The Arrow of Time may come from higher dimensional frame dragging
I have a great preoccupation with time, yet it seems hard to write anything really new about it. Yes, yes, we have heard what Einstein has to say on the subject. We have even heard about McTaggart and the A and B series.
The physics is quite fascinating because, time as we perceive, seems to be a statistical phenomenon which means that statistically we are likely to be moving forward but there is a small chance that time can move backwards in some region at some moment.
Quantum experiments have shown that cause and effect can be reversed in time. A recent experiment also showed that a quantum system could be made to evolve backwards for a short “time”.
Why time does that, why it has an arrow, is a mystery. Consider that all laws of physics are time reversible at a fundamental level. That is why energy is conserved. Yet, when moving forward in time, entropy increases, meaning that things tend to become more disordered and diffuse.
I propose that time comes from higher dimensional frame dragging, and thus is not statistical at all, but the statistics is an outcome of that frame dragging.
There is the theory that time actually doesn’t have an arrow and that it is all in our heads. Entropy is a measure of information content in a system and so when entropy increases, information increases. Thus, our perception of time may simply be how we perceive information increase.
Although this is an interesting idea to ponder, there are much deeper aspects of quantum physics that drive time forward. Thus, information flow is an effect and not a cause of time irreversibility.
Imagine, for a moment, that you are placed in a room floating in space and that room is completely isolated from all interaction with the outside universe. It is entirely reasonable that the time in this room might flow in a different direction than the time in the universe, not from any general relativistic considerations, but simply because it is not connected the overall information flow of the universe. But it won’t without some additional system which can manipulate the flow of time. That is because the room will essentially continue on in the time evolution in which it started when it was connected to the larger universe.
This has been realized in systems with as few as one or two particles. Time irreversibility seems to be baked into quantum evolution. The great theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner showed that a time reversal operation is “antiunitary”, meaning that it is inconsistent with the unitary transformation that all quantum processes undergo as they evolve in time.
This is similar to other kinds of reversed operations like convergent waves. If you drop a rock in pond, waves ripple outwards from it. It is physically possible, however, to generate ripples which converge onto a single spot in the exact reversal. Why don’t such things appear spontaneously in nature? It is because they are highly unlikely, but they can be created artificially.
Likewise, an antiunitary time reversal can be done, however, by carefully manipulating an time evolving system using another, supersystem. Researchers recently published a report on achieving this phenomenon on an IBM quantum computer.
Using a fluctuating electromagenetic field, a single particle can be made to reverse its time evolution, effectively creating a convergent wavefunction, one which, rather than spreading from the measured point in the past, converges on a point in the future.
The authors conclude that they have discovered this about the arrow of time:
(i) For the time reversal one needs a supersystem manipulating the system in question. In the most of the cases, such a supersystem cannot spontaneously emerge in nature. (ii) Even if such a supersystem would emerge for some specific situation, the corresponding spontaneous time reversal typically requires times exceeding the universe lifetime.
The research is a beautiful demonstration of why time seems to move foward for everything everywhere rather than some systems moving forward and others backwards or changing from forward to backward. Since all matter in the universe that we can see is correlated, it cannot move backwards unless some supersystem explicitly does so. The probability of that happening is so low, that it is never observed to occur spontaneously.
What the research does not show is why it moves in the direction it does or why it moves at all instead of remaining effectively static like a system in equilibrium.
My own theory about why this happens is that it is generated by higher dimensional gravitoelectromagnetic potential which points largely in our time dimension. (This is consistent with Einstein-Aether theory and Aether Scalar Tensor Theory.) This potential is a four dimensional vector called a shift vector. This shift is spacetime inertia. We know that spacetime regions such as warp bubbles are subject to the same kind of inertial laws as matter objects. Thus, the 4D universe of space and time simply moves in the time direction as it is propagating in the 5th dimension.
As spacetime propagates in the fifth dimension it experiences frame “dragging” which is mostly constant. The arrow of time becomes a consequence of the Sagnac effect.
I talked about this in a previous newsletter. The Sagnac effect occurs even in the presence of constant frame dragging potential. One example is if you have a ring shaped spacestation around a black hole that is itself rotating. If you pass light around the spacestation, it will take longer to go around counter to the black hole’s rotation than with it.
The same is true of linear dragging. A linearly dragged situation occurs, for example, when you have a long massive body, say a hollow pipe made of something very dense, several lightyears long moving in the direction of its length. If you pass light through the center of the pipe, the Sagnac effect implies the light beam sent with the pipe’s motion will take less time than one sent back against its motion. This is measurable in all reference frames.
In the case of the universe, this might explain why time itself propagates. It is like spacetime itself is inside a long, moving 5D pipe. The fifth dimension takes the place of time, and time itself is just like another spatial dimension. As we propagate in both time and the fifth dimension (as we would inside the pipe’s length and time in the previous analogy), it takes less distance in the fifth dimension to go with the flow of time than against it. This differential creates the arrow of time forcing everything to evolve in that direction.
This means that time is physically present in a higher dimension universe’s gravitational field and is not simply a statistical phenomenon. Rather, the statistical asymmetry emerges from the physical asymmetry.
I feel like this would not be hard to show but very hard to prove. While frame dragging in ordinary dimensions is easy enough, frame dragging in high dimensions might just look like dark matter or energy (as I have argued before). Still, if I find the time, I might devise a paper on the subject.