The Physics and Philosophy of Directionless Time

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• Matt Farr (Department of History and Philosophy of Science)
• Wednesday 12 March 2025, 17:30-18:30
• Gatsby Room, Chancellor's Building, Wolfson College, Cambridge, UK, CB3 9BB.

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Stuff happens. It’s hard to think of a more general description of reality.

We think of the universe as beginning in the past and evolving towards the future. However, despite its centrality to our understanding of the world, this picture of time is surprisingly poorly motivated by physics.

This talk sets out the various ways physics suggests time is fundamentally directionless, with no distinction between earlier and later, and no direction in which reality unfolds. This talk will present a philosophical account of directionless time, outlining what it entails about the nature of causality and scientific explanation, and how it relates to our own experience of time, and argue that the view is far less radical than it sounds.

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