geomancer
04-25-2014, 02:59 PM
https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140416-times-arrow-traced-to-quantum-source/
Time’s Arrow Traced to Quantum Source
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SteGrifo27 (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:SteGrifo27/gallery)
Cups of coffee cool, buildings crumble and stars fizzle out, physicists say, because of a strange quantum effect called “entanglement.”
By: Natalie Wolchover (https://www.simonsfoundation.org/authors/natalie-wolchover/?quanta)
April 16, 2014
Coffee cools, buildings crumble, eggs break and stars fizzle out in a universe that seems destined to degrade into a state of uniform drabness known as thermal equilibrium. The astronomer-philosopher Sir Arthur Eddington in 1927 cited the gradual dispersal of energy as evidence of an irreversible “arrow of time.”
But to the bafflement of generations of physicists, the arrow of time does not seem to follow from the underlying laws of physics, which work the same going forward in time as in reverse. By those laws, it seemed that if someone knew the paths of all the particles in the universe and flipped them around, energy would accumulate rather than disperse: Tepid coffee would spontaneously heat up, buildings would rise from their rubble and sunlight would slink back into the sun.
“In classical physics, we were struggling,” said Sandu Popescu (https://www.phy.bris.ac.uk/people/Popescu_S/index.html), a professor of physics at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. “If I knew more, could I reverse the event, put together all the molecules of the egg that broke? Why am I relevant?”
Surely, he said, time’s arrow is not steered by human ignorance. And yet, since the birth of thermodynamics in the 1850s, the only known approach for calculating the spread of energy was to formulate statistical distributions of the unknown trajectories of particles, and show that, over time, the ignorance smeared things out.
Now, physicists are unmasking a more fundamental source for the arrow of time: Energy disperses and objects equilibrate, they say, because of the way elementary particles become intertwined when they interact — a strange effect called “quantum entanglement.”
“Finally, we can understand why a cup of coffee equilibrates in a room,” said Tony Short (https://www.bristol.ac.uk/physics/people/tony-j-short/), a quantum physicist at Bristol. “Entanglement builds up between the state of the coffee cup and the state of the room.”
https://www.simonsfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Bristol-group_web-300x200.jpg
Courtesy of Tony Short
(https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140416-times-arrow-traced-to-quantum-source/attachment/bristol-group_web/)A watershed paper by Noah Linden, left, Sandu Popescu, Tony Short and Andreas Winter (not pictured) in 2009 showed that entanglement causes objects to evolve toward equilibrium. The generality of the proof is “extraordinarily surprising,” Popescu says. “The fact that a system reaches equilibrium is universal.” The paper triggered further research on the role of entanglement in directing the arrow of time.
Popescu, Short and their colleagues Noah Linden (https://www.maths.bris.ac.uk/people/faculty/manl/) and Andreas Winter (https://grupsderecerca.uab.cat/giq/people/andreas-winter) reported the discovery (https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.79.061103) in the journal Physical Review E in 2009, arguing that objects reach equilibrium, or a state of uniform energy distribution, within an infinite amount of time by becoming quantum mechanically entangled with their surroundings.
Similar results (https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.101.190403) by Peter Reimann (https://www.physik.uni-bielefeld.de/theory/cm/people/members/preimann.html) of the University of Bielefeld in Germany appeared several months earlier in Physical Review Letters. Short and a collaborator strengthened the argument (https://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/14/1/013063) in 2012 by showing that entanglement causes equilibration within a finite time. And, in work that was posted on the scientific preprint site arXiv.org in February, two separate groups have taken the next (https://arxiv.org/abs/1402.1093) step (https://math.rutgers.edu/%7Eoldstein/papers/TypicalDecayLett03.pdf), calculating that most physical systems equilibrate rapidly, on time scales proportional to their size. “To show that it’s relevant to our actual physical world, the processes have to be happening on reasonable time scales,” Short said.
The tendency of coffee — and everything else — to reach equilibrium is “very intuitive,” said Nicolas Brunner (https://theory.physics.unige.ch/%7Ebrunner/), a quantum physicist at the University of Geneva. “But when it comes to explaining why it happens, this is the first time it has been derived on firm grounds by considering a microscopic theory.”
If the new line of research is correct, then the story of time’s arrow begins with the quantum mechanical idea that, deep down, nature is inherently uncertain. An elementary particle lacks definite physical properties and is defined only by probabilities of being in various states. For example, at a particular moment, a particle might have a 50 percent chance of spinning clockwise and a 50 percent chance of spinning counterclockwise. An experimentally tested theorem (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bell-theorem/) by the Northern Irish physicist John Bell says there is no “true” state of the particle; the probabilities are the only reality that can be ascribed to it.
Quantum uncertainty then gives rise to entanglement, the putative source of the arrow of time.
When two particles interact, they can no longer even be described by their own, independently evolving probabilities, called “pure states.” Instead, they become entangled components of a more complicated probability distribution that describes both particles together. It might dictate, for example, that the particles spin in opposite directions. The system as a whole is in a pure state, but the state of each individual particle is “mixed” with that of its acquaintance. The two could travel light-years apart, and the spin of each would remain correlated with that of the other, a feature Albert Einstein famously described as “spooky action at a distance.”
“Entanglement is in some sense the essence of quantum mechanics,” or the laws governing interactions on the subatomic scale, Brunner said. The phenomenon underlies quantum computing, quantum cryptography and quantum teleportation.
