The forward march of time is possibly the most basic and shared human experience. Whatever else may happen in our lives none of us can make time run backwards (the title of this post recalls Martin Amis‘s brilliant novel
Yet, as Lee Smolin points out in this week’s New Scientist, our most fundamental theories of physics – quantum mechanics and general relativity – are time free: they work just as well if time runs the other way round. Physicists square this circle by insisting on only time-forward solutions and by imposing special conditions on our universe. We have even invented a physical category – which has no material existence per se – called entropy and demanded that it always increase.
The accepted physics leaves us in the difficult position of believing that “the future” is not the future at all – it exists and has always existed but we are barred from getting there “ahead of time”. It’s a deep contradiction, though whether this is a flaw in the theories or in human comprehension is what the debate (such as it exists, those who challenge QM and GR are very much in the minority) is all about.
In Smolin’s view (or perhaps my interpretation of it) all of this violates the “Copernican principle” – that we observers are nothing special – that has guided much of physics’s advances of the last five centuries. So what if it is actually telling us that our theories are wrong and like Newtonian gravity is to general relativity, they are merely approximations?
Smolin’s argument is just this. He says we should base our theories on the fundamental observation that time flows in only one direction and so find deeper, truer theories based on unidirectional time.
Related articles
- A Jaunt backwards through Time (archiewahwah.wordpress.com)
- Fecund Universes (thedailyomnivore.net)
- Garrett Lisi Explains Particle Physics (33rdsquare.com)
- Zeno Proof Paradox (rjlipton.wordpress.com)
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 