Physicist Joan Vaccaro of Griffith University in Australia believes that time in the universe and conservation laws could have arisen from time symmetry breaking (T-invariance). She announced this at the annual Australian science festival National Science Week, according to EurekAlert !.
According to the researcher, she discovered a mechanism due to which some physical phenomena are irreversible. For example, the second rule of thermodynamics prohibits the transfer of heat from a less heated body to a more heated one. In particular, the physicist drew attention to the behavior of mesons - particles involved in strong interactions that are responsible for the bonds between quarks. Earlier experiments have shown that when time is reversed, the transformation of these particles into others occurs with a different probability.
Having studied the behavior of mesons, Vaccaro came to the conclusion that without violation of T-invariance, strange phenomena could occur in the Universe. For example, objects would move in time as easily as in space. Appearing at one point, they would immediately disappear. In such conditions, conservation laws would not be able to work, says the physicist.
The next step in Vaccaro's research is the theoretical design of experiments that will test the predictions of her hypothesis.