It seems like a simple question. Why does a plate full of hot food cool off in a comparatively cool room. It's a question addressed in the first law of thermodynamics, and it makes a lot of sense, intuitively speaking. Of course heat is going to flow from an area of high temperature into an area of lower temperature until they reach equilibrium. These laws of thermodynamics govern the fate of our entire universe, the inevitable flow of energy from an organized state into an unorganized state is known as entropy, and our universe is bound to it. Based on our observations of the universe, this seems to make sense, as the universe slowly moves from the ultra-condensed, ultra-ordered Big Bang state to the ultimate expression of entropy, the inevitable heat death of the universe, where only stray bits of energy remain.
There is a big problem with entropy, however. Physics is supposed to work both forwards and backwards. The rules should be the same even if time is flowing backwards. This is where thermodynamics runs into a problem. Let's say you boil a pot of water and then turn the stove off. Without a source of heat, the water will eventually cool off to the same temperature as the surrounding air. Now, run that same scenario backwards. For absolutely no reason, the water in the pot will begin to heat up, and there will be no reason why this will be occurring. Sure, eventually the stove will turn on, but remember, time is flowing backwards in this scenario, and the cause cannot precede the effect, not according to physics, no matter which way time is flowing. This, in a nutshell, is the problem of the arrow of time, a phrase coined by Arthur Eddington in the 1920's, and it has confounded scientists for a long time.
Scientists may have a solution to this fundamental problem with thermodynamics in quantum entanglement. As with all quantum related things, entanglement defies common sense. Basically, when two particles come into contact with each other, they interact with each other in an irreversible way, becoming entangled with each other. Now, you could separate these particles, you could take them to opposite sides of the universe, but they would always remain related to each other. If you've heard of Einstein's quote, "spooky action at a distance," he was referring to quantum entanglement.
What does quantum entanglement have to do with our hot pot of water? According to this new theory, the information in the pot becomes entangled with the information in the surrounding air, leaking out and spreading around the environment. The importance of this theory is that the information in the pot never actually disappears, it is just spread out into the universe. This means that the entropy of the universe does not actually increase over time, but remains constant. Quantum entanglement also means that it is possible for the pot to spontaneously heat itself again, although the likelihood of this is so small you would have to wait longer than the lifespan of the universe to witness it happening. This is why the process was seen as being only one-way before, because there is no way to observe the opposite.
Of course, there are still problems with this theory, and it remains to be seen how practical it is in real-life applications. But this theory does more than address why a pot of hot water cools off. Another troubling issue concerning the arrow of time is how we perceive time, namely why we can remember the past but not the future. With this new theory, there is a potential answer. When we view something, the information becomes entangled with your brain, and only afterwards can you recall that information. Basically, you are becoming entangle with your environment all the time. It's an interesting idea, and we'll have to see where it can take us.
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