New Difficulties for the Past Hypothesis

Abstract

I argue that explanations for time asymmetry in terms of a ‘Past Hypothesis’ face serious new difficulties. First I strengthen grounds for existing criticism by outlining three categories of criticism that put into question essential requirements of the proposal. Then I provide a new argument showing that any time-independent measure on the space of models of the universe must break a gauge symmetry. The Past Hypothesis then faces a new dilemma: reject a gauge symmetry and introduce a distinction without difference or reject the time independence of the measure and lose explanatory power.