. H. Mellor and J. J. C. Smart agree that tensed talk is important for understanding how we think and
speakthe temporal indexicals are essential, as are other indexicalsbut they claim it is not important for
describing temporal, extra-linguistic reality. They advocate a newer tenseless B-theory by saying the truth
conditions of any tensed declarative sentence can be explained without tensed facts even if Chisholm and
Prior are correct that some tensed sentences in English cannot be translated into tenseless ones. [The truth
conditions of a sentence are the conditions which must be satisfied in the world in order for the sentence to
be true. The sentence "Snow is white" is true on the condition that snow is white. More particularly, it is
true if whatever is referred to by the term 'snow' satisfies the predicate 'is white'. The conditions under
which the conditional sentence "If it's snowing, then it's cold" are true are that it is not both true that it is
snowing and false that it is cold. Other analyses are offered for the truth conditions of sentences that are
more complex grammatically.]
According to the newer B-theory of Mellor and Smart, if I am speaking to you and say, "It is now midnight,"
then this sentence admittedly cannot be translated into tenseless terminology without loss of meaning, but
the truth conditions can be explained with tenseless terminology. The truth conditions of "It is now
midnight" are that my utterance occurs at the same time as your hearing the utterance, which in turn is the
same time as when our standard clock declares the time to be midnight in our reference frame. In brief, it's
true just in case it is uttered at midnight. Notice that no tensed facts are appealed to in the explanation of
those truth conditions. Similarly, an advocate of the new tenseless theory could say it is not the pastness of
the painful event that explains why I say, Thank goodness thats over. I say it because I believe that the
time of the occurrence of that utterance is greater than the time of the occurrence of the painful event, and
because I am glad about this. Of course I'd be even gladder if there were no pain at any time. I may not be
consciously thinking about the time of the utterance when I make it; nevertheless that time is what helps
explain what I am glad about. Notice that appeal to tensed terminology was removed in that explanation.
In addition, it is claimed by Mellor and other new B-theorists that tenseless sentences can be used to
explain the logical relations between tensed sentences: that one tensed sentence implies another, is
inconsistent with yet another, and so forth. Understanding a declarative sentence's truth conditions and its
truth implications and how it behaves in a network of inferences is what we understand whenever we know
the meaning of the sentence. According to this new theory of tenseless time, once it is established that
tensed sentences can be explained without utilizing tensed facts, then Ockhams Razor is applied. If we can
do without essentially-tensed facts, then we should say essentially-tensed facts do not exist. To summarize,
tensed facts were presumed to be needed to account for the truth of tensed talk; but the new B-theory
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analysis shows that ordinary tenseless facts are adequate. The theory concludes that we should not take
seriously metaphysical tenses with their tensed facts because they are not needed for describing the
objective features of the extra-linguistic world. Proponents of the tensed theory of time do not agree with
this conclusion. So, the philosophical debate continues over whether tensed concepts have semantical
priority over untensed concepts, and whether tensed facts have ontological priority over untensed facts.
10. What Gives Time Its Direction or Arrow?

Time's arrow is revealed in the way macroscopic or multi-particle processes tend to go over time, and that
way is the direction toward disarray, the direction toward equilibrium, the direction toward higher entropy.
For example, egg processes always go from unbroken eggs to omelets, never in the direction from omelets
to unbroken eggs. The process of mixing coffee always goes from black coffee and cream toward brown
coffee. You cant unmix brown coffee. We can ring a bell but never un-ring it.
The arrow of a physical process is the way it normally goes, the way it normally unfolds through time. If a
process goes only one-way, we call it an irreversible process; otherwise it is reversible. (Strictly speaking, a
reversible process is one that is reversed by an infinitesimal change of its surrounding conditions, but we
can overlook this fine point because of the general level of the present discussion.) The amalgamation of
the universes irreversible processes produces the cosmic arrow of time, the master arrow. This arrow of
time is the same for all of us. Usually this arrow is what is meant when one speaks of times arrow. So,
time's arrow indicates directed processes in time, and the arrow may or may not have anything to do with
the flow of time.
Because so many of the physical processes that we commonly observe do have an arrow, you might think
that an inspection of the basic micro-physical laws would readily reveal times arrow. It will not. With some
exceptions, such as the collapse of the quantum mechanical wave function and the decay of a B meson, all
the basic laws of fundamental processes are time symmetric. A process that is time symmetric can go
forward or backward in time; the laws allow both. Maxwells equations of electromagnetism, for example,
can be used to predict that television signals can exist, but these equations do not tell us whether those
signals arrive before or arrive after they are transmitted. In other words, the basic laws of science, its
fundamental laws, do not by themselves imply an arrow of time. Something else must tell us why television
signals are emitted from, but not absorbed into, TV antennas and why omelets don't turn into whole,
unbroken eggs. The existence of the arrow of time is not derivable from the basic laws of science but is due
to entropy, to the fact that entropy goes from low to high and not the other way. But, as we will see in a
moment, it is not clear why entropy behaves this way. So, how to explain the arrow is still an open question
in science and philosophy.
a. Time without an Arrow

