IS OUR UNDERSTANDING OF TIME FLAWED HAVE WE FOOLISHLY BELIEVED IN THIS DOGMA?
Time as a concept is one of the most intriguing subjects of debate in human chronology and it is also the most dogmatic aspect of physics.
Time seems clear to us, from our perspective, it clearly has a direction and the one we experience via our senses is only a single direction known as the future since time is constantly passing by, our senses trick us into believing time flows universally and it doesn’t have much to do with space, for there only seems to be a ‘now’ of it, with a gone past, and an unseen future that’s nonexistent this is the definition that an average person will likely come up while describe time and it’s effects. But as always there’s way more to this.
Direction of time
There are generally three-pointers of time that are probably not concerned with each other;
• The Weak Interactions
• Entropy
• Redshift (expansion of the Universe)
The Weak Interactions
Quantum field theory lays the foundation os something known as symmetry, which is never violated by any known process, It is called the CPT (charge-parity-time) symmetry, and it says that if you take the Universe and everything in it and flip the electrical charge (C), invert everything as though through a mirror (P), and reverse the direction of time (T), then the base laws of physics all continue to work the same.
Now you might think by flipping the parity, all laws of physics should also work exactly the same as before, since you don’t notice any visible change in ambiance and everything you know or are aware of are still the same. Like how a mirror image is just inverted and nothing else it’s still you in the mirror just flipped? Right? well, this is where the pointer of the time given by the Weak Interactions comes into play.
When neutrons deteriorate into protons, they shoot off an electron and an anti-electron neutrino. But since a neutron has spin, so defining a “north” and “south” in analogy to the way Earth rotates, it turns out that the electron emitted during β- decay is always shot out of the neutron’s “south pole”.
But again we’re in an inverted world or to phrase this better inside a mirror this spin reverses, so the mirror would show a completely impossible situation!
When time and charge are also reversed, this behaves perfectly normal again. What we call anti-particles, are charge and parity (CP) reversed particles, that therefore behave exactly like time reversed normal particles. It’s only that there are so many more regular particles, that we prefixed the short-lived CP reversed versions of these with “anti”. When an anti-neutron decays into an anti-proton and shoots off a positron and an electron-neutrino, the positron pops out of its “north pole”.
Entropy
But this arrow of time given by Weak Interactions has nothing to do with what makes us remember the details of the past more clearly than the details of the future. It is the continuous increase of entropy towards one direction of time that is completely responsible for what we call ‘time’ in our day-to-day lives.
Entropy is nothing but a state of uncertainty, the second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system left to spontaneous evolution cannot decrease with time. As a result, isolated systems evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium, where the entropy is highest. A consequence of the second law of thermodynamics is that certain processes are irreversible.
But according to physics, there is nothing that says that the reverse situation is an impossible situation, but it is just positively unlikely. Imagine then how incredibly unlikely this must be for the particles that make up our Universe! When we look at a video recording that’s played back in reverse, all the things that look strange to us there, are phenomena that simply show an unnatural decrease in entropy. All the strange phenomena in reverse are explained by it.
The only reason why there are so many more possibilities for an increase in uncertainty, why we always see entropy increasing, and why we experience this direction of time, is because the space-time continuum treats time as a separate dimension of temporality there somehow was this extremely low state of entropy, right after what we call the Big Bang. With a Big Bang at the “other side” of the time dimension, we’d simply experience time flowing away from that direction of low entropy, but our current particles would then look like their CP reversed anti-particles.
Time seeming to have a fundamental direction is somewhat analogous to space seeming to have a direction for us as well, being near a source of gravity. The reason it is so much easier for us to know the details of the past, and not the details of the future, is because it ends up being more precise and easier to calculate towards the lower entropy direction, even when only processing just a fragment of the information provided, like for instance a small part of the light reflected by a surface. The higher entropy direction of time on the other hand is much less precise to calculate, especially when handling only a fragment of information. With just a small calculation error, the difference might escalate to set other things in motion that weren’t taken into account, even ignoring the probabilistic nature of our reality.
For instance, the sea has a lot of heat energy, but it’s by no means free energy. We get a lot of free, low-entropy energy in the form of short-wavelength radiation from the Sun, which then largely re-radiates back into space. The difference? Earth’s radiation goes out as long-wavelength light with added entropy:
Our own bodies consume low-entropy energy from food and emit high-entropy long-wavelength radiation back, and tries to keep itself in a low entropy state, by continuous “repairing”. The information in our brains, on the other hand, depends a lot on the natural mechanism of increasing entropy. Just think of a nice, orderly packet of data in the form of photons, entering our eyes and hitting our retinas, which sets off this collision course of interpretations inside our brains. Again, the reverse is also technically possible, but extremely improbable: our brains setting off signals to our eyes, shooting off photons from our retinas.
The relativity of simultaneity + Redshift
The most mind blogging thing about time is that our intuitions gives us the notion that we should be able to define a Universal clock, so we can clearly define what events transpired before other events, independent of their coordinate in space-time this is obviously not true. Every object has an individual time, and it’s impossible to define absolute simultaneity.
To understand this, think of how we are able to precisely define what has happened simultaneously within our surroundings by making use of the constant speed of light, by sending out light pulses to our surroundings: everything that is reflected back at the same time must’ve been happening at the same time, at the same distance. This asymmetry is observed by the static observer to cause the following artifact when the traveler defines his spatial simultaneity;
The Many-worlds interpretation
A peculiar aspect of quantum mechanics is that we can only ever measure particles, and never waves, even though they are fundamentally waves, according to quantum field theory. Whenever we seem to measure waves, we are merely measuring multiple particles that statistically behave like interfering waves.
Where and when the particle is measured along a single wavelength of a field is impossible to predict, and is completely random. After measurement the wavefunction collapses. This collapse is somewhat of a thorn in the side of physics because it doesn’t clearly follow out of anything, it’s not a logical result of something fundamental.
But the Many-worlds interpretation tries to fix this by saying there’s really no collapse at all, but the collapse is a branching point of which we can only measure our branch, even though all possible branches are actually happening next to our personal timeline.
TIME
As clear as time intuitively may seem to us, in reality, it doesn’t have a fundamental direction, its rate is only relative, it deeply corresponds with space, and there’s no clearly defined past or future. Furthermore, the past and future might not be gone or non-existent at all, and there may be more than one single timeline.
