Everyone knows that time’s arrow only goes in one direction, regardless of the system or material involved. In the case of material time, i.e. the ageing of materials such as amorphous materials resulting from glass transition, this material time is determined after the initial solidification by the relaxation of localized stresses and medium-scale reordering. These changes are induced by the out-of-equilibrium state of the amorphous material, and result in changes to the material’s properties, such as a change from ductile to a brittle state in metallic glasses. It is this material time which the authors of a recent paper (preprint) in Nature Physics postulates to be reversible.
Whether or not this is possible is said to be dependent on the stationarity of the stochastic processes involved in the physical ageing. Determining this stationarity through the investigation of the material time in a number of metallic glass materials (1-phenyl-1-propanol, laponite and polymerizing epoxy) was the goal of this investigation by [Till Böhmer] and colleagues, and found that at least in these three materials to be the case, suggesting that this process is in fact reversible.
Naturally, the primary use of this research is to validate theories regarding the ageing of materials, other aspects of which have been investigated over the years, such as the atomic dynamics by [V.M Giordano] and colleagues in a 2016 paper in Nature Communications, and a 2022 study by [Birte Riechers] and colleagues in Science Advances on predicting the nonlinear physical ageing process of glasses.
While none of these studies will give us time-travel powers, it does give us a better understanding of how materials age over time, including biological systems like our bodies. This would definitely seem to be a cause worthy of our time.
Header image: Rosino on Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.
Physical aging in amorphous materials really has nothing to do with the way biological systems age. The former aging is caused by molecular relaxation to a lower, generally more dense, state. Biological systems age due to changes in molecules due to chemistry (oxidation, radical processes, etc).
“Biological systems age due to changes in molecules due to chemistry (oxidation, radical processes, etc).”
Those are molecular changes to biological systems. There are physical changes to biological systems as well, unless you think your bones aren’t part of you.
Given what we’ve been seeing happen at the quantum level, I cannot say for a certainty that time only goes in one direction. Just sayin’.
Time is merely the abstract perception of linear causation. The relations that compose our reality are transformed through the veil of space-time. It is only on this side of the veil, through hindsight, we say ‘That instance came after the one that preceded it and before the next’
People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a nonlinear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey… stuff.
Time is a flat disk…
Thank you Doctor