fuckyeahquantummechanics:

Is quantum mechanics messing with your memory?

Imagine if a cold cup of coffee spontaneously heated up as you watched. Or a cracked pane of glass suddenly un-broke. According to physicist Lorenzo Maccone at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, you see things like this all the time – you just don’t remember.

In a paper published last week in Physical Review Letters, he attempts to provide a solution to what has been called the mystery of “the arrow-of-time.”

When you observe any system, according to Maccone, you enter into a “quantum entanglement” with it. That is, you and the system are entangled and cannot properly be described separately.

The entanglement, Maccone says, is between your memory and the system. When you disentangle, “the disentangling operation will erase this entanglement, namely the observer’s memory”. His paper derives this conclusion mathematically.

While we cannot remember our cups of coffee re-heating, and hence cannot study them, Maccone thinks that entropy-decreasing events like that must happen.

“If transformations that increase the entropy do occur – and we know that they do – by symmetry we should expect also transformations that decrease the entropy – but we cannot see them.”

By Michael Slezak, via guardian.co.uk/science

Posted 1 year ago — 20 notes