We all feel the forward march of time, but the laws of physics tell us it is an illusion. A radical rethink is needed.
The aim of science is to explain all the features of the universe, from the mass of the Higgs boson to the fact that the night sky is filled with stars. Perhaps the most obvious feature of all is that time in our universe only travels in one direction: forwards. We remember the past but not the future, and most things about our world are irreversible, from a glass of spilt milk to the birth of a child.
No single feature of our universe is more in need of explanation than the forward march of time, yet physics and cosmology have so far failed to explain this basic fact of nature. It's time for a radical approach. We need a new starting point for explaining the directionality of time.
Physicists speak about arrows of time. One such arrow is visible in the light we see coming to us from distant stars: all of it comes from the past, showing us what they were once like, with none coming from the future. This is mysterious because the equations we use to describe light are unchanged if we reverse the direction of time. Consequently these equations have two solutions: waves that propagate energy and information from the past to the future, and waves that do the reverse, moving backwards in time.
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