Unidirectionality of time induced by T violation

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Author(s)
Vaccaro, Joan A
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2011
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The physical nature of time has been an enigma for centuries. Despite the progress made in linking various arrows of time together, the underlying reason for the observed direction of time has remained a deep mystery. However, an increasing number of experiments are confirming a violation of time reversal invariance (T) in meson decay processes. T violation represents a fundamental break in the symmetry between the past and future. I show here that such processes induce destructive interference between different paths that the universe can take through time. The interference eliminates all paths except for two that represent ...
View more >The physical nature of time has been an enigma for centuries. Despite the progress made in linking various arrows of time together, the underlying reason for the observed direction of time has remained a deep mystery. However, an increasing number of experiments are confirming a violation of time reversal invariance (T) in meson decay processes. T violation represents a fundamental break in the symmetry between the past and future. I show here that such processes induce destructive interference between different paths that the universe can take through time. The interference eliminates all paths except for two that represent continuously forwards and continuously backwards time evolution. These results illustrate that there are previously-unknown large-scale physical effects arising from the T violation processes in meson decay. Moreover these effects offer a solution to the age-old problem of the cause of the unidirectionality of time.
View less >
View more >The physical nature of time has been an enigma for centuries. Despite the progress made in linking various arrows of time together, the underlying reason for the observed direction of time has remained a deep mystery. However, an increasing number of experiments are confirming a violation of time reversal invariance (T) in meson decay processes. T violation represents a fundamental break in the symmetry between the past and future. I show here that such processes induce destructive interference between different paths that the universe can take through time. The interference eliminates all paths except for two that represent continuously forwards and continuously backwards time evolution. These results illustrate that there are previously-unknown large-scale physical effects arising from the T violation processes in meson decay. Moreover these effects offer a solution to the age-old problem of the cause of the unidirectionality of time.
View less >
Conference Title
5TH INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP DICE2010: SPACE-TIME-MATTER - CURRENT ISSUES IN QUANTUM MECHANICS AND BEYOND
Volume
306
Issue
1
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2011. This is the author-manuscript version of this paper. It is posted here with permission of the copyright owner[s] for your personal use only. No further distribution permitted. For information about this paper please refer to the conference website or contact the authors.
Subject
Cosmology and extragalactic astronomy
Condensed matter physics
Quantum physics not elsewhere classified
Other physical sciences