Particle physicists confirm arrow of time — for B mesons

reply to post by Blarneystoner


I whole-heartedly believe that we will one day achieve faster than light communication utilizing this very principle. I admit I read it in a sci-fi novel but I think it's sound science. I also don't think it could be used to communicate with the past or future, only an instantaneous connection to it's entangled twin.

It has always been my understanding that nobody could travel back in time because there would be nothing to physically travel back to.

All matter that exists right now to create our present is mostly the same matter that existed in the past. So if you left the present to visit the past, there would be no matter to view because it is stuck in the future. So, in order to ever travel back in time to see the world as it was in the past, you would have to take the entire world with you in your time machine.

A good question, in the right kind of thread, but perhaps slightly veering from topic?
What the Hell ever happened to Ron Mallett? I've been trying hard to find stuff on the guy, anything in the last couple of years, but alas, he seems only to give lectures STILL on his book & his general experiment ideas. Did he ever get anywhere?!

Originally posted by JayDub113
reply to post by Blarneystoner

 

I whole-heartedly believe that we will one day achieve faster than light communication utilizing this very principle. I admit I read it in a sci-fi novel but I think it's sound science. I also don't think it could be used to communicate with the past or future, only an instantaneous connection to it's entangled twin.

You're absolutely right... and it is sound science for certain. In fact there was a recent breakthrough where researchers have "teleported" macroscopic particles for the first time.

Here's the ATS thread:
ATS Thread: Researchers Achieve Quantum Teleportation Between Two Macroscopic Objects For The First Time, page 1

MIT Technology Review:First Teleportation from One Macroscopic Object to Another


But here's the thing....

I also don't think it could be used to communicate with the past or future, only an instantaneous connection to it's entangled twin

Experiments indicate that a (present time) change-in-state of entangled QI packets actually effects the state of those QI packets in the past.... a property of spukhafte Fernwirkung or "spooky action at a distance".

I don't want to go into detail regarding how I think this property would facilitate seeing into the future but maybe I'll develop a thread about it someday....

reply to post by ChaoticOrder

Of course time flows in only one direction... that much is completely obvious to me. However that does not mean time travel is impossible.

Well of course time travel is possible, we are all currently travelling forward at one second per second, except for those on fast moving trains, planes, and space stations, and they are travelling slightly slower than one second per second.

S&F.

Thanks for posting this...it is about time (no pun intended) that humanity started to realise there are more levels to the universe and all therein.

Hello everyone, this is actually my very first post on ATS, I've been reading the forums for awhile and only recently made an account.

Regarding time travel, it is my understanding that we are all living in the past. That is, we do not live in the present because it takes time for the light reflected off objects to reach our eyes and for our brain to process what it sees. Additionally, as illuminatedOne already pointed out (quite well in my opinion):

All matter that exists right now to create our present is mostly the same matter that existed in the past. So if you left the present to visit the past, there would be no matter to view because it is stuck in the future. So, in order to ever travel back in time to see the world as it was in the past, you would have to take the entire world with you in your time machine.

Understanding that matter exists in the present, and that the world we live in is in past (granted, a very recent past), I see only two ways to effectively "time travel". That way would be to:

1. Slow down the light around us.
   
2. Slow down our brain's ability to process what our eye's see.
   

By doing either of these methods we would effectively live in the past, but only from the point at which we activated our time machine.

It is important to note that by doing these methods any action would not effect the present, because the actual objects (or matter) would not necessarily be in the location that we would see them in anymore. This makes the argument for paradoxical universes irrelevant. Additionally, the sounds we would hear would reflect what was happening in the present world, and not the world we see. I'd expect there to be several other limitations to this method, if it were even possible.

As for a machine that does what you normally think of when you think about time travel, I don't believe to be possible because I do not think time is anything other than our perception of our surroundings. It is a human creation to understand sequences of events.

Note: I don't have a great understanding of light or the human brain, so everything I've said in this post is hypothetical. I don't know if it is possible to do anything I claimed would be the only way to time travel. It is because I don't think time as anything more than a human creation that I put forth, in my opinion, the only other way time travel would theoretically be plausible. Also: consider you did slow down the way you perceive your surroundings and effectively were living in the past... would others be able to see you? If a table were in the same spot and you moved it, and people could not see you, what would they think was moving the table?

This may be completely off topic but... I have been thinking for a long time now about this. If the universe is expanding, could you stop your motion and let it travel past you? You most likely couldn't return to where you had started but it would be a good way to travel long distances into our universe.
Just thinking out loud

Originally posted by Uberdavo
This may be completely off topic but... I have been thinking for a long time now about this. If the universe is expanding, could you stop your motion and let it travel past you?

Yes, you could. You'd die immediately, of course, by either being crushed by the Earth, or flying off it into space, depending on which side you were on when you "stopped."

You most likely couldn't return to where you had started but it would be a good way to travel long distances into our universe.

