Penrose News

YES

Einstein

Newton

Maxwell

Someone who solves quantum gravity

Dirac

Richard P. Feynman

Bohr

Schrödinger

Heisenberg

Planck

Pauli

Fermi

Boltzmann

Johannes Kepler

Bose

Someone to cause a paradigm shift in understanding the physics of experience

Lorentz

Emmy Noether

Witten

Someone with high achievement in experimental physics

Someone who convincingly replaces quantum mechanics with a better framework

Poincaré

Stephen Hawking

Tycho Brahe

Demokritos (sp)

Shen Kuo

Ibn al-Haytham

Archimedes

Ernst Mach

Roger Penrose

@121

YES

NO

Different observers may have time's arrows pointing in different directions

Anthropic selection: observers necessarily find themselves in regions with increasing entropy

The arrow reflects brute initial conditions; there is no deeper explanation to be had

Growth of quantum entanglement under unitary dynamics explains thermodynamic irreversibility

Gravitational instability and cosmological expansion generate the observed thermodynamic arrow

Inflationary cosmology dynamically selects special low-entropy initial conditions, explaining the arrow

Entropy increase is emergent from coarse-graining and typicality; no deeper micro-physical asymmetry is needed

Time’s arrow arises from asymmetric boundary conditions at both temporal ends (two-time boundary conditions)

The Past Hypothesis is a fundamental lawlike assumption, and a low-entropy beginning fixes the arrow

Landauer’s principle and information-erasure costs make entropy increase a consequence of information processing constraints

Computational irreversibility and algorithmic complexity growth are the deeper source of the arrow

Penrose’s Weyl curvature hypothesis: near-vanishing initial Weyl curvature sets the gravitational arrow