There's some good stuff here guys. I'm pleased to see a discussion on time that focusses on scientific evidence instead of wandering off into woo like time travel.
Billy, I read the Economist article and totally disagree with the conclusion. I have no issue with this:
"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."
But IMHO this is a cargo-cult non-sequiteur:
"Going forwards is thus not the same as going backwards, and time’s arrow really does exist".
As voiced on the thread, there is no such thing as "going forwards in time". It's merely a figure of speech. Things move or change, events occur, and clocks clock up some kind of regular cyclic motion rather than "the flow of time".
There are other proposals to explain the asymmetry, such as this one by Mark Hadley at Warwick.
"Nature is fundamentally asymmetric according to the accepted views of particle physics. There is a clear left right asymmetry in weak interactions and a much smaller CP violation in Kaon systems. These have been measured but never explained. This research suggests that the experimental results in our laboratories are a consequence of galactic rotation twisting our local space time. If that is shown to be correct then nature would be fundamentally symmetric after all. This radical prediction is testable with the data that has already been collected at Cern and BaBar by looking for results that are skewed in the direction that the galaxy rotates.”
Billy, I read the Economist article and totally disagree with the conclusion. I have no issue with this:
"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."
But IMHO this is a cargo-cult non-sequiteur:
"Going forwards is thus not the same as going backwards, and time’s arrow really does exist".
As voiced on the thread, there is no such thing as "going forwards in time". It's merely a figure of speech. Things move or change, events occur, and clocks clock up some kind of regular cyclic motion rather than "the flow of time".
There are other proposals to explain the asymmetry, such as this one by Mark Hadley at Warwick.
"Nature is fundamentally asymmetric according to the accepted views of particle physics. There is a clear left right asymmetry in weak interactions and a much smaller CP violation in Kaon systems. These have been measured but never explained. This research suggests that the experimental results in our laboratories are a consequence of galactic rotation twisting our local space time. If that is shown to be correct then nature would be fundamentally symmetric after all. This radical prediction is testable with the data that has already been collected at Cern and BaBar by looking for results that are skewed in the direction that the galaxy rotates.”