Physicists investigate how time moves forward

Physicists investigate how time moves forward: "Physicists investigate how time moves forward
September 5th, 2008 By Lisa Zyga

As humans, we have a very intuitive concept of time, and of the differences between the past, present, and future. But, as scientists Edward Feng of the University of California, Berkeley, and Gavin Crooks of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory point out, science does not provide a clear definition of time.

Ads by Google

How Consciousness Creates - www.Free-Will.de
Reality - Free will is far more than an illusion. Read now!



“In our everyday lives we have the sense that time flows inexorably from the past into the future; water flows downhill; mountains erode; we are born, grow old, and die; we anticipate the future but remember the past,” the scientists write in a recent study in Physical Review Letters. “Yet almost all of the fundamental theories of physics – classical mechanics, electrodynamics, quantum mechanics, general relativity, and so on – are symmetric with respect to time reversal.

“The only fundamental theory that picks out a preferred direction of time is the second law of thermodynamics, which asserts that the entropy of the Universe increases as time flows toward the future. This provides an orientation, or arrow of time, and it is generally believed that all other time asymmetries, such as our sense that future and past are different, are a direct consequence of this thermodynamic arrow.”"