It’s obvious that time flows in one direction. A teacup falls to the floor and shatters but we never see the broken shards reassemble; scramble an egg and it will never unscramble; we get older not younger with each passing day. It might seem less obvious to ask: why does our Universe have an arrow of time? But physicists and philosophers have asked, and struggled with this question, at least since the days of Aristotle. So whenever a new theory comes along, the scientific community greets it with great caution. Nevertheless, a paper in Physical Review Letters last October, by Flavio Mercati at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, and his colleagues, has made physicists sit up and take notice. Mercati believes he can demonstrate that the most familiar of nature’s forces – gravity – is what sets time ticking in a certain direction. https://cosmosmagazine/…/gravity-force-driving-time-for…
Posted on: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 16:03:51 +0000
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