Personal & Exploratory Work
Fundamental Physics
Foundational questions about time, change, and the structure of physical law — pursued alongside consulting work, as part of an ongoing engagement with the field that shaped the analytical approach behind everything else here.
Background
Dr. Vardavas holds a PhD in condensed matter physics and spent the early part of his career doing theoretical and computational work on complex physical systems before moving into policy modeling and health analytics. The transition was methodological as much as topical: the same tools — simulation, calibration, sensitivity analysis, reasoning carefully about what equations do and do not imply — travel across domains.
The physics questions never went away. The work on this page is personal and sits outside any consulting engagement. It reflects a longstanding interest in foundational problems: what the mathematical structure of physical theories actually commits us to, and where interpretation ends and deduction begins.
Interests
Relational physics
Whether time and space are fundamental or emerge from relations between physical degrees of freedom.
Reversibility & irreversibility
Why fundamental equations are time-symmetric yet observed processes are not — and where the asymmetry is actually introduced.
Decoherence & measurement
How entanglement with large environments selects classical outcomes without invoking wave-function collapse as a primitive.
Quantum gravity
Shape Dynamics and the Wheeler–DeWitt equation as laboratories for what becomes of time when spacetime is quantized.
Working Paper
Draft · Circulating for feedback
Change, Not Time
Reversibility from Newtonian Mechanics to Quantum Gravity
This paper is a reading of established physics, not a new theory. It follows a single interpretive proposal — that change is the physical primitive and that time is what we call comparing one change against another — through three domains where physics has built enormously precise mathematics: classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, and general relativity.
In each domain the paper asks the same three questions: what is time here, what is change, and is the dynamics reversible? The answers converge: reversibility is the default in every fundamental formulation, and wherever an arrow of time appears it requires an extra ingredient — a large environment, a statistical argument, a boundary condition — that is not itself time. Newton's absolute time turns out not to be required by the equations. The Schrödinger equation is exactly time-symmetric; the thermodynamic arrow belongs to decoherence, not to time itself. And Shape Dynamics reformulates general relativity without treating time as a fundamental dimension, reproducing every observational prediction of the standard theory.
Five experiments are walked through in full under this reading: the double-slit experiment, the delayed-choice quantum eraser, the Elitzur–Vaidman interaction-free measurement, a Leggett–Garg test, and a recent double-slit-in-time experiment. The paper proposes no new experimental test. Its purpose is to make one intuition rigorous across as much of physics as it reaches.