We all live in the flow of time. And the awareness of this fact is considered one of the signs of an intelligent being. Since the era of antiquity, the concept of time has remained a philosophical category, but physics could not ignore such a significant observed process. On the way to comprehending the nature of time, scientists were waiting for many amazing discoveries.
THE ARROW OF TIME
The first person who tried to describe the nature of time is considered the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, a student of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle. He characterized time as "a moving semblance of eternity", that is, as a characteristic of an imperfect changing world that seeks order, but is not able to achieve it. In turn, Aristotle developed the concept of time, defining it as a "measure of movement", which we still use.
The greatest medieval thinker Augustine the Blessed described time as a psychological phenomenon of a change in perception ("stretching the soul"); at the same time, he distinguished between the past, stored in memory, the present, fixed at a specific moment, and the future, expressed in expectations. At the same time, Augustine formulated the concepts of the one-pointedness and irreversibility of time, which would later be reflected in the vivid image of the “arrow of time”.
For physicists, the assertion of Isaac Newton about the "absoluteness" of time became basic: he believed that it had no beginning or end, it flows the same everywhere in the Universe, and all real events occur simultaneously. Hence follows the philosophical concept of the non-existence of time without changes, confirmed in the framework of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which was formulated by Rudolf Clausius in 1865.
Since then, time has also been described as a measure of the increase in entropy, that is, the "disorder" of an object or a group of objects. Since entropy always only increases, it turns out that at the moment of its birth the Universe was a super-ordered object. What caused the appearance of such an object and what happened before its appearance remains the greatest mystery.
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FOURTH DIMENSION
In 1880, the mathematician and mystic Charles Hinton wrote an essay "What is the fourth dimension?" fact that can be demonstrated in practice. Throughout his life, Heaton was engaged in the study of four-dimensional geometry and believed that its comprehension would make him equal to God. To popularize his ideas, he wrote "science fictions", which caught the eye of the famous science fiction writer Herbert Wells. He used them to create his own plots: for example, in the novel "The Time Machine", published in 1895, he almost word for word recounted the considerations of Charles Hinton from his work "Incomplete Connection": "There is no difference between time and the three dimensions of space,except that our consciousness moves in time”. Thus, the science fiction writer anticipated the emergence of the concept of the space-time continuum.
The special and general theories of relativity, formulated by Albert Einstein, reinforced the point of view of science on the need to recognize time as a dimension that is inextricably linked with space. It has been shown and confirmed by many experiments that the speed of the flow of time depends on the frame of reference: the faster the system moves, the slower time flows in it relative to the conventionally stationary system. Moreover, time is influenced by gravity: the stronger the gravitational field of an object, the more the spatial lines are curved at its surface and, again, time flows slower.
It turns out that the course of time can be changed by curving space in much the same way as gravity does. And if you contrive and create a special spatial formation, which today is called a "wormhole" (or "wormhole") and connects distant points in space, then theoretically it becomes possible to break the causal relationship and be at the exit from such a "hole" before you went there …
KOZYREV'S THEORY
The possibility of constructing a "time machine" is fiercely debated, but attempts to understand the mechanism of the passage of time look much more intriguing.
In 1958, the Soviet astrophysicist Nikolai Aleksandrovich Kozyrev published an article "Causal or asymmetric mechanics in the linear approximation." The scientist proceeded from the postulate that time has a special property that distinguishes the future from the past, the cause from the effect, which "can be called direction or course." The existing mechanics, Kozyrev stressed, does not take into account the fundamental difference between cause and effect, which must be corrected. Since interacting bodies cannot simultaneously occupy the same place in space, it must be admitted that cause and effect are always separated by some kind of spatial gap - it can be arbitrarily small, but never equal to zero.
The astrophysicist argued that during the transfer of interaction between bodies, an additional difference in forces should arise, due to the transformation of a cause into an effect. It is insignificant, but it can be measured with particularly accurate scales.
For the first experiments, tops and gyroscopes were used, and a positive result was immediately obtained: when the axis rotated clockwise upward, the gyroscope became lighter, and when inverted, it became heavier. However, repeated and more accurate experience with the aircraft gyroscope showed no difference. I had to return to theory. Kozyrev suggested that, unlike spatial dimensions, time spreads across the Universe in the same way and instantly. It turns out that if you measure the flow of time, then you are dealing with the entire Universe at once. For this reason, during experiments, it is necessary to build an open system, otherwise no influence of time on physical quantities will be noted. But in this case, there is a risk of obtaining non-repeated results, which contradicts the very essence of science.
And so it happened. The spectacular experiments invented by Kozyrev either gave the predicted result or refused to give it. Attempts to refine the theory did not lead to success, and the astrophysicist himself was dubbed a "pseudoscientist." Now his theory is considered marginal and is used mainly by mystics to substantiate supernatural phenomena.
GREAT CRYSTAL
Today physicists operate with the concept of "Planck time", that is, its limiting unit, which is 5.4 * 10 ^ -44 seconds. Until now, it has not been possible to measure the "Planck time", because the shortest experimentally observed time interval is of the order of an attosecond (10 ^ -18).
Perhaps it will never be possible to measure this theoretically calculated time, because in reality it does not exist. This is the conclusion reached by physicists from the University of Waterloo, who established that the limiting unit of time is several orders of magnitude larger than the "Planck" one. In the model they proposed, time has a "crystalline" structure, that is, it consists of discrete repeating elements. The author of the new theory Mir Faizal describes its essence as follows: “The Physical Universe is like a motion picture, where a sequence of static frames creates the illusion of movement. If we take this point of view seriously, then our perception of reality in the spirit of continuous movement turns out to be an illusion, which is formed by a discrete structure."
Like his Soviet predecessor, Faisal is about to confirm his claims with experiment. And if he succeeds, then, probably, scientists will again have to revise the laws that are considered unshakable.
Anton Pervushin