Time could exist in a universe that had no arrow, provided there was change in the universe. However, that
change needs to be random change in which processes happen one way sometimes and the reverse way at
other times. The second law of thermodynamics would fail in such a universe.
b. What Needs to be Explained

There are many goals for a fully developed theory of times arrow. It should tell us (1) why time has an
arrow; (2) why the basic laws of science do not reveal the arrow, (3) how the arrow is connected with
entropy, (4) why the arrow is apparent in macro processes but not micro processes; (5) why the entropy of a
closed system increases in the future rather than decreases even though the decrease is physically possible
given current basic laws; (6) what it would be like for our arrow of time to reverse direction; (7) what are the
characteristics of a physical theory that would pick out a preferred direction in time; (8) what the
relationships are among the various more specific arrows of timethe various kinds of temporally
asymmetric processes such as a B meson decay [the B-meson arrow], the collapse of the wave function [the
quantum mechanical arrow], entropy increases [the thermodynamic arrow], causes preceding their effects
[the causal arrow], light radiating away from hot objects rather than converging into them [the
electromagnetic arrow], and our knowing the past more easily than the future [the knowledge arrow].
c. Explanations or Theories of the Arrow

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There are three principal explanations of the arrow: (i) it is a product of one-way entropy flow which in turn
is due to the initial conditions of the universe, (ii) it is a product of one-way entropy flow which in turn is
due to some as yet unknown asymmetrical laws of nature, (iii) it is a product of causation which itself is
asymmetrical.
Leibniz first proposed (iii), the so-called causal theory of time's order. Hans Reichenbach developed the
idea in detail in 1928. He suggested that event A happens before event B if A could have caused B but B
could not have caused A. The usefulness of this causal theory depends on a clarification of the notorious
notions of causality and possibility without producing a circular explanation that presupposes an
understanding of time order.
21st century physicists generally favor explanation (i). They say the most likely explanation of the
emergence of an arrow of time in a world with time-blind basic laws is that the arrow is a product of the
direction of entropy change. A leading suggestion is that this directedness of entropy change is due to
increasing quantum entanglement plus the low-entropy state of the universe at the time of our Big Bang.
Unfortunately there is no known explanation of why the entropy was so low at the time of our Big Bang.
Some say the initially low entropy is just a brute fact with no more fundamental explanation. Others say it is
due to as yet undiscovered basic laws that are time-asymmetric. And still others say it must be the product
of the way the universe was before our Big Bang.
Before saying more about quantum entanglement let's describe entropy. There are many useful definitions
of entropy. On one definition, it is a measure inversely related to the energy available for work in a physical
system. According to another definition, the entropy of a physical system that is isolated from external
influences is a measure [specifically, the logarithm] of how many microstates are macroscopically
indistinguishable. Less formally, entropy is a measure of how disordered or "messy" or "run down" a closed
system is. More entropy implies more disorganization. Changes toward disorganization are so much more
frequent than changes toward more organization because there are so many more ways for a closed system
to be disorganized than for it to be organized. For example, there are so many more ways for the air
molecules in an otherwise empty room to be scattered about evenly throughout the room giving it a
uniform air density than there are ways for there to be a concentration of air within a sphere near the floor
while the rest of the room is a vacuum. According to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, which is not one of
our basic or fundamental laws of science, entropy in an isolated system or region never decreases in the
future and almost always increases toward a state of equilibrium. Although Sadi Carnot discovered a
version of the second law in 1824, Rudolf Clausius invented the concept of entropy and expressed the law
in terms of heat. However, Ludwig Boltzmann generalized this work, expressed the law in terms of a more
sophisticated concept of entropy involving atoms and their arrangements, and also tried to explain the law
statistically as being due to the fact that there are so many more ways for a system of atoms to have
arrangements with high entropy than arrangements with low entropy. This is why entropy flows from low
to high naturally.
For example, if you float ice cubes in hot coffee, why do you end up with lukewarm coffee if you dont
interfere with this coffee-ice-cube system? And why doesnt lukewarm coffee ever spontaneously turn into
hot coffee with ice cubes? The answer from Boltzmann is that the number of macroscopically
indistinguishable arrangements of the atoms in the system that appear to us as lukewarm coffee is so very
much greater than the number of macroscopically indistinguishable arrangements of the atoms in the
system that appear to us as ice cubes floating in the hot coffee. It is all about probabilities of arrangements
of the atoms.
Whats really going on [with the arrow of time pointing in the direction of equilibrium] is things are
becoming more correlated with each other, M.I.T. professor Seth Lloyd said. He was the first person to
suggest that the arrow of time in any process is an arrow of increasing correlations as the particles in that
process become more entangled with neighboring particles.
Said more simply and without mentioning entanglement, the change in entropy of a system that is not yet
