New research suggests that time may not be a fundamental element of the universe, but rather an illusion resulting from quantum entanglement.
time This is a vexing problem for physicists: inconsistent behavior among our best theories of the universe has led to an impasse that has prevented researchers from finding a “theory of everything” – a framework that explains all of the physical phenomena in the universe.
But in a new study, researchers have Quantum entanglementThe strange connection between two distant particles. The team published their findings in the journal Physics on May 10. Physics Review A.
“There are ways to introduce time, which is a manifestation of entanglement, that are consistent with both classical and quantum laws,” said the first author. Alessandro Coppo“The correlation between clocks and systems gives rise to time, a fundamental element of our lives,” the physicist at Italy’s National Research Council told Live Science.
Finally
in Quantum mechanicsAccording to physics, our best theory of the microscopic world, time is a fixed phenomenon, an inescapable unidirectional flow from past to present. Time is external to the strange, ever-changing quantum systems it measures, and can only be seen by observing changes in external entities, such as the hands of a clock.
But according to Einstein’s theory, General theory of relativity Time is the theory that describes our bodies as well as larger objects like stars and galaxies, but it is entangled with space and can be distorted and expanded when traveling at high speeds or in the presence of gravity. This has led to a fundamental impasse between our two best theories of reality, and without a solution, a coherent theory of everything will remain unattainable.
“There seems to be a major inconsistency in quantum theory,” Coppo said. “This is what we call the time problem.”
To solve this problem, researchers have turned to a theory called the Page and Wutters mechanism, which was first proposed in 1983 and suggests that an object’s time is manifested through the object’s motion. Quantum entanglement On the other hand, in an unentangled system, time does not exist and the system perceives the universe as frozen and unchanging.
By applying Page and Wutters’ mechanism to two theoretical entangled but non-interacting quantum states — one a vibrating harmonic oscillator, the other a set of tiny magnets acting as a clock — the physicists found that the system can be perfectly described as follows: Schrödinger Equationpredicts the behavior of quantum objects. But instead of time, their version of the famous equations moved according to the state of a tiny magnet that acts as a clock.
While this insight was not new, the team’s next step was: They repeated their calculations twice, first assuming that the magnetic clock and then the harmonic oscillator were macroscopic (larger) objects. Their equations simplified to those of classical physics, suggesting that the flow of time is the result of entanglement, even for massive objects.
“We strongly believe that the correct and logical direction is to start from quantum physics and understand how to arrive at classical physics, and not the other way around,” Coppo said.
Other physicists have expressed caution: They think Page and Wutters’ mechanism is an intriguing idea about the quantum origins of time, but they say it hasn’t yet produced anything testable.
“Yes, it is mathematically consistent to think of world time as an entanglement of quantum fields and quantum states of three-dimensional space.” Vlatko Vedrar“But who knows whether anything new or useful will emerge from this picture, such as modifications to quantum physics or general relativity, or corresponding experimental tests,” said A professor of quantum information science at the University of Oxford, who was not involved in the research, told Live Science.
Despite these doubts, building a fundamental theory of time from quantum mechanics may be a promising starting point, as long as it can be tailored to fit experiment.
“It’s possible that entanglements play a role.” Adam FrankJohn Myers, a theoretical physicist at the University of Rochester in New York, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science: “Maybe the only way to understand time is not from a God’s perspective, but from the inside, from a perspective that asks what it is about life that makes the world look the way it does.”
