Is the Past Hypothesis a Law?

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The past hypothesis is that only one time and the dynamical laws keep being true from moment to moment. So should we really throw them in the same bucket as laws of nature? You just mentioned Einstein. One of the lessons of Einstein is, what's so important about time anyway)? And I know in theory as a quantum gravity, there are views in which what's fundamental, it doesn't even involve space and time. They are emergent features. It's distribution is what determines the dimensionality and the fact that the dimensions can be divided up in a particular way. There are certain best ways of characterizing all of that, systematize all of that.

The founders of statistical mechanics in the 19th century faced an uphill battle to convince their fellow physicists that the laws of thermodynamics could be derived from the random motions of microscopic atoms. This insight turns out to be even more important than they realized: the emergence of patterns characterizing our macroscopic world relies crucially on the increase of entropy over time. Barry Loewer has (in collaboration with David Albert) been developing a theory of the Mentaculus — the probability map of the world — that connects microscopic physics to time, causation, and other familiar features of our experience.

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Barry Loewer received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University. He is currently distinguished professor of philosophy at Rutgers University. His research focuses on the foundations of physics and the metaphysics of laws and chance.

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