in equilibrium is a one-way street toward greater disorganization and less useful forms of energy. For
example, when a car burns gasoline, the entropy increase is evident in the fact that the new heat energy
distributed throughout the byproducts of the gasoline combustion is much less useful than was the
potential chemical energy in the pre-combustion gasoline. The entropy of our universe, conceived of as the
largest isolated system, has been increasing for the last 13.8 billion years and will continue to do so for a
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very long time. At the time of the Big Bang, our universe was in a highly organized, low-entropy, nonequilibrium state, and it has been running down and getting more disorganized ever since. This running
down is the cosmic arrow of time.
According to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, if an isolated system is not in equilibrium and has a great
many particles, then it is overwhelmingly likely that the system's entropy will increase in the future. This
2nd law is universal but not fundamental because it apparently can be explained in terms of the behavior of
the atoms making up the system. Ludwig Boltzmann was the first person to claim to have deduced the
macroscopic 2nd law from reversible microscopic laws of Newtonian physics. Yet it seems too odd, said
Joseph Loschmidt, that a one-way macroscopic process can be deduced from two-way microscopic
processes. In 1876, Loschmidt argued that if you look at our present state (the black dot in the diagram
below), then you ought to deduce from the basic laws (assuming you have no knowledge that the universe
actually had lower entropy in the past) that it evolved not from a state of low entropy in the past, but from a
state of higher entropy in the past, which of course is not at all what we know our past to be like. The
difficulty is displayed in the diagram below.
Yet we know our universe is an isolated system by definition, and we have good observational evidence that
it surely did not have high entropy in the pastat least not in the past that is between now and the Big Bang
so the actual low value of entropy in the past is puzzling. Sean Carroll (2010) offers a simple illustration of
the puzzle. If you found a half-melted ice cube in an isolated glass of water (analogous to the black dot in
the diagram), and all you otherwise knew about the universe is that it obeys our current, basic timereversible laws and you knew nothing about its low entropy past, then you'd infer, not surprisingly, that the
ice cube would melt into a liquid in the future (solid green line). But, more surprisingly, you also would
infer that your glass evolved from a state of liquid water (dashed red line). You would not infer that the
present half-melted state evolved from a state where the glass had a solid ice cube in it (dashed green line).
To infer the solid cube you would need to appeal to your empirical experience of how processes are working
around you, but you'd not infer the solid cube if all you had to work with were the basic time-reversible
laws. To solve this so-called Loschmidt Paradox for the cosmos as a whole, and to predict the dashed green
line rather than the dashed red line, physicists have suggested it is necessary to adopt the Past Hypothesis
that the universe at the time of the Big Bang was in a state of very low entropy. Using this Past Hypothesis,
the most probable history of the universe over the last 13.8 billion years is one in which entropy increases.
Can the Past Hypothesis be justified from other principles? Some physicists (for example, Richard
Feynman) and philosophers (for example, Craig Callender) say the initial low entropy may simply be a
brute factthat is, there is no causal explanation for the initial low entropy. Objecting to inexplicable initial
facts as being unacceptably ad hoc, the physicists Walther Ritz and Roger Penrose say we need to keep
looking for basic, time-asymmetrical laws that will account for the initial low entropy and thus for times
arrow. A third perspective on the Past Hypothesis is that perhaps a future theory of quantum gravity will
provide a justification of the Hypothesis. A fourth perspective appeals to God's having designed the Big
Bang to start with low entropy. A fifth perspective appeals to the anthropic principle and the many-worlds
interpretation of quantum mechanics in order to argue that since there exist so many universes with
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different initial entropies, there had to be one universe like our particular universe with its initial low
entropyand that is the only reason why our universe had low entropy initially.
d. Multiple Arrows
The past and future are different in many ways that reflect the arrow of time. Consider the difference
between times arrow and times arrows. The direction of entropy change is the thermodynamic arrow.
Here are some suggestions for additional arrows:
1. We remember last week, not next week.
2. There is evidence of the past but not of the future.
3. Our present actions affect the future and not the past.
4. It is easier to know the past than to know the future.
5. Radio waves spread out from the antenna, but never converge into it.
6. The universe expands in volume rather than shrinks.
7. Causes precede their effects.
8. We see black holes but never white holes.
9. B meson decay, neutral kaon decay, and Higgs boson decay are each different in a time reversed world.
10. Quantum mechanical measurement collapses the wave function.
11. Possibilities decrease as time goes on.
Most physicists suspect all these arrows are linked so that we can not have some arrows reversing while
others do not. For example, the collapse of the wave function is generally considered to be due to an
increase in the entropy of the universe. It is well accepted that entropy increase can account for the fact that
we remember the past but not the future, that effects follow causes rather than precede them, and that
animals grow old and never young. However, whether all the arrows are linked is still an open question.
e. Reversing the Arrow

