Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics – General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
Scientific paper
2009-09-12
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
6pgs, Talk given at FQXI conference, Azores, 2009; to appear in 'Time's Arrow' book, Springer
Scientific paper
Scientists continue to wrestle with the enigma of time. Is time a dynamic or a fundamental property of spacetime? Why does it have an arrow pointing from past to future? Why are physical laws time-symmetric in a universe with broken time-reversal symmetry? These questions remain a mystery. The hope has been that an understanding of the selection of the initial state for our universe would solve such puzzles, especially that of time's arrow. In this article, I discuss how the birth of the universe from the multiverse helps to unravel the nature of time and the reasons behind the time-reversal symmetry of our physical laws. I make the distinction between a local emerging arrow of time in the nucleating universe and the fundamental time with no arrow in the multiverse. The very event of nucleation of the universe from the multiverse breaks time-reversal symmetry, inducing a locally emergent arrow. But, the laws of physics imprinted on this bubble are not processed at birth. Time-reversal symmetry of laws in our universe is inherited from its birth in the multiverse, since these laws originate from the arrowless multiversal time.
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