Why Time Only Moves Forward
From Time Slips & Past Lives · 13:57
Show by James Garner
Drop a glass, and it shatters. It never unshatters. Heat flows from hot to cold, never from cold to hot. You remember yesterday, but you cannot remember tomorrow. And yet the laws of physics do not care which way time runs. Elena follows the arrow of time from Boltzmann's tombstone in Vienna to the BaBar experiment at Stanford, which proved in 2012 that time itself is not symmetrical — and asks the question physics cannot answer: why did the universe begin in a low-entropy state? Verdict: the mechanism is demonstrated, but the origin is genuinely unexplained. Sources: Ludwig Boltzmann, S = k log W and the H-theorem; Josef Loschmidt's paradox (1876); CP violation in neutral kaon decays (Christenson et al., 1964); CPLEAR at CERN (1998); BaBar at SLAC (Lees et al., 2012); Andrei Sakharov (1967); Hafele-Keating (1972); Pound-Rebka (1959).
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