Could the cosmic arrow of time have gone the other way? Most physicists suspect that the answer is yes,
and they say it could have gone the other way if the initial conditions of the universe at our Big Bang had
been different. Crudely put, if all the particles trajectories and charges are reversed, then the arrow of time
would reverse. Here is a scenario of how it might happen. As our universe evolves closer to a point of
equilibrium and very high entropy, time would lose its unidirectionality. Eventually, though, the universe
could evolve away from equilibrium and perhaps it would evolve so that the directional processes we are
presently familiar with would go in reverse. For example, we would get eggs from omelets very easily, but it
would be too difficult to get omelets from eggs. Fires would absorb light instead of emit light. This new era
would be an era of reversed time, and there would be a vaguely defined period of non-directional time
separating the two eras.
If the cosmic arrow of time were to reverse this way, perhaps our past would be re-created and lived in
reverse order. This re-occurrence of the past is different than the re-living of past events via time travel. With
time travel the past is re-visited in the original order, not in reverse order.
Philosophers have asked interesting questions about the reversal of times arrow. What does it really mean
to say time reverses? Does it require entropy to decrease on average in closed systems? If time were to
reverse only in some far off corner of the universe, but not in our region of the universe, would dead people
there become undead, and would the people there walk backwards up steps while remembering the
future? First off, would it even be possible for them to be conscious? Assuming consciousness is caused by
brain processes, could there be consciousness if their nerve pulses reversed, or would this reversal destroy
consciousness? Supposing the answer is that they would be conscious, would people in that far off corner
appear to us to be pre-cognitive if we could communicate with them? Would the feeling of being conscious
be different for time-reversed people? [Here is one suggestion. There is one direction of time they would
remember and call the past, and it would be when the entropy is lower. That is just as it is for us who do
not experience time-reversal.] Consider communication between us and the inhabitants of that far off timereversed region of the universe. If we sent a signal to the time-reversed region, could our message cross the
border, or would it dissolve there, or would it bounce back? If residents of the time-reversed region
successfully sent a recorded film across the border to us, should we play it in the ordinary way or in reverse?
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11. What is Temporal Logic?

