THE LOGICAL CONTRADICTIONS OF THE TIME REVERSIBILITY AND THEIR SOLUTIONS IN PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE OF XX-XXI CENTURIES

Abstract

Introduction: the purpose of this article is to highlight the main difficulties and paradoxes, which connected with the time reversibility and also to research their solutions in the context of philosophy and natural science. The article focus is the main philosophical and scientific ideas of this problem of XX-XXI centuries.Materials and Methods: the base of this article is various developments of Russian and foreign researchers, who researched problem of the time reversibility with different approaches. The main chosen methods are critical analysis of the researched materials and the attempt on this base to synthesize identified contradictions and their solutions.Results: the interim result of this article is the statement that time reversibility is not logically controversial, but it is improbable. It was also noticed that the definition of time reversibility and the definition of time are a problem, therefore the possibility to speak about existing in nature or non-existing of the phenomenon depends on the researcher’s point of view.If we assume the possibility of time reversibility there appear a few paradoxes, which are Gibbs’ paradox, time’s multiplicity, causality leap, dead grandfather paradox.Not only philosophers and scientists were interested in those paradoxes, but also science-fiction writers who offered their own solutions. Today the Edinburg University philosophers and particularly A. Richmond are dealing with the problem, they also created the new direction of the philosophy named time travel philosophy. Richmond’s, his predecessors’ and Russian and foreign colleagues’ developments are presented in the paper; the attempt to find the contradictions in their approaches and the ways of its resolving has been also made.Discussion and conclusions: the main contradictions concerning the time reversibility are not ultimately resolved and still exist as a field for further discussion.

Keywords

• time reversibility
• causality leap
• space-time
• clifford’s word
• time arrow