23.10.2015 - admin

Who among us has not dreamed of traveling through time? Oh, if only we could go back in time to change the mistake we made, go back to the days of our youth, see a loved one who has long been gone from us alive and well, and tell him what we didn’t have time or couldn’t say during our lifetime. Looking at old photographs, in our memories we can be transported to the past, remembering certain events long ago days gone by. Does this mean that we are therefore ? In our memory, yes, we can move into the past, but only in our memories, and not in time. But what is time? Most of us think we know the answer to this question. But many are wrong. When we look at the Sun and think that we see it in real time, but in fact we see what it was like in the past, namely 8 minutes ago, because the light from the Sun to the Earth travels 148 million kilometers per 8 minutes.
Time flows differently in different places. So, for example, in space time flows slower than on Earth, which means that when traveling in time we must forget about mechanical time, and start thinking about time as a dimension. Scientists have long been talking about the multiplicity of worlds and other dimensions, but many people have managed to visit other worlds, and, accordingly, other dimensions. And Evgeniy’s story is proof of this. Once upon a time, many years ago, Evgeniy met Natasha, a friendship began that grew into something more, they soon got married, and a few months later Natasha told Zhenya that they would have a child, the guy was happy, pride filled his heart, so I became an adult and I'll soon become a father. But the joy did not last long; just before giving birth, Natasha fell ill with the flu, which caused complications, and then the worst happened: the girl died during childbirth, and the baby died along with the mother. The doctors did everything possible to save at least one of them, but all attempts were in vain.

Evgeny experienced the loss for a long time, sometimes on the street in the crowd he noticed a familiar figure of a girl with a child and it seemed to him that this was his Natasha, he caught up with the girl, took her hand and said Natasha! And when the girl turned around, he had no choice but to say, “Sorry, I was wrong,” this happened several times. For a long time the guy did not dare to make acquaintances, for a long time it seemed to him that the door would open and his family, his Natasha and a small ray of light, his little daughter Svetlana, would enter the apartment. Years passed, the pain of loss gradually began to subside, and a few years later Eugene met Marina, who was gentle, kind and sympathetic, they fell in love with each other, and a year later they got married. Ten years passed, a happy family life, the whole family often went outdoors to the mountains, taiga, fishing, tried to get as far as possible from people in order to fully enjoy the tranquility.

This time was no exception; Evgeniy, Marina and son Maxim decided to spend the weekend outdoors. They drove into the depths of the taiga, where only the three of them were and no one else, they set up a tent, lit a fire, Evgeny took a step and disappeared before the eyes of Marina and Maxim, as if he had stepped behind some invisible wall. The woman rushed after her husband, but stopped, remembering her son, because he would be left completely alone in the taiga, where there was not a single living soul within a radius of several tens of kilometers. And Evgeniy felt how he was pulled into a certain tunnel, in which at great speed, like on a roller coaster, he began to move first to the right, then to the left, then up and down, some lights flashed past, and then the speed began to slow down and the man found himself on the ocean shore. The air is warm, palm trees grow along the coastline, and the sand is so clean, warm and soft that it crunches under your feet. Evgeny looked around, raised his head to the sky and saw above his head a completely different sky than on earth, it was pink in places, blue in others, and two suns were shining on it.

The man could not understand where he was, what was wrong with him? Is this some kind of dream? And in the distance he noticed two figures walking along the shore, it was a woman with a child of about six years old, they soon approached Eugene and he recognized his Natasha in the woman, the man could not utter a word, tears rolled from his eyes, Natasha approached and tenderly once in her youth she hugged him, in a quiet and gentle voice she said, “don’t cry, darling, we are very happy here, it’s just that our daughter often asked me about you, and now you came,” she leaned towards the child and said, “daughter, this is our dad , he now lives in another world, but he cannot be with us since his path in that world has not yet been completed, but he remembers us and loves us very much.” Evgeny hugged Natasha and his daughter, pressed them to him and his heart beat even stronger in his chest, through his tears he could only say “my dear ones, how I love you and miss you.” Natasha said, “I know my beloved, but it’s not time for you to be with us, we feel good here, and here time flows more slowly than on earth and that’s why our daughter is only six years old here.

The three of them walked along the shore, and after some time Evgeniy saw that Big city, in the city there were mostly one and two-story well-kept houses, the streets were clean, flowers grew around, the people they met on the street were friendly. They went into Natasha’s house, it was a cozy one-story house, it had everything, and on the chest of drawers Evgeniy saw a photo of him and Natasha, which had been lost and he had been looking for for a long time but could not find. It was getting dark and Natasha said that it was time for him to return, they went to the place on the ocean where he met them. It seemed to Evgeniy that he had spent the whole day here, approaching the place where Evgeniy found himself, he again felt how he began to be pulled into a certain tunnel, the speed was stunning, the lights flashed again, and then Evgeniy felt solid ground under his feet, he took a step and saw Marina and Maxim, standing in confusion.

The man told his wife about where he had been, that he had seen Natasha there, and his little daughter Sveta that he had been there for almost the whole day. But what was the man’s surprise when Marina told him that a week had passed here on earth, and she and Maxim came here again in the hope that their dad would return, Marina said that some invisible force was pulling and leading her here, and that she I knew that he would return just as he left. For some time, Evgeniy could not understand how this happened, because it seemed to him that he had been in the parallel world for almost a day, but it turns out that he had been absent here for a whole week. This story suggests that time flows differently in different dimensions and spaces, and not only somewhere in the distant depths of the Universe, but also here on earth. We all remember how in childhood we all wanted to grow up, become adults, and how long time dragged on. But when we pass thirty, we gradually begin to notice how time gradually speeds up, and now ten years later we remember and say: “My God, but these ten years flew by like one year”!