Temporal logic is the representation of reasoning about time by using the methods of symbolic logic in
order to formalize which statements (or propositions or sentences) about time imply which others. For
example, in McTaggart's B-series, the most important relation is the happens-before relation on events.
Logicians have asked what sort of principles must this relation obey in order to properly account for our
reasoning about time. Let the two-argument relation B(x,y) be interpreted as "x happens before y" with a
domain of instantaneous events. Now, consider this informally valid reasoning:
Adam's arrival at the train station happened before Bryan's. Therefore, Bryan's arrival at the station did
not happen before Adam's.
Let us translate this into classical predicate logic using a domain of instantaneous events, namely point
events, where the individual constant 'a' denotes Adam's arrival at the train station, and 'b' denotes Bryan's
arrival at the train station. Then we have:
B(a,b)
-----------~B(b,a)
Unfortunately, this formal reasoning is invalid. To show that it is in fact valid, we could make explicit the
implicit premise that the B relation is asymmetric. That is, we need the implicit premise:
xy[B(x,y) ~B(y,x)]
So, we might want to add this principle as an axiom into our temporal logic.
In other informally valid reasoning, we discover a need to make even more assumptions about the
happens-before relation. Suppose Adam arrived at the train station before Bryan, and suppose Bryan
arrived before Charles. Is it valid reasoning to infer that Adam arrived before Charles? Yes, but if we
translate directly into classical predicate logic we get this invalid argument:
B(a,b)
B(b,c)
--------B(a,c)
To make this argument be valid we need the implicit premise that says the happens-before relation is
transitive, that is:
xyz [(B(x,y) & B(y,z)) B(x,z)]
What other constraints should be placed on the B relation (when it is to be interpreted as the happensbefore relation)? Logicians have offered many suggestions: that B is irreflexive, that in any reference frame
any two events are related somehow by the B relation (there are no disconnected pairs of events), that B is
dense in the sense that there is a third point event between any two point events that are not simultaneous,
and so forth.
The more classical approach to temporal logic, however, does not add premises to arguments in classical
predicate logic as we have just been doing. Instead it is via tense logic, a formalism that adds tense operators
on propositions of propositional logic. The pioneer in the late 1950s was A. N. Prior. He created a new
symbolic logic to describe our reasoning involving time phrases such as now, happens before, twentythree minutes afterwards, at all times, and sometimes. He hoped that a precise, formal treatment of
these concepts could lead to resolution of some of the controversial philosophical issues about time. Prior
begins with an important assumption: that a proposition such as Custer dies in Montana can be true at
one time and false at another time. That assumption is challenged by some philosophers, such as W.V.
Quine, who prefer to avoid use of this sort of proposition and who recommend that temporal logics use only
sentences that are timelessly true or timelessly false, and that have no indexicals whose reference can shift
from one context to another.
Prior's main original idea was to appreciate that time concepts are similar in structure to modal concepts
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such as it is possible that and it is necessary that. He adapted modal propositional logic for his tense
logic. Michael Dummett and E. J. Lemmon also made major, early contributions to tense logic. One
standard system of tense logic is a variant of the S4.3 system of modal logic. In this formal tense logic, the
modal operator that is interpreted to mean it is possible that is re-interpreted to mean at some past time
it was the case that or, equivalently, it once was the case that, or "it once was that." Let the capital letter
'P' represent this operator. P will operate on present-tensed propositions, such as p. If p represents the
proposition Custer dies in Montana, then Pp says Custer died in Montana. If Prior can make do with the
variable p ranging only over present-tensed propositions, then he may have found a way to eliminate any
ontological commitment to non-present entities such as dinosaurs while preserving the possibility of true
past tense propositions such as "There were dinosaurs."
Prior added to the axioms of classical propositional logic the axiom P(p v q) (Pp v Pq). The axiom says that
for any two propositions p and q, at some past time it was the case that p or q if and only if either at some
past time it was the case that p or at some past time (perhaps a different past time) it was the case that q.
If p is the proposition Custer dies in Montana and q is Sitting Bull dies in Montana, then
P(p v q) (Pp v Pq)
says
Custer or Sitting Bull died in Montana if and only if either Custer died in Montana or Sitting Bull died in
Montana.
The S4.3 systems key axiom is the equivalence, for all propositions p and q,
Pp & Pq [P(p & q) v P(p & Pq) v P(q & Pp)].
This axiom when interpreted in tense logic captures part of our ordinary conception of time as a linear
succession of states of the world.
Another axiom of tense logic might state that if proposition q is true, then it will always be true that q has
been true at some time. If H is the operator It has always been the case that, then a new axiom might be
Pp ~H~p.
This axiom of tense logic is analogous to the modal logic axiom that p is possible if and only if it is not the
case that it is necessary that not-p.
A tense logic may need additional axioms in order to express q has been true for the past two weeks. Prior
and others have suggested a wide variety of additional axioms for tense logic, but logicians still disagree
about which axioms to accept.
It is controversial whether to add axioms that express the topology of time, for example that it comes to an
end or doesn't come to an end; the reason is that this is an empirical matter, not a matter for logic to settle.
Regarding a semantics for tense logic, Prior had the idea that the truth of a tensed proposition should be
expressed in terms of truth-at-a-time. For example, a modal proposition Pp (it was once the case that p) is
true at a time t if and only if p is true at a time earlier than t. This suggestion has led to an extensive
development of the formal semantics for tense logic.
The concept of being in the past is usually treated by metaphysicians as a predicate that assigns properties
to events, but, in the tense logic just presented, the concept is treated as an operator P upon propositions,
and this difference in treatment is objectionable to some metaphysicians.
The other major approach to temporal logic does not use a tense logic. Instead, it formalizes temporal
reasoning within a first-order logic without modal-like tense operators. One method for developing ideas
about temporal logic is the method of temporal arguments which adds an additional temporal argument to
any predicate involving time in order to indicate how its satisfaction depends on time. A predicate such as
is less than seven does not involve time, but the predicate is resting does, even though both use the
word "is". If the x is resting is represented classically as P(x), where P is a one-argument predicate, then it
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could be represented in temporal logic instead as the two-argument predicate P(x,t), and this would be
interpreted as saying x has property P at time t. P has been changed to a two-argument predicate by adding
a temporal argument. The time variable 't' is treated as a new sort of variable requiring new axioms.
Suggested new axioms allow time to be a dense linear ordering of instantaneous instants or to be
continuous or to have some other structure.
Occasionally the method of temporal arguments uses a special constant symbol, say 'n', to denote now, the
present time. This helps with the translation of common temporal sentences. For example, let Q(t) be
interpreted as Socrates is sitting down at t. The sentence or proposition that Socrates has always been
sitting down may be translated into first-order temporal logic as
(t)[(t < n) Q(t)].
Some temporal logics allow sentences to lack both classical truth-values. The first person to give a clear
presentation of the implications of treating declarative sentences as being neither true nor false was the
Polish logician Jan Lukasiewicz in 1920. To carry out Aristotles suggestion that future contingent
sentences do not yet have truth values, he developed a three-valued symbolic logic, with each grammatical
declarative sentence having the truth-values True, or False, or else Indeterminate [T, F, or I]. Contingent
sentences about the future, such as, "There will be a sea battle tomorrow," are assigned an I value in order
to indicate the indeterminacy of the future. Truth tables for the connectives of propositional logic are
redefined to maintain logical consistency and to maximally preserve our intuitions about truth and
falsehood. See (Haack 1974) for more details about this application of three-valued logic.
Different temporal logics have been created depending on whether one wants to model circular time,
discrete time, time obeying general relativity, the time of ordinary discourse, and so forth. For an
introduction to tense logic and other temporal logics, see (hrstrm and Hasle 1995).
12. Supplements
a. Frequently Asked Questions
The following questions are addressed in the Time Supplement article:
1. What are Instants and Durations?
2. What is an Event?
3. What is a Reference Frame?
4. What is an Inertial Frame?
5. What is Spacetime?
6. What is a Minkowski Diagram?
7. What are the Metric and the Interval?
8. Does the Theory of Relativity Imply Time is Part of Space?
9. Is Time the Fourth Dimension?
10. Is There More Than One Kind of Physical Time?
11. How is Time Relative to the Observer?
12. What is the Relativity of Simultaneity?
13. What is the Conventionality of Simultaneity?
14. What is the Difference Between the Past and the Absolute Past?
15. What is Time Dilation?
16. How does Gravity Affect Time?
17. What Happens to Time Near a Black Hole?
18. What is the Solution to the Twin Paradox (Clock Paradox)?
19. What is the Solution to Zenos Paradoxes?
20. How do Time Coordinates Get Assigned to Points of Spacetime?
21. How do Dates Get Assigned to Actual Events?
22. What is Essential to Being a Clock?
23. What does It Mean for a Clock To Be Accurate?
24. What is Our Standard Clock?
25. Why are Some Standard Clocks Better Than Others?
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b. What Science Requires of Time

What Science Requires of Time
c. Special Relativity: Proper times, Coordinate systems, and Lorentz