Well, it would be inaccurate, slow (think billions of years) and the universe isn't migrating, it's expanding, so the likelihood that you'd actually have something come across you in your stasis would be pretty close to zero.

In theory its possible... in reality it isn't. I think we would already see evidence if we had discovered time travel.

I'm not claiming to really know about the subject, but, if matter having opposite properties was the only obstacle to overcome then you would just need to include a device that reverses your properties at the moment you began travel. then the effect of the "time travel matter property reversal" would actually reverse you right back to normal. Easy huh? lol

Originally posted by theyrout2getus
I'm not claiming to really know about the subject, but, if matter having opposite properties was the only obstacle to overcome then you would just need to include a device that reverses your properties at the moment you began travel. then the effect of the "time travel matter property reversal" would actually reverse you right back to normal. Easy huh? lol

Unfortunately, that isn't how it works. One can change the speed at which time flows by moving at a higher rate of speed -- at speeds approaching the speed of light, the difference is significant, but you're still moving forward in time, no matter how slow it happens to be through temporal dilation.

To move into the past, however, by the same process would require the opposite of speed, or "negative speed" and there's no such thing (it's not to be confused with deceleration or negative velocity, neither of which would do the trick.)

Good to see people thinking about these complex ideas, though!

reply to post by adjensen


Well ya wouldn't do it standing in your lounge room lol. I should have been more clear, if you could be inside a device or ship of some kind that was already out in space. don't really understand this but it appears it is expanding quite fast curious.astro.cornell.edu...

Originally posted by Uberdavo
reply to post by adjensen

 

Well ya wouldn't do it standing in your lounge room lol. I should have been more clear, if you could be inside a device or ship of some kind that was already out in space. don't really understand this but it appears it is expanding quite fast curious.astro.cornell.edu...

Right, but, again, it's expanding, not moving, so the only thing that you would encounter would be an object that was closer to the Galactic core and was on a precise trajectory to come through here. And that's both highly unlikely, and a long time a'comin', if it is.

reply to post by adjensen


Thanks for the replies I think we have kept this thread off topic long enough though. sorry OP

There are processes in physics that make it improbable (and likely impossible) to reverse or go back in time, such as entropy, and the changing of energy states from one form to another, in which energy is "lost" and there are not (at present) any known ways to reverse. (ie - solid to liquid to gas) Entropy is the most familiar to everyone. Simply put, it is the change from order to chaos. During that change, in most cases, the original state is unrecoverable.

Think of an egg.

Can you take an egg, cook it into an omelette, and ever, in any way whatsoever, turn the omelette back into an egg? No. This is because of entropy. Through heating, and exciting the orderly pattern of particles, energy escapes/transitions and the pattern changes form into something else. We do not know of any way to put the energy back into an ordered form to make the omelette back into an egg.

Some other things that make it improbable is the current theory of the expanding universe.

This would mean that in order to go back in time, you'd have to be able to take a "snapshot" or picture of, or somehow record, the placement of EVERY particle and quanta of energy in the universe at that time that you want to go back to, and then when you were ready to go back to that point in time, you'd have to be able to contract the universe back into its state at the time, and re-arrange EVERY particle and quanta back to it's original place. Good luck with that one.

Here in lies the paradox, and the rub thanks to our trusted (and measurable) friend, entropy.

You, the human being that you are in the future, are made up of a different amount of matter and energy than you were in the past. If you wanted to go back in time, you'd have to restore yourself to that state that you existed in at that time as well, which means you'd essentially have no memory of any of the events leading up to your trip back in time. You would not be able to make the universe "bend" around you and your newly-included matter and energy from the "future" that is conserved by the known laws of physics. ALL matter and energy would have to be returned to its previous state, including that which is in your brain, making your trip back in time possible, but then nobody would ever know it existed, including yourself.

Entropy keeps energy changing at all times, it does not stop (yet) in the universe, because it is not at a state of equilibrium, and entropy does not move in reverse because it follows our perceived arrow of time. Cause NEVER comes after effect. Your thought processes in your brain, your heart beating, everything that makes you alive, happens because entropy is happening. If the arrow of time could move in two directions, you'd have some weird stuff that starts to happen when present "cause" can have past "effect" / consequences. If that were possible, we'd likely already have witnessed the repercussions.

So when does entropy really stop? When equilibrium is reached. And if you really want to bake your noodle... what happens when we reach maximum entropy, ie - equilibrium - in the universe? Does it stop expanding (if you believe in the expanding universe theory)? Does time travel become possible? Do we all cease to exist?

Great thread OP... S&F for the ride down quantum lane...

