Slashdot Mirror
Physicists Confirm a Pear-Shaped Nucleus, and It Could Ruin Time Travel Forever (sciencealert.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via ScienceAlert: Physicists have confirmed the existence of pear-shaped nuclei, which challenges the fundamental theories of physics that explain our Universe. "We've found these nuclei literally point towards a direction in space. This relates to a direction in time, providing there's a well-defined direction in time and we will always travel from past to present," Marcus Scheck from the University of the West of Scotland told Kenneth MacDonald at BBC News. Until recently, it was generally accepted that nuclei of atoms could only be one of three shapes: spherical, discus, or rugby ball. The first discovery of a pear-shaped nucleus was back in 2013, when physicists at CERN discovered isotope Radium-224. Now, that find has been confirmed by a second study, which shows that the nucleus of the isotope Barium-144 is also asymmetrical and pear-shaped. In regard to time travel, Scheck says that this uneven distribution of mass and charge caused Barium-144's nucleus to "point" in a certain direction in spacetime, and this bias could explain why time seems to only want to go from past to present, and not backwards, even if the laws of physics don't care which way it goes.
Time only "goes from" the past to the future because we define those terms by the way that time "goes", and time "goes" the way it does, from less-entropic to more-entropic states, because the process of memory formation, like all processes, necessitates an increase in entropy. Time isn't actually "going" anywhere, there are just different possible states of the universe, and the ones we we remember (or are otherwise recorded for us to gather information from) are necessarily more entropic, and we call the states we already remember (or otherwise has record of) "past" and the opposite direction in the configuration space "future".
What the hell could pear-shaped nuclei possible have to do with any of that?
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
I'm not a scientist but this pear-shaped atom probably points back to the origin point of the Big Bang. It might be possible find the precise galactic center from where everything got spewed out into the cosmos?
How do we know time doesn't go backward? Maybe it does. We'd never know it if it did. (think about it.)
Perhaps in fact time goes back and forward all the time. This would be a nifty way to have things like spooky action at a distance. You run time forward till a correlated event happens, then run it backward and imbue the necessary future state. Instant hidden variables that you can't detect.
it doesn't matter how much time this time reversal takes since, you will never notice it happening.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Pear shaped means time runs neither forwards nor backwards, it has a direction and that is that, it is arbitrary which direction that is, everything is just bound to that direction, well within our space, stranger things happen in infinitely small and infinitely large space and especially beyond where they become the same relative to our scale.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
> so why people keep mixing several theories together, is beyond me
I can tell you that. It's because the only difference between the written down formula for Shannon Entropy and the written down formula for thermodynamic entropy is a single - sign. Which led people to believe that the one is merely an inversion of the other.
Unfortunately this is an extremely silly conclusion - because although the formulas look the same on paper, they aren't representing the same things. The symbols re the same - but they are not symbols for the same things.
The conflation of Shannon entropy with Thermodynamic Entropy is only marginally less silly than somebody arguing that carbon dioxide is 2 Oxygen atoms travelling at light speed because C is also the symbol for the speed of light.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *