February 2025
There is no difference between the past and the future from a physics perspective, claims a new paper by mathematicians at the University of Surrey in Guildford, England. The conclusion suggests that human experiences of timelessness are more natural than ”mystical”.
According to the study published in Nature, fundamental equations allow for time reversal. Flipping those equations doesn’t change anything and has no effect on particles.
In day-to-day life, we perceive the arrow of time going in one direction — advancing forward. What has happened leaves memories we call the past. What is yet to happen and we haven’t experienced, we call the future.
But the laws of physics allow otherwise.
“The arrow of time describes the clear asymmetry that makes the past intrinsically different from the future”, the mathematicians write. “And yet, the fundamental laws of physics in both the classical and the quantum realms do not manifest any intrinsic arrow of time. … As a consequence, backward-in-time motion is equally possible as forward-in-time motion.”
This implies, the authors think, that two opposing arrows of time emerged from the Big Bang, the starting point of spacetime. This “would account for the maintenance of time-reversal symmetry … We would happen to live in one of them, where dissipation and entropy increase are common experiences, but unaware of the existence of the other alternative possibility”, the paper states.
Commentary: The phenomenon of time
In a nonphysical sense – mental, psychological or spiritual, one might say – we are able to revisit the past in our dreams and thoughts; we have memories of it. By the same token, we actually are able to know something about the future, which is perhaps less commonly realised. Everything we create begins as a thought. What we envision now will become a reality, even though perhaps not exactly as in the vision.
A less trivial example of experiencing the future is precognition. People with this paranormal ability have in a way “memories” of the future.
We normally perceive reality as if there is an actual temporal separation. But in Near-Death Experiences (NDE), the continuum of the present is a core feature.
People who have had NDEs and other spiritually transformative experiences describe a fundamental shift in the sense of time. Many describe “stepping out of time”, to a reality where everything is perceived as happening simultaneously.
A related phenomenon that challenges our normal idea of time is what psychologist Steve Taylor calls Time Expansion Experiences (TEE). In accidents such as car crashes and falls, many people report dramatic time expansion. This enables people to take preventative, even life-saving, action that would be impossible in “normal” time.
The oddly surprising fact is that neither the past nor the future can exist in anything other than the present moment, which is the only actual point in spacetime reality. When the “past” happened, it was now. When the “future” comes, it is now.
Christopher Nolan’s film, “Tenet”, provides an interesting idea of what backward-in-time motion looks and feels like.
Anders Bolling
