• 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

The Arrow Of Time Can Go In Both Directions Inside Glass

January 30, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

The direction of time seems pretty obvious; it goes from the past towards the future, though the reason why that is the case is unclear. This arrow of time has been linked to entropy, the measurement of the disorder of a system. Over time, in an isolated system, entropy always increases. This process is irreversible. It applies to the aging everything experiences, or an egg rolling off the counter and breaking apart. But under a certain perspective, there are materials that defy this behavior. And they are very common: glasses and plastics.

These materials consist of tangles of molecules, usually in a random distribution. Even as solids, the constituent molecules are moving, though it’s an incredibly slow process. The molecules always look for the most favorable energetic state, and this process changes the properties of the material over time. For the glass in a window, it would take billions of years.

Advertisement

To look at this process from the point of view of the material, researchers use the “material time” – the internal clock ticking inside the substance in question. This depends on how quickly the molecules within the material reorganize, meaning you can have material that has a very long material time. Still, globally the arrow of time points toward the future. Everything ages.

Measurements of material time are far from easy. Researchers created a setup to study the molecular movement in a sample of glass, and statistical methods were used to establish the fluctuations over time. On analyzing the results, the team discovered that these molecular fluctuations are time-reversable. This means that they would look the same looking forward or backward in time.

“However, this does not mean that the aging of materials can be reversed,” lead author Till Böhmer, from the Technical University of Darmstadt, said in a statement.

So, the molecular small movements don’t affect the aging of the whole system. They shake and shimmy without affecting the material time. As far as that time arrow is concerned, in glasses and plastic, the molecular changes could be going backward or forward. The direction of the arrow of time from the molecular point of view is irrelevant. But overall, the glass still ages.

Advertisement

“This leaves us with a mountain of unanswered questions,” added co-author Prof. Thomas Blochowicz.

Does the reversibility come from physical laws that are reversible? How is the material time different in different materials? Does this finding apply to all disordered materials as the team suspects? Those are the questions that future research must now determine the answers to.

The study is published in Nature Physics.

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: The Arrow Of Time Can Go In Both Directions Inside Glass

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • A Spinning Island Lake In Argentina Looms Out Of The Swamps Like An Eyeball
  • Mammals Have Evolved Into Ant Eaters 12 Times Since The Dinosaurs Went Extinct
  • Thieving Pulsar Spinning 592 Times A Second Reveals New Understanding Of Where Its X-Rays Come From
  • The Rise And Fall (And Lamentable Rise) Of The “Alpha Male” Myth
  • IFLScience The Big Questions: How Do Black Holes Shape The Universe?
  • North America’s Smallest Turtle Is The Cutest Thing You’ll Find In A Bog
  • “Unambiguous Signal” To Curb Emissions Now: Long-Lost Aerial Photos Reveal Evolution Of Antarctic Ice Shelf Collapse
  • 8 Children Have Been Born With 3 Biological Parents Each After Mitochondrial Transfer
  • First Known Observations Of Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry In Special Particle Decay
  • In 1973, NASA Sent Two Spiders Into Space To See If They Can Spin Webs – And They Learnt A Lot
  • Meet The Many Species Of Freaky Looking “Assassin Spiders” That Only Eat Other Spiders
  • Your Dog’s TV Preferences Might Reveal Their Personality
  • Some Human Gut Bacteria Can Absorb Harmful Toxic “Forever Chemicals” So They Can Be Pooped Out
  • You Could Float Through 10 Countries Before The World’s Most International River Spat You Out
  • Enormous Coronal Hole And Beast-Like Crawling Prominences Dazzle On The Active Sun
  • Dramatic Drone Footage Of Iceland’s Latest Volcanic Eruption Shows An Epic Scene From Hell
  • A Shrimp That Lives In A Tree? Indonesia’s Cyclops Mountains Are Home To Some Seriously Strange Wildlife
  • Is NASA’s Claim That Saturn Could Float On Water Really True?
  • Pangea Proxima: This Is What Planet Earth May Look Like 250 Million Years In The Future
  • The Story Of Dogxim, The Fox-Dog Hybrid That Shouldn’t Have Existed
  • 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