82.1.15a
November 1982/august 2007
TIME'S ARROW... 
Jean-Michel Laffaille
Patacentre Unilatéral de Recherche Scientifique
Abstract : Reflections about the space and time structure.
Résumé (switch to the
french version) : Réflexions sur la structure de
l'espace et du temps.
Preamble :
The subject is not approached here in traditional
article form, but as a data base where the various reflections are
connected by hypertext links. The interest of such an approach is
through the flexibility it provides to the progressive
structuration of ideas as the research development proceeds.
Documents thus constituted does not have as pretension to reach
directly the physical "Truth", but to propose some possible
frameworks for microscopic physics, at the “ultimate” quantum
level of space-time (and particularly in order to test the
understanding of infinites connected to the renormalization
process). Then, this may require to question back some of our
“usual” concepts, therefore the progressive formulation (which
temporarily mixes old and new interpretations) hardly risks to
contain contradictions. The approach consists to suppose that the
progressive clarification leads afterwards to eliminate those
contradictions.
All constructive comments about this data base (including opposite
arguments) are welcome.
A starting basis :
The notion of time is extremely “blurred” and is “defined” only in
an intuitive way :
• duration : “time interval that a thing lasts” ;
• instant : “very short moment” ;
• moment : “time
distance, short instant” ;
• time : “quantity characterizing
both the duration of phenomena and
the successive instants of their
occurence”.
This kind of “definitions” making selfreference is known to
sometimes raise cumbersome disappointments ; thus mathematicians
were they confronted with questions as : “does it exist a set of all
the sets ?”.
This does not involve that our concept
of time would be devoid of meaning ; thus, whereas it is true
that most of the definitions making selfreference may lead to wrong
argumentations, the theories like the one about hypersets show that
some exist leading to acceptable argumentations [1]. However, this
imposes to us a draconian vigilance about the coherence of such
inferred argumentations. The only existence of relativistic theories would be
sufficient to recall that to us.
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References :
1. see as example : “Les hyperensembles”, J.P. Delahaye, Pour la
Science n° 195, january 1994.
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