As the past-future asymmetry – that fact that we have records of the past but not the future – is still a puzzle the aim of this paper is twofold: a) to explain the asymmetry and its status in philosophy and physics and to critically review the proposed solutions to this puzzle; b) to advance a dynamic solution to the puzzle in terms of the ‘universality’ of the entropy relation in statistical mechanics.

We discuss some difficulties that arise in attempting to interpret the Page–Wootters and Internal Quantum Reference Frames formalisms, then use a ‘final measurement’ approach to demonstrate that there is a workable single-world realist interpretation for these formalisms. We note that it is necessary to adopt some interpretation before we can determine if the ‘reference frames’ invoked in these approaches are operationally meaningful, and we argue that without a clear operational interpretation, such reference frames might not be suitable to define an (...) equivalence principle. We argue that the notion of superposition should take into account the way in which an instantaneous state is embedded in ongoing dynamical evolution, and this leads to a more nuanced way of thinking about the relativity of superposition in these approaches. We conclude that typically the operational content of these approaches appears only in the limit as the size of at least one reference system becomes large, and therefore these formalisms have an important role to play in showing how our macroscopic reference frames can emerge out of wholly relational facts. (shrink)

The decoherent histories formalism, developed by Griffiths, Gell-Mann, and Hartle (in Phys. Rev. A 76:022104, 2007; arXiv:1106.0767v3 [quant-ph], 2011; Consistent Quantum Theory, Cambridge University Press, 2003; arXiv:gr-qc/9304006v2, 1992) is a general framework in which to formulate a timeless, ‘generalised’ quantum theory and extract predictions from it. Recent advances in spin foam models allow for loop gravity to be cast in this framework. In this paper, I propose a decoherence functional for loop gravity and interpret existing results (Bianchi et al. in (...) Phys. Rev. D 83:104015, 2011; Phys. Rev. D 82:084035, 2010) as showing that coarse grained histories follow quasiclassical trajectories in the appropriate limit. (shrink)