Transformations
Proper Times, Coordinate Systems, and Lorentz Transformations (by Andrew Holster)
13. References and Further Reading

Butterfield, Jeremy. Seeing the Present Mind, 93, (1984), pp. 161-76.
Defends the B-camp position on the subjectivity of the present and its not being a global present.
Callender, Craig, and Ralph Edney. Introducing Time, Totem Books, USA, 2001.
A cartoon-style book covering most of the topics in this encyclopedia article in a more elementary way. Each page is two-thirds
graphics and one-third text.
Callender, Craig and Carl Hoefer. Philosophy of Space-Time Physics in The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of
Science, ed. by Peter Machamer and Michael Silberstein, Blackwell Publishers, 2002, pp. 173-98.
Discusses whether it is a fact or a convention that in a reference frame the speed of light going one direction is the same as the
speed coming back.
Callender, Craig. "The Subjectivity of the Present," Chronos, V, 2003-4, pp. 108-126.
Surveys the psychological and neuroscience literature and suggests that the evidence tends to support the claim that our
experience of the "now" is the experience of a subjective property rather than merely of an objective property, and it offers an
interesting explanation of why so many people believe in the objectivity of the present.
Callender, Craig. "The Common Now," Philosophical Issues 18, pp. 339-361 (2008).
Develops the ideas presented in (Callender 2003-4).
Callender, Craig. "Is Time an Illusion?", Scientific American, June, 2010, pp. 58-65.
Explains how the belief that time is fundamental may be an illusion because time emerges from a universe that is basically static.
Carroll, John W. and Ned Markosian. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
This introductory, undergraduate metaphysics textbook contains an excellent chapter introducing the metaphysical issues
involving time, beginning with the McTaggart controversy.
Carroll, Sean. From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, Dutton/Penguin Group, New York,
2010.
Part Three "Entropy and Time's Arrow" provides a very clear explanation of the details of the problems involved with time's
arrow. For an interesting answer to the question of whether any interaction between our part of the universe and a part in
which the arrow of times goes in reverse, see endnote 137 for p. 164.
Carroll, Sean. "Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time," Discover Magazine, Cosmic Variance, online 2011.
Contains the quotation about how the mind reconstructs its story of what is happening "now."
Damasio, Antonio R. Remembering When, Scientific American: Special Edition: A Matter of Time, vol. 287, no. 3,
2002; reprinted in Katzenstein, 2006, pp.34-41.
A look at the brain structures involved in how our mind organizes our experiences into the proper temporal order. Includes a
discussion of Benjamin Libets discovery in the 1970s that the brain events involved in initiating a free choice occur about a third
of a second before we are aware of our making the choice.
Dainton, Barry. Time and Space, Second Edition, McGill-Queens University Press: Ithaca, 2010.
A survey of all the topics in this article, but at a deeper level.
Davies, Paul. About Time: Einsteins Unfinished Revolution, Simon & Schuster, 1995.
An easy to read survey of the impact of the theory of relativity on our understanding of time.
Davies, Paul. How to Build a Time Machine, Viking Penguin, 2002.

A popular exposition of the details behind the possibilities of time travel.
Deutsch, David and Michael Lockwood, The Quantum Physics of Time Travel, Scientific American, pp. 68-74. March
1994.
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An investigation of the puzzle of getting information for free by traveling in time.
Dowden, Bradley. The Metaphysics of Time: A Dialogue, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2009.
An undergraduate textbook in dialogue form that covers most of the topics discussed in this encyclopedia article.
Dummett, Michael. Is Time a Continuum of Instants?, Philosophy, 2000, Cambridge University Press, pp. 497-515.
A constructivist model of time that challenges the idea that time is composed of durationless instants.
Earman, John. Implications of Causal Propagation Outside the Null-Cone," Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 50,
1972, pp. 222-37.
Describes his rocket paradox that challenges time travel to the past.
Grnbaum, Adolf. Relativity and the Atomicity of Becoming, Review of Metaphysics, 1950-51, pp. 143-186.
An attack on the notion of times flow, and a defense of the treatment of time and space as being continua and of physical
processes as being aggregates of point-events. Difficult reading.
Haack, Susan. Deviant Logic, Cambridge University Press, 1974.

Chapter 4 contains a clear account of Aristotles argument (in section 9c of the present article) for truth value gaps, and its
development in Lukasiewiczs three-valued logic.
Hawking, Stephen. The Chronology Protection Hypothesis, Physical Review. D 46, p. 603, 1992.
Reasons for the impossibility of time travel.
Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time, Updated and Expanded Tenth Anniversary Edition, Bantam Books, 1996.
A leading theoretical physicist provides introductory chapters on space and time, black holes, the origin and fate of the universe,
the arrow of time, and time travel. Hawking suggests that perhaps our universe originally had four space dimensions and no
time dimension, and time came into existence when one of the space dimensions evolved into a time dimension. He calls this
space dimension imaginary time.
Horwich, Paul. Asymmetries in Time, The MIT Press, 1987.

