• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Solution To Complex Light Problem Shows That Time Can Only Go Forward

October 23, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

Light is something in our world that we are very familiar with, and yet it can still throw some incredible curveballs when you look at it in detail. A newly discovered one comes from a pretty well-established phenomenon: what happens when light passes through an interface? That could be glass, water, or something completely different. The solution for that has long been established, but scientists have now found something weird going on in the middle.

As light goes through an interface, its speed changes. The solution for the behavior of light on one side of the interface or the other is the well-established standard wave equation. They can be linked with no problem (a piecewise continuous solution) but this still doesn’t explain what happens at the interface itself. There, the wave should experience an acceleration that is not accounted for by the current solution. 

Advertisement

Now, an equation has been put forward in the case of a universe with one space dimension and one time dimension.

“Basically, I found a very neat way to derive the standard wave equation in 1+1 dimensions. The only assumption I needed was that the speed of the wave is constant.  Then I thought to myself: what if it’s not always constant? This turned out to be a really good question,” lead author Assistant Professor Matias Koivurova, from the University of Eastern Finland, said in a statement.

The team came up with an accelerating wave equation. At first, the solution did not make sense, but the physicists realized that they needed a reference speed: the speed of light in a vacuum. Solving the equation delivered the correct solution both at the interface and on either side of it, but it has one crucial requirement. It needs time to only move forward.

The arrow of time is a concept that is fairly important in science. More often in physics, we talk about the thermodynamic arrow of time. In all isolated systems, entropy increases as time goes on. This clearly gives a direction to time.

Advertisement

This equation, despite being in just one dimension, seems to suggest that the arrow of time doesn’t just come from thermodynamics, but might be an intrinsic property of nature that even propagating light ought to obey.

For the field of optics, solving this equation means solving a long-standing controversy that has confused physicists for years.

“There is this very famous debate in physics, which is called the Abraham-Minkowski controversy. The controversy is that when light enters a medium, what happens to its momentum? Minkowski said that the momentum increases, while Abraham insisted that it decreases,” study lead Professor Marco Ornigotti explained.

Experimental evidence supports both sides, and according to the new equation momentum is conserved thanks to relativistic effects. It only appears to increase or decrease depending on how you are looking at it.

Advertisement

“We found that we can ascribe a ‘proper time’ to the wave, which is entirely analogous to the proper time in the general theory of relativity,” Ornigotti continued.

The work jumps from a specific optical conundrum to a possible fundamental truth of the universe. And if the arrow of time is always going in one direction, we might have to say goodbye to dreams of time travel into the past.

The study is published in the journal Optica.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Paris ramps up security as jihadist attacks trial starts
  2. Cricket-‘Western bloc’ has let Pakistan down, board chief says
  3. Ancient Bison Found In Permafrost Is So Well Preserved Scientists Want To Clone It
  4. Where Inside Us Do We Feel Love?

Source Link: Solution To Complex Light Problem Shows That Time Can Only Go Forward

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • What Alternatives Are There To The Big Bang Model?
  • Magnetic Flip Seen Around First Photographed Black Hole Pushes “Models To The Limit”
  • Something Out Of Nothing: New Approach Mimics Matter Creation Using Superfluid Helium
  • Surströmming: Why Sweden’s Stinky Fermented Fish Smells So Bad (But People Still Eat It)
  • First-Ever Recording Of Black Hole Recoil Captured During Merger – And You Can Listen To It
  • The Moon Is Moving Away From Earth At A Rate Of About 3.8 Centimeters Per Year. Will It Ever Drift Apart?
  • As Solar Storm Hits Earth NASA Finds “The Sun Is Slowly Waking Up”
  • Plate Tectonics And CO2 On Planets Suggest Alien Civilizations “Are Probably Pretty Rare”
  • How To Watch The “Awkward” Partial Solar Eclipse This Weekend
  • World’s Oldest Pots: 20,000-Year-Old Vessels May Have Been Used For Cooking Clams Or Brewing Beer
  • “The Body Is Slowly And Continuously Heated”: 14,000-Year-Old Smoked Mummies Are World’s Oldest
  • Pizza Slices, Polaroid Pictures, And Over 300 Hats: What’s Left Behind In Yellowstone’s Hydrothermal Areas?
  • The Mathematical Paradox That Lets You Create Something From Nothing
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version