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Is Time Real?

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Direction of Time

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Abstract

We first give a detailed historical analysis of the different representations of change and time. After that we discuss the question of reversibility and irreversibility in the classical and in the quantum world. We shall follow the good practice of going from the simpler to the more complicated.

The editors mourn in deep sorrows the passing away of Marcello Cini, on Oct. 22, 2012. He was brilliant physicist, epistemologist and author. By his writings and “engagement” in social and political issues he had a strong influence upon us and we badly miss him.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Sant’Agostino, La Città di Dio, quoted in [3].

  2. 2.

    The approach reported above at the Bielefeld Conference in 2001 to non relativistic Quantum Mechanics has been further extended [29] to quantum field theory. In this paper it is shown that a coherent development of the original formulation by its founders [30, 31] leads to a formulation of quantum field theory in terms of ensemble averages of the field’s dynamical variables, in which no reference at all is made to the Schrödinger wave functions of “first quantization”. In this formulation the wave particle duality is no longer a puzzling phenomenon. The wave particle duality is instead, in this new perspective, only the manifestation of two complementary aspects (continuity vs. discontinuity) of an intrinsically non-local physical entity (the field) which objectively exists in ordinary three dimensional space.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Fisica, Università La Sapienza, Rome, Italy

    Marcello Cini

  2. INFM, Sez. di Roma, Rome, Italy

    Marcello Cini

Authors
  1. Marcello Cini
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. IAM und HCM, Universität Bonn, Bonn, Germany

    Sergio Albeverio

  2. Fakultät für Physik, Universität Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany

    Philippe Blanchard

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Cini, M. (2014). Is Time Real?. In: Albeverio, S., Blanchard, P. (eds) Direction of Time. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02798-2_1

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