A monograph that relates the central problems of time to other problems in metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of
language and philosophy of action.
Katzenstein, Larry, ed. Scientific American Special Edition: A Matter of Time, vol. 16, no. 1, 2006.
A collection of Scientific American articles about time.
Krauss, Lawrence M. and Glenn D. Starkman, The Fate of Life in the Universe, Scientific American Special Edition:
The Once and Future Cosmos, Dec. 2002, pp. 50-57.
Discusses the future of intelligent life and how it might adapt to and survive the expansion of the universe.
Kretzmann, Norman, Omniscience and Immutability, The Journal of Philosophy, July 1966, pp. 409-421.
If God knows what time it is, does this demonstrate that God is not immutable?
Lasky, Ronald C. Time and the Twin Paradox, in Katzenstein, 2006, pp. 21-23.
A short, but careful and authoritative analysis of the twin paradox, with helpful graphs showing how each twin would view his
clock and the other twins clock during the trip. Because of the spaceships changing velocity by turning around, the twin on the
spaceship has a shorter world-line than the Earth-based twin and takes less time than the Earth-based twin.
Le Poidevin, Robin and Murray MacBeath, The Philosophy of Time, Oxford University Press, 1993.
A collection of twelve influential articles on the passage of time, subjective facts, the reality of the future, the unreality of time,
time without change, causal theories of time, time travel, causation, empty time, topology, possible worlds, tense and modality,
direction and possibility, and thought experiments about time. Difficult reading for undergraduates.
Le Poidevin, Robin, Travels in Four Dimensions: The Enigmas of Space and Time, Oxford University Press, 2003.
A philosophical introduction to conceptual questions involving space and time. Suitable for use as an undergraduate textbook
without presupposing any other course in philosophy. There is a de-emphasis on teaching the scientific theories, and an
emphasis on elementary introductions to the relationship of time to change, the implications that different structures for time
have for our understanding of causation, difficulties with Zenos Paradoxes, whether time passes, the nature of the present, and
why time has an arrow. The treatment of time travel says, rather oddly, that time machines disappear and that when a time
machine leaves for 2101, it simply does not exist in the intervening times, as measured from an external reference frame.
Lockwood, Michael, The Labyrinth of Time: Introducing the Universe, Oxford University Press, 2005.
A philosopher of physics presents the implications of contemporary physics for our understanding of time. Chapter 15,
Schrdingers Time-Traveller, presents the Oxford physicist David Deutschs quantum analysis of time travel.
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Markosian, Ned, A Defense of Presentism, in Zimmerman, Dean (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, Vol. 1, Oxford
University Press, 2003.
Maudlin, Tim. The Metaphysics Within Physics, Oxford University Press, 2007.
Chapter 4, On the Passing of Time, defends the dynamic theory of times flow, and argues that the passage of time is
objective.
McTaggart, J. M. E. The Nature of Existence, Cambridge University Press, 1927.

Chapter 33 restates more clearly the arguments that McTaggart presented in 1908 for his A series and B series and how they
should be understood to show that time is unreal. Difficult reading. The argument that a single event is in the past, is present,
and will be future yet it is inconsistent for an event to have more than one of these properties is called "McTaggart's Paradox."
The chapter is renamed "The Unreality of Time," and is reprinted on pp. 23-59 of (LePoidevin and MacBeath 1993).
Mellor, D. H. Real Time II, International Library of Philosophy, 1998.

This monograph presents a subjective theory of tenses. Mellor argues that the truth conditions of any tensed sentence can be
explained without tensed facts.
Mozersky, M. Joshua. "The B-Theory in the Twentieth Century," in A Companion to the Philosophy of Time. Ed. by
Heather Dyke and Adrian Bardon, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2013, pp. 167-182.
A detailed evaluation and defense of the B-Theory.
Nadis, Steve. "Starting Point," Discover, September 2013, pp. 36-41.

Non-technical discussion of the argument by cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin that the past of the multiverse must be finite but its
future must be infinite.
Newton-Smith, W. H. The Structure of Time, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.

A survey of the philosophical issues involving time. It emphasizes the logical and mathematical structure of time.
Norton, John. "Time Really Passes," Humana.Mente: Journal of Philosophical Studies, 13 April 2010.
Argues that "We don't find passage in our present theories and we would like to preserve the vanity that our physical theories
of time have captured all the important facts of time. So we protect our vanity by the stratagem of dismissing passage as an
illusion."
hrstrm, P. and P. F. V. Hasle. Temporal Logic: from Ancient Ideas to Artificial Intelligence. Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 1995.
An elementary introduction to the logic of temporal reasoning.
Perry, John. "The Problem of the Essential Indexical," Nos, 13(1), (1979), pp. 3-21.
Argues that indexicals are essential to what we want to say in natural language; they cannot be eliminated in favor of B-theory
discourse.
Pinker, Steven. The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, Penguin Group, 2007.
Chapter 4 discusses how the conceptions of space and time are expressed in language in a way very different from that
described by either Kant or Newton. Page 189 says that t in only half the worlds languages is the ordering of events expressed
in the form of grammatical tenses. Chinese has no tenses.
Pppel, Ernst. Mindworks: Time and Conscious Experience. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1988.
A neuroscientist explores our experience of time.
Prior, A. N. Thank Goodness Thats Over, Philosophy, 34 (1959), p. 17.

Argues that a tenseless or B-theory of time fails to account for our relief that painful past events are in the past rather than in
the present.
Prior, A. N. Past, Present and Future, Oxford University Press, 1967.

