Temporal Direction, Intuitionism and Physics

Abstract

In a recent paper, Nicolas Gisin suggests that by conducting physics with intuitionistic rather than classical mathematics, rich temporality—that is, passage and tense, and specifically the future’s openness—can be incorporated into physics. Physics based on classical mathematics is tenseless and deterministic, and that, so he holds, renders it incongruent with experience. According to Gisin, physics ought to represent the indeterminate nature of reality, and he proposes that intuitionistic mathematics is the key to succeeding in doing so. While I share his insistence on the reality of passage and tense and on the future being real and open, I argue that the amendment he offers does not work. I show that, its attunement to time notwithstanding, intuitionistic mathematics is as tenseless as classical mathematics and that physics is bound to remain tenseless regardless of the math it employs. There is much to learn about tensed time, but the task belongs to phenomenology and not to physics.

Keywords

• direction of time
• time-reversal invariance
• thermodynamics
• statistical mechanics
• metaphysics of time
• presentism