Theoretical physicists have recently made progress in their understanding of how particles and cells produce the large-scale dynamics that people perceive as time passing.
A key component of how we view the world is how time moves from the past to the future. The exact process by which this phenomenon, also referred to as the arrow of time, is caused by tiny interactions between particles and cells is still unknown. Researchers at the CUNY Graduate Center Initiative for the Theoretical Sciences (ITS) have made advancements in the investigation of this riddle with the publication of a new study in the journal Physical Review Letters. The findings could have substantial effects on a number of disciplines, including physics, neuroscience, and biology.
The arrow of time derives fundamentally from the second law of thermodynamics. According to this theory, physical systems change from being ordered to being disordered as they get smaller and more random. A system becomes increasingly disorganised as the arrow of time gets stronger and it becomes harder for it to get back to a state of order. In essence, the universe is prone to chaos, thus we see time as going in one direction.
The two questions that motivated Christopher Lynn, a postdoctoral fellow with the ITS programme and the paper’s first author, were “would we be able to quantify the strength of a particular system’s arrow of time, and would we be able to sort out how it emerges from the micro scale, where cells and neurons interact, to the whole system.” According to the authors, “our results give the first step toward understanding how the arrow of time that we experience in daily life originates from these more microscopic qualities.”
To begin addressing these problems, physicists looked into how the arrow of time might be broken by examining specific system elements and their interactions. Working neurons in the retina, for example, could be one of the components. By concentrating on a single instance, they showed how the arrow of time can be broken up into pieces produced by sections acting alone, in pairs, in triplets, or in more complicated configurations.
With this method for tracing the arrow of time, the researchers looked at past studies on salamander neurons’ retinal responses to different films. In one movie, a single object appeared and disappeared randomly across the screen, while in another, the beauty of the surrounding environment was vividly depicted. According to the study, the arrow of time appeared in both films, but only in tiny, intricate clusters of neurons, not in enormous, complicated ones. Surprisingly, the scientists discovered that seeing random motion generated a bigger arrow of time in the retina than watching a real scene did. This latter finding, according to Lynn, raises questions about how our internal perception of the arrow of time corresponds with reality.
According to Lynn, these results may be especially intriguing to researchers studying neuroscience. For instance, they “could indicate if the arrow of time functions differently in neuroatypical brains.”
David Schwab, the study’s lead author and a professor of Physics and Biology at the Graduate Center, says that Chris’ decomposition of local irreversibility, also referred to as the arrow of time, is a beautiful, all-encompassing framework that could offer a fresh way of looking at a variety of high-dimensional, nonequilibrium systems.
Reference: “Decomposing the local arrow of time in interacting systems,” approved for publication in Physical Review Letters by Christopher W. Lynn, Caroline M. Holmes, William Bialek, and David J. Schwab.
The authors are Christopher W. Lynn, Ph.D., Caroline M. Holmes, a Princeton PhD student, William Bialek, Ph.D., a postdoctoral scholar at the CUNY Graduate Center, and David J. Schwab, Ph.D., a professor of physics and biology at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Funding is provided by a number of organisations, including the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, James S. McDonnell Foundation, Simons Foundation, and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
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