When did physicists first begin to suspect that what we experience as time emerges from quantum entanglement, much as we experience heat from the kinetic energy of molecules?
I suspect it was a long time ago, perhaps around the time of the double-slit experiment in 1909, but certainly by the 1960s. More recently some of the physicists I read have been openly speculating that time is emergent at the macro level, presumably in the context of a collapse of the wave function (measured in unit.
So it's particularly interesting that new experimental evidence of an "arrow of time" used quantum entanglement to expose T symmetry violation in kaons...
The arrow of time: Backward ran sentences… | The Economist
... The main hint that nature violates the time-reversal (T) symmetry ... —and thus that there really is an arrow of time—came from seemingly disparate discoveries about matter and antimatter. Mathematically, particles and their anti-versions differ in two ways: they have opposite electrical charges and they are each other’s mirror reflections. But in 1964 some particles called kaons were shown not to respect this charge-conjugation/parity (CP) symmetry, as it is known. Matter and antimatter are not, in other words, quite equal and opposite. However, according to another law, C, P and T symmetries, when lumped together into a single, overarching CPT symmetry, must be conserved. This means that if CP is violated, then T must be too, in order to even things out.
The obvious place to look for this T violation is where C and P are already known to misbehave. Between 1999 and 2008 a laboratory in California was set up to do just that. The old linear accelerator at Stanford was repurposed, turning it from the machine that co-discovered a particle known as the charm quark (thus winning its operators a Nobel prize) into a factory for making particles called B mesons. These are interesting because they and their antiparticles exhibit CP-violating tendencies. They are thus a promising place to look for T violations, too.
Which is what the scientists of SLAC’s BaBar experiment have been doing. Though the B-meson factory itself has been silent for four years (the accelerator is now in its third incarnation, as the world’s most powerful X-ray camera), its data live on, and the collaborators have been ploughing through them. They are looking in particular at how long it takes a B-meson to change its nature, focusing on one particular member of the extended B-meson family, the electrically neutral B0.
As with many things quantum, B0 can exist in a number of forms. These are known as B, B-bar, B-plus and B-minus. Like a subatomic werewolf, a B0 constantly shifts between them. If time truly has an arrow, though, some of these shifts will occur at a different rate when going in one direction rather than the other. In particular, CP-violation theory predicts that B-bar will turn into B-minus faster than B-minus turns into B-bar. All that remains is to measure the difference.
Unfortunately, that is not as easy as it sounds. A particle’s final state can be known by looking at what other sorts of particle it decays into. What cannot easily be known is what it was beforehand, and for how long.
In the wacky world of quantum physics, however, it is not always impossible to work out what a particle once was but no longer is. That is because B-mesons are sometimes born as quantum-mechanically conjoined twins. One twin gives away the initial state of the other and how long it lasted in that state—and all is revealed.
That revelation, which has been submitted for publication to Physical Review Letters, leaves no room for doubt: B-bars turn into B-minuses far faster than B-minuses turn into B-bars. As many as five B-minuses are produced for every B-bar. The chance of this result being a fluke is a nugatory one in 10**43...
It feels as though we're closing in on the nature of time. The next few years should be fun.
See also:
- Decoherence, Quantum Measurement and the Arrow of Time (workshop 2006)
- Planck time - Wikipedia - "The Planck time is the unique combination of the gravitational constant G, the relativity constant c, and the quantum constant h, to produce a constant with units of time."
- quantum mechanics - Can decoherence time be shorter than Planck time? - Physics (stackexchange)
- Gordon's Notes: Entanglement and the emergence of time 5/2012
- Gordon's Notes: The Tralfamadorians and the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics 4/2007 (before I wrote this there were no hits on these strings, now there are many)
- Gordon's Notes: Quantum macro 6/2011
- Gordon's Notes: Carroll on Time: emergent or fundamental? 9/2011
- Gordon's Notes: Macroscopic quantum mechanics 4/2010
- Gordon's Notes: The Standard Model - summarized 7/2012
- Gordon's Notes: One of these things is not like the other: Gravity 4/2010
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