The Role of Particle Motion in Explaining the Nature of Time

This paper proposes a hypothesis according to which the directionality of time (the arrow of time) is grounded in the monotonic, irreversible growth of the number of particles in the Universe. Unlike the thermodynamic approach, which derives the arrow of time from increasing entropy and must postulate a special low-entropy initial state (the “past hypothesis”), the proposed model links directionality to the continuous increase in the number of self-replicating particles underlying cosmic expansion, requiring no privileged initial state. Time is treated as an emergent, measurement-related category. The physical correlate of the direction of time is identified as a concrete monotonically growing quantity — the total particle number N(t) — and a testable criterion and falsification condition are formulated.