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      An Idiot's Guide to Time

      November 26, 2012



      If you smash some particles together in an accelerator, they turn into a spray of other particles. If you were to run the movie of that collision backwards—one that showed those other particles forming the original particles—that would, in fact, appear just as valid. This is called time reversal symmetry. Time is basically symmetrical at the quantum level. It's all just particles and energy moving around. And this quantum bullshit dimension contains all the tiny machinery that decides how everything works.

      But these people here discovered a subatomic process that doesn't behave in that way. Working in antimatter physics, deep down in the hadronic depths with mesons (tiny things, found on a scale several powers tinier than the fields that nanomachines operate in), they found something that wasn't supposed to happen. Down in the murk, these weird flavors of meson turn into different kinds of stuff all the time. In a world with symmetrical time, the conditions down there say that Thing A will become Thing B more easily than Thing B will turn into Thing A. It's how the reversed movie makes sense.

      But it turns out that Thing B turns into Thing A six times more often. This is a bit like reversing a video of a glass of water being dropped, winding it back to the start—and finding it simply won't go back to the point before the glass tipped over. Time has a preferred direction. Time is asymmetrical.


      Makes you wonder what's at the bottom, doesn't it?


      People involved in time-travel physics now have to consider that traveling into the past may be, at best, rolling a Sisyphean boulder of conceits up an impossible incline. You know the universe is pissing on you when even the angle of time itself is against you.


      I imagine it now as an endless walk into the future, with all your pasts rising up as a cliff behind you.



      Good morning, from a little further down the hill.

      Follow Warren on Twitter: @warrenellis

      Image by Marta Parszeniew




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