Eideard

Maccone claims glass can unbreak – for example

Imagine if a cold cup of coffee spontaneously heated up as you watched. Or a cracked pane of glass suddenly un-broke. According to physicist Lorenzo Maccone at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, you see things like this all the time – you just don’t remember.

In a paper published last week in Physical Review Letters, he attempts to provide a solution to what has been called the mystery of “the arrow-of-time”.

Briefly, the problem is that while our laws of physics are all symmetrical or “time-reversal invariant” – they apply equally well if time runs forwards or backwards – most of the everyday phenomena we observe, like the cooling of hot coffee, are not. They never seem to happen in reverse…

So why will your coffee spontaneously cool down, but not heat up?

Maccone’s solution is to suggest that in fact entropy-decreasing events occur all the time – so there is no asymmetry and no associated mystery about the arrow of time.

He argues that quantum mechanics dictates that if anyone does observe an entropy-decreasing event, their memories of the event “will have been erased by necessity“.

Maccone doesn’t mean that your memories will never form in the first place. “What I’m pointing out is that memories are formed and then are subsequently erased,” he tells me.

When you observe any system, according to Maccone, you enter into a “quantum entanglement” with it. That is, you and the system are entangled and cannot properly be described separately.

The entanglement, Maccone says, is between your memory and the system. When you disentangle, “the disentangling operation will erase this entanglement, namely the observer’s memory”. His paper derives this conclusion mathematically.

Smacks of philosophic Idealism to me. Mind over matter. Or mind over matter over mind over matter.

In any case, accounting for physical processes with non-material devices.