~Namaste

Originally posted by SonOfTheLawOfOne
.....and entropy does not move in reverse.....

correction (at least according to the OP): entropy DOES move in reverse. if it does not, as you have said, then it would be no problem to get the reverse configuration by moving backward in time. the problem is (according to the OP), that there IS a new configuration state in the reverse direction.

entropy is notoriously difficult to understand, primarily because there acutally are two mutually opposing definitions in use: the boltzmann (noise) entropy, and the information (not-noise) entropy. the most correct answer thus far (IMO) is here:

Originally posted by AfterInfinity
See, I'm thinking the reason for the discovery with the mesons is that our reality is constructed of subatomic particles all moving in synchronization. There's lots of different ways to disrupt the motion, but most of it happens at a broad enough level that you're messing with the compounds. The actual physical structure itself, at the most basic level, is free to react naturally.

AfterInfinity has given the correct version of entropy as an interpretation at the MACRO level, what is occuring at the MICRO level, or alternatively, the coarse-graining of indistinguishable particle configurations. the "arrow of time", then, is a side effect of the fact that interpretation can only happen from the top->down perspective. with reference to the OP, what we are saying is that there is also a MACRO level in the reverse direction....or rather, that information does appear to move backward.

or in other words, reverse time does not "undo". reverse time also "does".

this is a very important aspect of quantum mechanics with respect to the emergence of life as the ability to manipulate configuration states in order to generate miniature "time-warps" within a closed systems, by dual strapping (bootstrapping?) individual closed systems. this allows life to "take out the garbage". but in order to know what garbage is, you must be able to distinguish between (according to the "laws" of physics) indistinguishable particles. "you" must be "above" the "garbage".


TLDR;
the research in the OP is IMO an indication that "indistinguishable" particles are, in fact, distinguishable. this does not preclude time travel. in fact, it supports it by placing "quantum" reality over "relativity" reality.

quantum reality wins.

reply to post by Maxmars


Very cool.

I actually envision it to be something more akin to 'timelines' in that, with the use of a time machine (Or UFO), the moment you leave time the 'universe' protects itself by creating a duplicate reality for you to manipulate. So the original reality you departed from will now in fact continue on without you ever returning BUT the reality you arrive at is identical to everything that has happened in the reality you left. So you actually don't know the difference but if you have gone back in time and change something then that change is only specific to that timeline/reality you are in, and NOT the reality you left. I figure that going forward in time though does not apply the same way.

I actually have no idea what I just wrote, nor how I came up with that theory.

reply to post by Maxmars


Maxmars, this instance is a confirmation that time is not symmetric in backward/forward directions for B Mesons. It is a confirmation of a fairly broadly established paradigm in the physics community and extends the absence of time symmetry into the quantum realm. It shows, but does not explain, the arrow of time for quantum events.

Certain of Einsteins equations can be solved in ways that would 'loop' space-time (many of these were proofed by Kurt Gödel). These time-like-loops remain as viable solutions to relativistic math and so i would suspect can exist in the real world.

The absence of time symmetry in physical theory is one of the things I have been trying to explain in several posts at ATS and it is good to be vindicated by experimental results.

The issue is that the word "time" has different meanings. in terms of Physics, it has a different connotation than the perceptual concept that most people hold.

In Physics, time is a spatial dimension at 90 degrees to the other three spatial dimensions - One second is equivalent to 299,792,458 m along the time axis and, like the other three dimensions, physical distances along the axis conform to Lorentz contraction for certain relativistic conditions.

If we take the thought experiment of a gas being released from a flask, the gas dissipates generally to stabilize pressures but also migrates via Brownian motion and turbulence (if flow is significant enough). If the time values in the equations are reversed so that they get smaller again and the equations are run, the gas still dissipates. "The genie does not go back into the bottle".

Cheers!

Originally posted by Sublimecraft
reply to post by Maxmars

 

I had to Google "arrow of time" and "B-mesons" - this paradox of "time" is now more confusing than ever.

Obviously there are some pretty bright minds whom have already contributed to this thread - I am not one of them and quite frankly am out of my depth here.

But, my grandfather, God rest his soul, always talked about the following little paradox with me and it, to this day, still keeps me guessing - what is "time"......

An arrow is fired from point A and arrives at point B some time later – a certain distance away from point A.
In order for it to travel that distance, it must first travel half that distance. In order for it to travel that “half” distance, it must first travel half of that half distance. Mathematically, the arrow must travel through an infinite number of half distances. Therefore the arrow never reaches point B. But we the observer witness it landing at point B.

Today on ATS was a post about doppelgangers and persons arriving in a place before they arrived in that place - as confirmed by witnesses. There is also the phenomena of "time slips" - covered quite well by Jenny Randles in her book "Encyclopedia of the Unexplained".

What the hell is actually going on here - is "time" what I look at on my watch - celestial navigation and the use of GMT would suggest a linear philosophy works - but that is based on me - the observer.

I could use some clarity about what "time" is - the more I read, the more it seems we are in a holographic matrix or something - kept together like sheep in a paddock.

I'm confused - that bloody arrow never reaching point B gets to me!

edit on 20-11-2012 by Sublimecraft because: (no reason given)

Let me help you out:

mathforum.org...


The arrow does reach point B ...