According to the scientists, our ability to remember the past but not the future, another historically confounding manifestation of time’s arrow, can also be understood as a buildup of correlations between interacting particles. When you read a message on a piece of paper, your brain becomes correlated with it through the photons that reach your eyes. Only from that moment on will you be capable of remembering what the message says. As Lloyd put it: “The present can be defined by the process of becoming correlated with our surroundings.” The backdrop for the steady growth of entanglement throughout the universe is, of course, time itself. The physicists stress that despite great advances in understanding how changes in time occur, they have made no progress in uncovering the nature of time itself or why it seems different (both perceptually and in the equations of quantum mechanics) than the three dimensions of space. Popescu calls this “one of the greatest unknowns in physics.” “We can discuss the fact that an hour ago, our brains were in a state that was correlated with fewer things,” he said. “But our perception that time is flowing — that is a different matter altogether. Most probably, we will need a further revolution in physics that will tell us about that.”
Posted on: Sat, 19 Apr 2014 03:51:14 +0000
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