“Time is what keeps everything from happening at once,” wrote Ray Cummings in his 1922 science fiction novel “The Girl in the Golden Atom,” which sums up time’s function quite nicely. But how does time stop everything from happening at once? What mechanism drives time forward, but not backward?
In a recent study published in the journal Physical Review Letters, a group of theoretical physicists re-investigate the “Arrow of Time” — a concept that describes the relentless forward march of time — and highlight a different way of looking at how time manifests itself over universal scales.
