The problem of time's arrow historico-critically reexamined

Responding to Hasok Chang's vision of the history and philosophy of science (HPS) as the continuation of science by other means, I illustrate the methods of HPS and their utility through a historico-critical examination of the problem of “time's arrow”, that is to say, the problem posed by the claim by Boltzmann and others that the temporal asymmetry of many physical processes and indeed the very possibility of identifying each of the two directions we distinguish in time must have a ground in the laws of nature. I claim that this problem has proved intractable chiefly because the standard mathematical representation of time employed in the formulation of the laws of nature “forgets” one of the connotations of the word ‘time’ as it is used in ordinary language and in experimental physics.