The relationship of man with the time It has always been complex and full of meanings. In ancient times it was considered a divinity, then a physical dimension, while for some philosophers it would be nothing more than a subjective experience, an inner flow. What is certain is that we perceive it as a river in flood that flows unstoppable, dragging us with it from the past towards the future.
In everyday life, the idea of a precise direction of the time seems to be confirmed by common events: a glass that falls and shatters cannot return intact alone, a candle that is consumed cannot be rekindled spontaneously. From this evidence the concept of “Time arrow”that is, the notion that time has only one verse, from the order to disorder, from the past to the future. However, science started to question this idea: what if time had no privileged direction?
The main problem is that The fundamental laws of physics do not provide for a mandatory direction for time. Newton’s equations, which regulate the motion of the planets, work in the same way regardless of the fact that the weather flows forward or backwards. Even quantum mechanics, which describes the behavior of subatomic particles, does not impose a single temporal verse.
This apparent contradiction has pushed a team of researchers from the University of Surreyin the United Kingdom, to study the phenomenon in the quantum world. Among the members of the research group there is also the Italian Andrea Roccowhich contributed to the publication of the study on Scientific Reportspart of the prestigious magazine Nature. The goal was to analyze the behavior of the Time arrow in quantum systemswhere the classic rules seem to lose their rigidity.
The study: time can flow into both directions
According to the most accredited theory, when a quantum system It interacts with its surrounding environment, gradually loses information, generating a favorite temporal direction. However, i mathematical calculations developed by the team have revealed that this loss of information can take place In both directionsboth towards the future and towards the past.
This discovery suggests that, at least in the subatomic world, time could be symmetricalwithout a unique verse. In other words, the Arrow of the time emerges only in specific conditionsdepending on the observed system and the context in which it is located. If it were truly a fundamental property of nature, it should manifest itself in all circumstances, regardless of the observation scale.
To make a comparison, phenomena such as the light speed or the charge of the electron They remain constant regardless of the experiment conducted. But the arrow of the time, according to the results of the study, does not seem to enjoy the same universality. To confirm this hypothesis, the researchers have shown that the main equations of quantum mechanics, such as those of Pauli, Lindblad and LangevinI am symmetrical compared to timeallowing the evolution of a system both forward and backwards.
The future of research: is time really bidirectional?
The results obtained open fascinating scenarios, but still remains to be clarified whether this property can extend to the macroscopic world. In our universe, in fact, time continues to flow forward, and one of the main reasons is the Second law of thermodynamics: Entropy, that is, disorder, always tends to increase.
The next step for researchers will be to understand if this new vision of time can have practical applicationsand above all if the universe itself really moves out of two opposite time directions. If so, our understanding of the cosmos could only be partial, and the travel over time It would no longer be a science fiction hypothesis.
