[PhilPhys] Warsaw Spacetime Colloquium: Carlo Rovelli (2 October on Zoom)

[Antonio Vassallo]

(With apologies for cross-posting)

On Friday, 2 October, Carlo Rovelli (Aix-Marseille University) will give a
talk entitled "Why can we decide what we shall do tomorrow, but we cannot
decide what we did yesterday? Time reversibility and the physics of an
agent" (abstract below).

The meeting will take place online on Zoom (16:00-18:00 CET). If you have
not registered yet, you can do so by sending a message to
antonio.vassallo at pw.edu.pl.

The Colloquium is organized by the Philosophy of Physics Group
<https://icfo.ans.pw.edu.pl/en/?page_id=3168> at the International Center
for Formal Ontology (Warsaw University of Technology). The program for the
winter semester can be found here
<https://icfo.ans.pw.edu.pl/en/?page_id=3389>.

ABSTRACT
Much of the confusion in the philosophy of spacetime stems from the failure
to recognize that 'space' and 'time' (and a fortiori 'spacetime') are
layered concepts used to denote a variety of different notions.  I
disentangle the different uses of these words, and discuss what we
understand about the different layers in contemporary physics.  In the
second part of the talk I discuss in particular the arrow of time: the
reason why the past is fixed and the future open. I show that we remember
the past (not the future) and we can affect the future (not the past)
because of the entropy gradient.  Hence the fact that the past is fixed and
the future is open is a macroscopic, statistical, phenomenon.
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