A pioneering work in temporal logic, the symbolic logic of time, which permits propositions to be true at one time and false at
another.
Prior, A. N. Critical Notices: Richard Gale, The Language of Time, Mind, 78, no. 311, 1969, 453-460.
Contains his attack on the attempt to define time in terms of causation.
Prior, A. N. The Notion of the Present, Studium Generale, volume 23, 1970, pp. 245-8.
A brief defense of presentism, the view that the past and the future are not real.
Putnam, Hilary. "Time and Physical Geometry," The Journal of Philosophy, 64 (1967), pp. 240-246.
Comments on whether Aristotle is a presentist and why Aristotle was wrong if Relativity is right.
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Russell, Bertrand. "On the Experience of Time," Monist, 25 (1915), pp. 212-233.
The classical tenseless theory.
Saunders, Simon. "How Relativity Contradicts Presentism," in Time, Reality & Experience edited by Craig Callender,
Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 277-292.
Reviews the arguments for and against the claim that, since the present in the theory of relativity is relative to reference frame,
presentism must be incorrect.
Savitt, Steven F. (ed.). Times Arrows Today: Recent Physical and Philosophical Work on the Direction of Time.
Cambridge University Press, 1995.
A survey of research in this area, presupposing sophisticated knowledge of mathematics and physics.
Sciama, Dennis. Time Paradoxes in Relativity, in The Nature of Time edited by Raymond Flood and Michael
Lockwood, Basil Blackwell, 1986, pp. 6-21.
A good account of the twin paradox.
Shoemaker, Sydney. Time without Change, Journal of Philosophy, 66 (1969), pp. 363-381.
A thought experiment designed to show us circumstances in which the esxistence of changeless intervals in the universe could
be detected.
Sider, Ted. The Stage View and Temporary Intrinsics, The Philosophical Review, 106 (2) (2000), pp. 197-231.
Examines the problem of temporary intrinsics and the pros and cons of four-dimensionalism.
Sklar, Lawrence. Space, Time, and Spacetime, University of California Press, 1976.
Chapter III, Section E discusses general relativity and the problem of substantival spacetime, where Sklar argues that Einsteins
theory does not support Machs views against Newtons interpretations of his bucket experiment; that is, Machs argument
against substantivialism fails.
Sorabji, Richard. Matter, Space, & Motion: Theories in Antiquity and Their Sequel. Cornell University Press, 1988.
Chapter 10 discusses ancient and contemporary accounts of circular time.
Steinhardt, Paul J. "The Inflation Debate: Is the theory at the heart of modern cosmology deeply flawed?" Scientific
American, April, 2011, pp. 36-43.
Argues that the Big Bang Theory with inflation is incorrect and that we need a cyclic cosmology with an eternal series of Big
Bangs and big crunches but with no inflation.
Thomson, Judith Jarvis. "Parthood and Identity across Time," Journal of Philosophy 80, 1983, 201-20.
Argues against four-dimensionalism and its idea of objects having infinitely many temporal parts.
Thorne, Kip S. Black Holes and Time Warps: Einsteins Outrageous Legacy, W. W. Norton & Co., 1994.
Chapter 14 is a popular account of how to use a wormhole to create a time machine.
Van Fraassen, Bas C. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Time and Space, Columbia University Press, 1985.
An advanced undergraduate textbook by an important philosopher of science.
Veneziano, Gabriele. The Myth of the Beginning of Time, Scientific American, May 2004, pp. 54-65, reprinted in
Katzenstein, 2006, pp. 72-81.
An account of string theorys impact on our understanding of times origin. Veneziano hypothesizes that our Big Bang was not
the origin of time but simply the outcome of a preexisting state.
Whitrow. G. J. The Natural Philosophy of Time, Second Edition, Clarendon Press, 1980.
A broad survey of the topic of time and its role in physics, biology, and psychology. Pitched at a higher level than the Davies
books.
Author Information
Bradley Dowden
Email: dowden@csus.edu
California State University, Sacramento
U. S. A.
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a. Time without an Arrow

1. What Should a Philosophical Theory of Time Do?

2. How Is Time Related to Mind?

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were there no organisms, and no teacups if there were no tea drinkers.

a. The Variety of Answers

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b. Time vs. Time

c. Linear and Circular Time

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d. The Extent of Time

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e. Does Time Emerge from Something More Basic?

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f. Time and Conventionality

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4. What Does Science Require of Time?

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5. What Kinds of Time Travel are Possible?

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6. Does Time Require Change? (Relational vs. Substantival

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7. Does Time Flow?

a. McTaggart's A-Series and B-Series

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b. Subjective Flow and Objective Flow

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8. What are the Differences among the Past, Present, and

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b. Is the Present, the Now, Objectively Real?

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c. Persist, Endure, Perdure, and Four-Dimensionalism

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d. Truth Values and Free Will

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9. Are There Essentially-Tensed Facts?

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10. What Gives Time Its Direction or Arrow?

a. Time without an Arrow

b. What Needs to be Explained

c. Explanations or Theories of the Arrow

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e. Reversing the Arrow

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11. What is Temporal Logic?

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b. What Science Requires of Time