Sunday 20 August 2017

spacetime - What grounds the difference between space and time?


We experience space and time very differently. From the point of view of physics, what fundamentally grounds this difference?


Dimensionality (the fact that there are three spatial dimensions but only one temporal) surely cannot be sufficient, as there are tentative proposals among string theories for models with multiple spatial dimensions, and two time dimensions.


One of the most lauded answers in the philosophy of spacetime has to do with the fact that our laws predict temporally, rather than spatially. That is to say, if we are given enough information about the state of the world at one moment, we can predict (quantum considerations aside) the future state of the world. However if we reverse the roles of time and space here, and instead give information about a single point of space for all of time, it seems we cannot predict spatially. Are there equations in physics that can be considered to predict across space (for a given time)?




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