Okay, look down at this playing bar… it's going forward right?
Time moves forward.
Why is that?
This new theory is going to bend your mind, seriously.
My roommate back in DC could say anything backwards, you could say something to her,
anything at all, and she could say it back to you backwards.
Try saying the alphabet backwards, or sing a Beatles song, or your own name!
Mirror images, backwards things…
they are hard enough to wrap our brains around… but what about a whole mirror universe?
Literally everything in ours, mirrored.
That's the new theory put forth by physics to explain time's onward march.
We're not the only universe at this party.
When you look at all the major theories of physics, Newton's gravitation, Einstein's
relativity, they all only work if time can go both forward, and backward.
But as we look at it, time is only going one direction.
Physicists call it, the "arrow of time."
It goes in one direction because the second law of thermodynamics says as the universe
ages, more entropy is introduced and we measure time by how much entropy there was before,
versus now.
There's more now, there's always more now.
Entropy, by the way, is hard to define.
But in a roundabout way, it’s like disorder.
See, just after the big bang happened, the universe was a consistent soup of particles,
and slowly they spread and coalesced into galaxies, solar systems, planets and so on,
adding entropy.
But, a new study in Physical Review Letters is challenging this whole idea of thermodynamics
and entropy driving time.
Their findings suggest time is driven, not by entropy, but by gravity!
They tested this by creating a computer simulation that ran from the big bang onward and got
a surprising result.
There isn't just ONE direction time can flow.
Their simulated universe was EXTREMELY simple, it had only 1,000 particles and used Newtonian
physics.
In the simulation, the Big Bang created TWO universes mirroring each other -- and the
arrow of time flows in opposite directions in each universe!
Time flowing both ways aligns with other theories, but it's pretty shocking to think there might
be another universe mirroring ours.
Okay, so if this is true, and as always more research is needed -- then the arrow of time
in the MIRROR universe is flowing backward relative to OUR arrow of time, but not for
THEM.
The perception of time is relative, so whomever lives in the mirrorverse sees their arrow
of time moving "forward."
The cool questions involve what if we could GO to that universe, would we see them aging
backward?
What about the multiverse, are there infinitely many mirrorverses in those parallel to us
too?
What's it all MEAN!!?!?!
I know, this is heavy, doc.
There's nothing wrong with the universe's gravitational pull, and time IS relative,
but… wow.
What if WE'RE THE TWIN!
What if they discovered this long ago and WE'RE the mirror!
What if in that other universe they're looking back toward us saying, look at THOSE guys,
amirite?!
Physics gets me so loopy…
i love it.
Can you wrap your head around this?
Any smart people out there have more explanations?
Sprew your brain-thoughts down in the comment corrall.