![]() ![]() Ever since Einstein formulated his theory of relativity, we stopped perceiving space as a three-dimensional figure and time as a one-dimensional one. Or, perhaps spacetime, the idea that space and time fuse together into one interwoven continuum, is. Kirk repeated at the beginning of each Star Trek episode. So maybe it is time (and not space) that is the final frontier, despite what the beloved Captain James T. When we forget the real, underlying physics, we come up with all sorts of crazy things,” Podila says. “That these ideas are used does not make them the truth. Even that time evolves forward is not an axiom per se, but a theory that astrophysicist Arthur Eddington coined and popularized in 1927. “Associating the arrow of time with entropy or a quantum mechanical system collapsing (as it is stated in the paper) are not formal statements, but popular methods that are easy to use,” he says. Podila thinks that in our quest to understand time, we are putting equations before physical reality-and missing the point. Even a single particle has its own, unique microstates. Ramakrishna Podila, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Clemson University in South Carolina, says that many-particle statistics versus single-particle statistics is a more accurate way to describe things. Not everyone agrees that the distinction between the macroscopic and microscopic is clear though. “Having a deeper understanding of how to describe time flow at the level of these elementary constituents could allow us to formulate more precise theories to describe them and, eventually, to gain a deeper understanding of the physical phenomena of the world which we inhabit.” “At its most fundamental level, the world is made up of quantum systems ,” Rubino explains. It might be the case that the world is slightly undecided though. We cannot perceive these quantum superpositions of temporal evolutions,” Rubino says. So how do these complex physics notions translate to the actual human experience? Is it finally time to start packing for a trip backward in time? Hold your horses. But for small entropy changes, the system could actually continue to evolve both forward and backward in time. ![]() Measurements showed that more often than not, the system ended up moving forward in time. Rubino’s team looked at a quantum superposition with a state that evolves both backward and forward in time. According to the principle of quantum superposition, individual units ( for instance, of light) can exist in two states at once, both as waves and particles, manifesting as one or the other depending on what you’re testing. She and her colleagues wondered about the consequences of applying this paradigm in the quantum realm. ![]() A Subatomic Particle Can Turn Into Its Evil Twin.This Math Can Stop Quantum Cyberattacks.In a microscopic system, we may see the system naturally evolving toward situations of lower entropy.” “It is true on average in a macroscopic system. “The second law of thermodynamics is a statistical law,” says Rubino. If there were only three gas particles instead of a humongous quantity of gas (comprising billions of particles), it would be possible that these few particles ended up sitting once again in the part of the vessel from where they originally started. “In principle, there is a non-zero probability that at some point the gas will naturally return to occupy half of the vessel, only this probability gets smaller the larger the number of particles that make up the gas get,” Rubino says. Over time, the gas will occupy the whole vessel. The particles will start to move freely through the whole volume of the vessel. Then imagine that we remove the valve that confined it within half of the vessel, so that the gas is now free to expand throughout the vessel.” ➡ Join Pop Mech Pro for unlimited access to the world's weirdest science stories. ![]() “Let’s suppose that at the beginning, the gas occupies only half of the vessel. “Take the case of a gas in a vessel,” says Giulia Rubino, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Bristol, and lead author of the new paper that appears in Communications Physics. “The second law of thermodynamics is a statistical law.It is true on average in a macroscopic system. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |