Conveners
Plenary Invited Talks
- Ilia Musco (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Rome)
The gravitational mass is a local property of particles like the electric charge, while the inertial mass is the resistance to acceleration, quite a different property. Mach’s principle states that inertial forces should be due to the interaction of a body with all the other masses in the universe. In General Relativity this principle is not fully present and is replaced by the equivalence...
Time has been a constant puzzle for mankind and the development of modern science just served to even more pinpoint the tantalising nature of this concept and its apparent clash with the current physical understanding of the world. In this brief seminar I will try to convey a brief history of time and try to point out foreseeable developments of our understanding of its nature within the...
I will show that if the philosophically dubious absolute elements which Newton introduced when he created dynamics are eliminated, his theory of gravity applied to a model universe leads to a theory of time and its arrow that is a direct consequence of Newton's laws. The arrow, which does not arise from a special condition of low entropy in the early universe that must be imposed in addition...
In this contribution I describe the fundamental tension that characterized Western culture in representing time as being fundamental and emergent, especially in fundamental physics and cosmology. I shall discuss the reasons of the persistence of this tension in current physics and then show why in what appears to be a conflict without resolution there is also a stimulating tool for research.
