Here’s a mind-bending conundrum to baffle ourselves with as we enter a new year…

 

Is There a Parallel Universe That’s Moving Backwards in Time?

 

by Janet Fang (from our beloved IFL Science)

 

 

“Time, as we understand it, moves from the past to the future irreversibly. But now, an international trio of theoretical physicists is suggesting that there’s more than one future. Two parallel universes were produced by the Big Bang: ours, which moves forward in time (pictured above), and another where time moves backwards. These findings were published in Physical Review Letters in October.

 

In the 1920s, British astronomer Arthur Eddington coined the term “arrow of time” (sometimes “time’s arrow”), which describes the asymmetrical, one-way direction of time. Many physicists today accept that time moves in the direction of increasing entropy—or disorder, randomness, and even chaos—in an effort to approach some equilibrium among all of the things. According to this thermodynamic arrow of time, things increasingly fall apart. If that’s the case, then our universe must have began in a low-entropy, highly ordered initial state.

 

But why would there have been this rare moment of low entropy in our past? One century-old idea developed by Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann is that our visible universe is a temporary, low-entropy statistical fluctuation that affects only a small portion of a much larger equilibrium system, APS Viewpoint explains…”

 

Click here for the rest.

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