PIRSA:19070075

Why is time always moving forwards and never backwards?

Cortes, M. (2019). Why is time always moving forwards and never backwards?. Perimeter Institute. https://pirsa.org/19070075

Cortes, Marina. Why is time always moving forwards and never backwards?. Perimeter Institute, Jul. 23, 2019, https://pirsa.org/19070075 

          @misc{ pirsa_PIRSA:19070075,
            doi = {},
            url = {https://pirsa.org/19070075},
            author = {Cortes, Marina},
            keywords = {},
            language = {en},
            title = {Why is time always moving forwards and never backwards?},
            publisher = {Perimeter Institute},
            year = {2019},
            month = {jul},
            note = {PIRSA:19070075 see, \url{https://pirsa.org}}
          }

Marina Cortes Institute for Astrophysics and Space Sciences

Collection
Talk Type Other

Abstract

Why is the future different from the past? The most poignant property about the world around us is that time is always moving forward, yet, as odd as it may seem, our current theories of physics cannot account for this property. In all of fundamental physics, the future and the past are entirely similar. We select time increasing solutions by hand and call on extremely unlikely initial conditions at the big bang to justify this choice. I will address this question and describe attempts to restore the irreversibility of time as the building block of our understanding of nature.

This talk was delivered at ISSYP 2019, Perimeter's high school summer program.