Scientists Say There’s No Difference Between the Past and the Future

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Scientists Say There’s No Difference Between the Past and the Future

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According to new research, physics does not distinguish between the past and future.

Researchers found that because many equations allow for time reversal, flipping those equations will not change anything, even though something that happens in reality doesn’t just… undo itself.

Reversing time had no effect on hypothetical particles, even though we can’t exactly pull a Back to the Future yet.

We have a linear perception of

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. Whatever will happen later is in the future. What is now occurring is in the present. Something that occurred and is over is in the past.

But scientists still have some questions. For example, do the

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also demand a past, present, and future? And was there ever a beginning of time?

Recently, a team of experts from the University of Surrey set out to answer those exact questions. While the beginning of time—if it exists—proved elusive, the researchers did find that physics does not distinguish between a forward and backward

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. Physically speaking, it is just as likely for time to move backwards as it is for it to move forwards.

“The arrow of time describes the clear asymmetry that makes the past intrinsically different from the future,” the research team wrote in a study recently published in

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, “And yet, the fundamental laws of physics in both the classical and quantum realms do not manifest any intrinsic arrow of time.”

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allow for time reversal. So does

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, which predicts the probability of something happening in the future, such as whether

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is dead or alive.

The concept of past and future being physically symmetrical may be difficult to grasp in a world where things that have already happened cannot undo themselves. An expensive vase that pops and shatters is not going to magically put itself back together and end up back on the table where it belongs. However, when you really get down to the crux of

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that describe how our world works, they could face either way—you wouldn’t be able to tell the future from the past, and vice versa.

This is where Markovian dynamics come in. In a

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everything goes one way. For example, the

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of a physical system (which can be any physical object) describes everything known about it and determines the transition to its next quantum state. A Markov chain like that can keep going infinitely. The team behind the new time discovery applied this logic to a hypothetical cloud of superheated particles that expands with the

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, and through a series of mathematical equations, they found out that time reversal had no effect on the particles transitioning between quantum states. And it’s not just quantum states.

“The motion of planets around the

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, as much as the oscillations of a pendulum, are phenomena that do not distinguish the past from the future,” the Surrey team said in the same

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. “A movie of these processes, played backwards, would still represent a perfectly legitimate physical phenomenon.”

Of course, this leads to another unanswered question. If quantum physics doesn’t care what direction time is moving in, why does history exist at all?

It might have something to do with the expansion of the universe. The

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assumes that an extremely hot and dense mass of particles once began to expand further and further out into the void, and while that expansion has continued, the particles have significantly cooled down. But they aren’t reverting back to the temperatures they were at almost 14 billion years ago. Cooling was what helped particles condense into

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, planets and other objects in space. Reversing that would break everything down into particles again.

There might still be a way to equalize past and future even after the

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. Another controversial

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hypothesizes that time symmetry might be possible if, at the moment of the explosion, two parallel universes were created rather than just one. We only see a past and a future because we are living in one half of a continuous line of time.

Whether we actually live in a

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has yet to be determined. And for now, at least, time reversal is only possible in theory. So hold on to your watch.

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