Continues at https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140416-times-arrow-traced-to-quantum-source/
Time’s Arrow Traced to Quantum Source
https://www.simonsfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Corfe_Castle_web.jpg
(https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:SteGrifo27/gallery)
SteGrifo27 (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:SteGrifo27/gallery)
Cups of coffee cool, buildings crumble and stars fizzle out, physicists say, because of a strange quantum effect called “entanglement.”
By: Natalie Wolchover (https://www.simonsfoundation.org/authors/natalie-wolchover/?quanta)
April 16, 2014
Coffee cools, buildings crumble, eggs break and stars fizzle out in a universe that seems destined to degrade into a state of uniform drabness known as thermal equilibrium. The astronomer-philosopher Sir Arthur Eddington in 1927 cited the gradual dispersal of energy as evidence of an irreversible “arrow of time.”
But to the bafflement of generations of physicists, the arrow of time does not seem to follow from the underlying laws of physics, which work the same going forward in time as in reverse. By those laws, it seemed that if someone knew the paths of all the particles in the universe and flipped them around, energy would accumulate rather than disperse: Tepid coffee would spontaneously heat up, buildings would rise from their rubble and sunlight would slink back into the sun.
“In classical physics, we were struggling,” said Sandu Popescu (https://www.phy.bris.ac.uk/people/Popescu_S/index.html), a professor of physics at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. “If I knew more, could I reverse the event, put together all the molecules of the egg that broke? Why am I relevant?”
Surely, he said, time’s arrow is not steered by human ignorance. And yet, since the birth of thermodynamics in the 1850s, the only known approach for calculating the spread of energy was to formulate statistical distributions of the unknown trajectories of particles, and show that, over time, the ignorance smeared things out.
Now, physicists are unmasking a more fundamental source for the arrow of time: Energy disperses and objects equilibrate, they say, because of the way elementary particles become intertwined when they interact — a strange effect called “quantum entanglement.”
“Finally, we can understand why a cup of coffee equilibrates in a room,” said Tony Short (https://www.bristol.ac.uk/physics/people/tony-j-short/), a quantum physicist at Bristol. “Entanglement builds up between the state of the coffee cup and the state of the room.”
https://www.simonsfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Bristol-group_web-300x200.jpg
Courtesy of Tony Short
(https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140416-times-arrow-traced-to-quantum-source/attachment/bristol-group_web/)A watershed paper by Noah Linden, left, Sandu Popescu, Tony Short and Andreas Winter (not pictured) in 2009 showed that entanglement causes objects to evolve toward equilibrium. The generality of the proof is “extraordinarily surprising,” Popescu says. “The fact that a system reaches equilibrium is universal.” The paper triggered further research on the role of entanglement in directing the arrow of time.
Popescu, Short and their colleagues Noah Linden (https://www.maths.bris.ac.uk/people/faculty/manl/) and Andreas Winter (https://grupsderecerca.uab.cat/giq/people/andreas-winter) reported the discovery (https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.79.061103) in the journal Physical Review E in 2009, arguing that objects reach equilibrium, or a state of uniform energy distribution, within an infinite amount of time by becoming quantum mechanically entangled with their surroundings.
Similar results (https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.101.190403) by Peter Reimann (https://www.physik.uni-bielefeld.de/theory/cm/people/members/preimann.html) of the University of Bielefeld in Germany appeared several months earlier in Physical Review Letters. Short and a collaborator strengthened the argument (https://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/14/1/013063) in 2012 by showing that entanglement causes equilibration within a finite time. And, in work that was posted on the scientific preprint site arXiv.org in February, two separate groups have taken the next (https://arxiv.org/abs/1402.1093) step (https://math.rutgers.edu/%7Eoldstein/papers/TypicalDecayLett03.pdf), calculating that most physical systems equilibrate rapidly, on time scales proportional to their size. “To show that it’s relevant to our actual physical world, the processes have to be happening on reasonable time scales,” Short said.
The tendency of coffee — and everything else — to reach equilibrium is “very intuitive,” said Nicolas Brunner (https://theory.physics.unige.ch/%7Ebrunner/), a quantum physicist at the University of Geneva. “But when it comes to explaining why it happens, this is the first time it has been derived on firm grounds by considering a microscopic theory.”
If the new line of research is correct, then the story of time’s arrow begins with the quantum mechanical idea that, deep down, nature is inherently uncertain. An elementary particle lacks definite physical properties and is defined only by probabilities of being in various states. For example, at a particular moment, a particle might have a 50 percent chance of spinning clockwise and a 50 percent chance of spinning counterclockwise. An experimentally tested theorem (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bell-theorem/) by the Northern Irish physicist John Bell says there is no “true” state of the particle; the probabilities are the only reality that can be ascribed to it.
Quantum uncertainty then gives rise to entanglement, the putative source of the arrow of time.
When two particles interact, they can no longer even be described by their own, independently evolving probabilities, called “pure states.” Instead, they become entangled components of a more complicated probability distribution that describes both particles together. It might dictate, for example, that the particles spin in opposite directions. The system as a whole is in a pure state, but the state of each individual particle is “mixed” with that of its acquaintance. The two could travel light-years apart, and the spin of each would remain correlated with that of the other, a feature Albert Einstein famously described as “spooky action at a distance.”
“Entanglement is in some sense the essence of quantum mechanics,” or the laws governing interactions on the subatomic scale, Brunner said. The phenomenon underlies quantum computing, quantum cryptography and quantum teleportation.
Continues at https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140416-times-arrow-traced-to-quantum-source/