A new theory developed by a Canadian theoretical physicist suggests that, for science, time only moves in one direction and is not capable of going backwards. Furthermore, he states that it is the force of gravity that is causing time to only move forward.
Flavio Mercati has published his theory recently in Physical Review Letters and he works at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. He states that gravity is the cause for time’s movement and it is the reason that, for him and others, time can only move forward.
Science has always declared that there is time and that it is linear time. The challenge here, for scientists, is that there isn’t anything in the body of knowledge, or the math, regrading gravity that may even hint that the force has anything to do with time at all. Physicists have always take the second law of thermodynamics to be just that – a law. It states that entropy increases itself over time.
Basically, a scrambled egg can’t be unscrambled. Start with almost no entropy and you are certain to have a high entropy situation quite soon. Do your house cleaning on a Saturday and it is likely by the following Friday, your house will be a mess again.
What Mercati is asking is why the universe, for science, is in a low entropy state to begin with? This arrow of time can be explained by gravity. But for others, time flows from a low complexity situation to a higher complexity situation and is fluid in that way. But when Mercati took a model universe and released 1,000 particles into the virtual space and only allowed the force of gravity to affect their movement. What they found was that the particles move quickly to clump but then simply separated once again. They did not go back to a clumped situation again. They remained free floating.
The experiments were based on Newton’s theories and Einstein and quantum mechanics was not considered at all in the experiment. However, the physics community saw the force of gravity seeming to make time go in only one direction which, for them, tested equations. This, they say, is just another step toward, perhaps, coming up with their long searched for quantum theory of gravity.
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