While time may not stop for everyone, a recent experiment conducted by scientists from Roskilde University in Denmark and the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany demonstrates how time may occasionally shuffle in some materials.
There is no tangible proof that a material-based measure of time can be reversed thanks to research into how materials like glass age.
Most of the time, time’s arrow is not very significant to the principles of physics. You can quickly determine the origin of an object’s movement by flipping an equation that describes its motion. We refer to these laws as being reversible in time.
Even while many particular rules occasionally flout the law, chaos will always ultimately determine the fate of our universe as a whole. Freshly deposited eggs, in one direction. Omelets in the other one. You will never again acquire a lovely, spherical egg with as much calculation.
In scientific parlance, time can be understood as a characteristic of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that isolated systems tend to be more disordered than they were previously in ways that are difficult to rewind.
It is difficult to determine what determines if a material system is time reversible or driven by entropy. While it is easy to see an old automobile rotting, a statue aging, or a ship slowly collapsing onto a beach, materials such as glass can undergo subtle, non-corrosive changes over time.
Non-crystalline materials, such as different polymers and amorphous solids like glass, are composed of particle jumbles that resemble liquids and that relax into a theoretically stable state under their inherent entropy-driven clock. Consider it a sort of special theory of relativity based on the continuous reconfiguration of various molecules falling into place thermodynamically, rather than on acceleration or gravity.
This unit of measurement for aging is called material time by physicists. Although the idea has been around since the early 1970s, no experiment has yet been conducted to assess how the Narayanaswamy formalism interprets the data. This is due to a valid reason. Glass ages slowly in ways that are impossible to photograph with the naked eye. Lead author Till Böhmer, a condensed matter physicist from the Technical University of Darmstadt, notes that “it was a huge experimental challenge.”
The researchers skillfully recorded scattered laser light using a highly sensitive video camera. When the light struck a glass sample, it created interference patterns that could be statistically interpreted as variations that represented a sense of material time within three distinct glass-forming materials.
They discovered evidence of time being reversible at the molecular level, changing as particles pushed and tugged into different arrangements, as opposed to being stuck on a road toward equilibrium. If you completely rewind the video, you won’t be able to distinguish whether it is playing forward or backward.
“However, this does not mean that the aging of materials can be reversed,” Böhmer asserts.
The system will ultimately settle into a state that is dictated by entropy. However, the molecular pendulums’ minute oscillations, which tick-tock back and forth as if oblivious to the passing of time, have no bearing on this process.
