82.1.15a
November 1982/august 2007
TIME'S ARROW... 
Jean-Michel Laffaille
Centre Régional de Recherche Scientifique
Abstract : Reflections about the space and time structure.
Résumé :
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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