Time travel to the past is basically impossible without breaking some laws of physics and
acquiring plutonium from some Libyans.
But time travel to the future is easy, we’re all doing it right now.
So why does time go forward and not back?
The idea that time only flows in one direction is called the Arrow of Time.
But odd as it sounds, there’s nothing in the equations that describes the laws of physics
that says it has to be this way.
The equations CAN tell you what will happen in the future or what took place in the past
based on what’s going on in the present, but they don’t explicitly state that time
must go from past to present to future.
The math works just as well going in either direction.
The one thing that seems to keep driving this time bus to futuretown is the second law of
thermodynamics, which states that entropy must always increase.
Things must go from order to chaos; heat must disperse from hot bodies to colder ones.
It’s this increase in entropy that keeps the ordered past behind us and the increasingly
messy future ahead.
But there seems to be a loophole in the second law of thermodynamics, and scientists recently
exploited it to turn entropy on its ear.
Apparently the law doesn’t apply to correlated particles, which are like entangled particles
with less strong of a connection.
When researchers observed a hot hydrogen nucleus that was next to a cooler carbon nucleus inside
a trichloromethane molecule, the nuclei behaved as expected and heat flowed from the HOT hydrogen
to the COOL carbon.
But when they tried the same thing with correlated hydrogen and carbon nuclei, the opposite happened.
The hydrogen got even hotter while the carbon chilled even more.
The scientists went on to make the bold claim that this experiment shows the reversal of
the Arrow of Time, but even if that’s indeed what’s happening it looks like it only applies
under very specific circumstances on an atomic scale.
So, not that I’m a physicist or anything, but did you?
Does that mean time is suddenly running backwards or is there something else at play here?
Needed is research more.
I wouldn’t predict a future where broken coffee mugs spontaneously reform or rooms
tidy themselves just yet.
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If you haven’t seen them all, check out this video on how your perception of time
can alter if you speak another language.
In the distant future when the entropy is at its maximum, there will be no arrow of
time because nothing will be able to change.
Thanks a lot for watching seeker!