[I]t is the statistical state that determines which variable is physical time, and not any a priori hypothetical "flow" that drives the system to a p… - Carlo Rovelli
" "[I]t is the statistical state that determines which variable is physical time, and not any a priori hypothetical "flow" that drives the system to a preferred statistical state. When we say that a certain variable is “the time”, we are not making a statement concerning the fundamental mechanical structure of reality. Rather, we are making a statement about the statistical distribution we use to describe the... properties of the system... The "thermal time hypothesis" is the idea that what we call "time" is the thermal time of the statistical state in which the world happens to be, when described in terms of the macroscopic parameters we have chosen.
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About Carlo Rovelli
Carlo Rovelli (born May 3, 1956) is an Italian physicist and cosmologist working in the field of quantum gravity. In 1988, Carlo Rovelli, Lee Smolin and Abhay Ashtekar introduced a theory of quantum gravity denoted loop quantum gravity.
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Additional quotes by Carlo Rovelli
While non-relativistic time is the observable quantity measured (or approximated) by physical clocks, in general relativity clocks measure s along their worldline, not t. The relativistic... t is a freely chosen label with no direct physical interpretation. ...The physical content of a solution of Einstein's equations is not in its dependence on t, but ...in what remains once the dependence on t (and x) has been factored away.
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