Time’s enigma

Patrick Das Gupta

Department of Physics and Astrophysics,
University of Delhi, Delhi - 110 007 (India)

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 Time is indeed a riddle wrapped inside a mystery. As some thinker had pointed out:
”Past is a collection of events that remains only in the memory and records, Future is yet to
unfold, only Present is real and tangible.” But then this Present is like a thin line shifting
forever into the Future. Again, is time there merely to prevent everything happening at
once?
Causality plays a central role in our daily life. I switch on the ceiling fan, and only then
the blades of the fan start turning. It is not the other way round. Cause precedes Effect.
Causality is intimately tied up with the march of Time. It prohibits time travel. If one
may go back to the past, one can exterminate the entire humanity. This leads to the well
known paradox: Who built the time machine and then journeyed to the past to obliterate
the cause that led to the existence of the inventor of the time machine? Causality and time
travel are incompatible. However, one can always go back and forth in space. Time and
space are different in this sense.
Although in relativity (both special as well as general), time and space are treated on
equal footing, there are glaring differences between the two. For instance, there is this
difference in sign in the expression for the square of proper interval,

ds2 = c2 dt2 − dx2 − dy 2 − dz 2 .

The proper interval is an invariant and plays a crucial role in giving meaning to mea-
surements of time intervals and distances. Two events for which ds2 is negative cannot be
causally related. For, in order to be causally connected something has to flow from one event
to the other. According to relativity the speed of this flow cannot exceed c (the speed of
light in vacuum). In which case ds2 is always non-negative for two events that are causally
connected. This point is taken very seriously in quantum theory of fields in the form of prin-
ciple of micro-causality, according to which any two quantum field variables, one at event
E1 and other at event E2, can be measured precisely so long as the events E1 and E2 are
not causally connected.
The second law of thermodynamics states that the disorder of a system left to itself
continues to increase with time. The disorder is characterized by entropy. The total entropy
always increases. The refrigerator tries to maintain the low entropy states of fruits and
vegetables inside, while it is constantly increasing the disorder outside by despatching heat.
Living systems do similar things. They grow into orderly states by consuming food and

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generate more entropy in the environment through respiration. Increase of entropy provides
an arrow of time.
Thinking and learning lowers the entropy of our brain at the cost of creating more disorder
outside (The brain has to maintain itself at the appropriate temperature, and hence the heat
generated by its activity has to be transported to the environment.). Our consciousness
provides another arrow of time. We know our Past but are unsure about the Future.
In the macroscopic domain our perception of flow of time is linked with the universe not
being in a maximal entropic state. For example, if the entire universe was in thermodynamic
equilibrium then for every forward process there would be a reverse process, so as to maintain
the equilibrium. In that case, at a coarse grain level, there is no ‘happening of events’. Does
it mean time has stopped? This is a metaphysical point, as there can be no human being or
intelligence if there is a perfect thermal equilibrium. The very notion of thinking involves
progress of time. It is futile to discuss Time’s halt.
Inclusion of quantum mechanics leads to a unitary evolution of the wave-function that
describes a physical state. A quantum system interacts with the environment by means of
a Hamiltonian. As time progresses more and more quantum states of the environment get
entangled with the system’s basis states. Does it mean that an arrow of time is provided by
the number of systems in the environment that get entangled? These are issues which need
to be resolved.
All fundamental theories are formulated in terms of differential equations consisting of a
derivative (or a second derivative) with respect to time, whether it is Grand Unified theory
or String Theory. This allows for time evolution of physical states. If all physical states
were stationary states (i.e. eigenstates of the Hamiltonian) there will be no time evolution
(since in that case only the phase will change linearly with time). But quantum mechanics
allows superposition of different physical states. Superposed states exhibit nontrivial time
evolution although each of the energy eigenstates that make up the superposition have only
their phase changing with time.
We may now let our imagination run loose: Is time an external agent that uses the
Hamiltonian to make a local quantum system get entangled with quantum systems of the
rest of the universe? Or, is the space-time continuum an active medium that makes the
quantum field operators undergo an orchestrated dance analogous to how a background
music guides dancers to make correlated moves even when they are not aware of each other?