Master Thesis Defense by Gillian Keiko Lin Drake

Title:  On the Reality of Time

Abstract: What is time? A seemingly outlandish question. Time is so fundamental to our thoughts, to our lives, to our functioning, it feels odd to ask such an obvious question. But time is anything but a definition or a physical parameter that is agreed up widely in physics. This paper goes through the different fields of physics and looks at the way in which time is treated. The paper then goes into looking into the ways in professors of physics look time and in there is a overall agreement on the view of time in the professional world, and if that matches up with the literature on the history of time in physics. The paper was to look into the questions of fundamental or emergent time and the probabilistic nature of the universe versus the determinism of the universe. Knowing we look at space and not as much at time, even though time is considered to be a fundamental aspect of space. This paper seeks out to look at not just a broad overview of the view of time, but also at the anthropological and philosophical view of time in consideration of how physics are looking at time and therefore at how they can ask the correct questions to discover more. The paper comes to the conclusion that there is less agreement in physics and that the overall view is that physics have an agreement on the nature of time. 

Supervisor:

• Jens Hjorth, University of Copenhagen, Niels Bohr Institute

Censor:

• Steen Hannestad, Aarhus University

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