Backwards Time Might Not Be Like You Expect
from the cool dept
Found over at WonkoSlice is a story about new research suggesting that time doesn’t go in reverse the way you might expect. It seems that time isn’t symmetrical, and if you happened to have a great big VCR of the world, hitting rewind would show things… um… moving forward. No, I don’t fully understand it either. Any physicists around to help clear this up?
Comments on “Backwards Time Might Not Be Like You Expect”
the internet will tell us...
“Most fundamental physical processes are symmetric in time. The motion of the planets in the gravity field of the sun is reversable- a film of the motion of a planet around its sun can be shown backwards without anyone being able to tell. Similarly to gravity, the strong nuclear and electromagnetic forces are also time-symmetric. Only the weak nuclear force appears to violate this symmetry, and this so far only in the behavior of the neutral kaon.”
http://ppd.fnal.gov/experiments/ktev/pipiee/pipiee_bg.html
So you need to get vcr that’ll record the behavior of particles under the influence of the weak nuclear force… Maybe TiVo will work, or Replay….
Re: the internet will tell us...
Above comment cut off–so repeated in full: A common mistake among all of us is to take our metaphors too seriously. In fact, the notions of forward and backward are spatial metaphors. Why would one think they apply to time at all. For example, wideness is a spatial metaphor too, as is up or down. They don’t apply to time–why should directional metaphors? The truth is (well, perhaps, anyway) that the notions of forward and backward are simply alien to the concept of time, and do not apply to it at all.
the internet will tell us...
A common mistake among all of us is to take our metaphors too seriously. In fact, the notions of