Such paradoxes happen to all of us over time, here is another paradox: you are in a hurry to a very important meeting, you are about to leave the house, you come to the place where you always have your keys, but they are not there, you begin to look for them chaotically, look and here and there, but they are not anywhere, you look at your watch and notice that according to your time, not so much time has passed for your search, but the watch says that ten minutes have flown by during your search, and now you are almost in desperation, you go to the place where you always have your keys and see that they are lying nearby in the most visible place and you simply could not help but notice them there, and then you notice that it took you twenty minutes to search. And we encounter such paradoxes of time everywhere almost every day, but around us in our dimension time moves evenly. But why in some cases do each of us experience such paradoxes over time?

There can be many reasons for this, maybe it intersects with our space, or maybe it’s purely ours psychological condition. But be that as it may, from the story of Eugene and the theory of the plurality of worlds, they say that time flows differently everywhere, this is also indicated by the famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who says that time in the Universe flows differently everywhere, dark energy, dark matter, they all have different time, even in some corners of energy and matter, time somehow flows differently, and this is proven by the refraction of light. Light seems to collide with some lens, bends around it and continues its path in space and time. But in the place where the light was refracted, it is possible that time flows in a different way, but why this happens, science today, unfortunately, cannot give an answer. Meanwhile, various paradoxes continue to occur over time, as in ours Everyday life, and on a universal scale. And therefore, time is the most expensive currency not only in the world, but also in the Universe, because money can be earned, but time cannot be returned. Originating in the Universe new star can give birth to gold and many other metals, atoms and give life to new planets, but even there the old time cannot be returned, just as it is impossible to jump forward. Based on all of the above, I would like to wish you, dear readers, value your time, do not waste it, contemplate and enjoy every minute, every second of life in this world.

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One of the topics of long-term debate is the possibility of travel in space and time. This is a tempting and beautiful theory about the possibility of changing your past, looking into the future, finding out what you did wrong in the past and correcting it again... looking into the future again, finding out the mistake of the past...

A strong psychological basis for the dream of almost every person is the opportunity to return to the past of one’s life and correct something there for the better. Of course, it would be a sin not to take advantage of the opportunities and not to look into the future - to find out how the descendants settled there, what they achieved and whether they completely destroyed this world.

It is difficult to say how serious the proposal to build a working time machine device may be. Currently, there is not even a hypothetical technology for how a time machine mechanism could be constructed. And except for science fiction writers, no one else knows how the distortion of the structure of space will occur.

Time paradoxes.

At the same time, the time machine, generated by science fiction writers - but not yet born by science - has already given rise to a lot of hypotheses about time paradoxes, including in the scientific community. Writer Ray Bradbury spoke about one of the popular and subsequently filmed hypotheses, promulgating the theory of a crushed butterfly in the past, and how it ends for the whole world in the present.

However, it is not a fact that events can develop according to the option predicted by Bradbury. Let's say the Universe can be imagined as a certain system of equations, which already includes the possibility of traveling in space and time. Also, based on this, it is not difficult to conclude something else - a crushed butterfly will remain just a crushed butterfly and nothing more.

And even if you carry it on the sole of a shoe after a hundred thousand years, it will not break the chain of entropy, and in no way will it destroy the processes of the universe. Since the probability of this is already included at the level of error in the equation of events, during time travel through several measurement systems.

Science does not deny the possibility of time travel, however, it is sure that if it is still possible to get to the future, then it is impossible to travel to the past, this is anti-scientific. However, there are many options for the development of time paradoxes, of course, except for a time traveler, no one can say which of them is correct.

Traveling into the past is impossible, so paradoxes are not worth a damn; Professor Stephen Hawking speaks about the impossibility of this kind of travel.

If time travel to the past is possible, it is travel to alternatively evolving realities. And then, this is the structure of the Universe already known to us, where no solutions to probabilities cause paradoxes - that is, actions committed by someone in the past will not cause any disturbances in reality, and accordingly the probability of a paradox will be zero.

Protecting the Universe from fools.

No matter what efforts the traveler made in the past to change his present reality of his time, everything will be meaningless. It is likely that a distortion of reality around an object plunged into the past will still occur. But reality, distorted by the presence of the traveler and his actions, will be distorted only in the “cloud” of time surrounding him.

For example: having accidentally led to the death of your grandfather in the past (they were run over by a car, or killed because of their grandmother in a duel), nothing will happen to the descendants of the deceased, and they will not disappear. Since the change will occur locally, in the very cloud of entropy created around the traveler, which represents a kind of protection of the Universe from the “fool”.

The universe's mockery is not your grandfather.

If the example with the butterfly and grandfather, although banal, is quite indicative of how a local field (cloud) of entropy can work around a time traveler into the past, and thereby respond to the change tasks created by him future reality- that's not all.

For example, how will the protection mechanism work if: a traveler from the future to the past performs a simple action, opens a deposit on behalf of his grandfather for his grandson - the sly man himself has not yet been born, so he will have to persuade the grandfather. However, what path will the situation take?

The past is unchanged and the contribution will never exist,

Or will it be the universe's mockery? solve your problems with its help, the grandfather will suddenly turn out to be someone else’s grandfather, and the investment will go into other hands.

Perhaps the most correct thought that reflects the attitude to the problem of a time machine as a device is that such a device is not even worth generating time paradoxes because of it. And moreover, from the point of view of entropy and the Universe, in order not to create problems of interference in destinies, it would be best not to allow the existence of a time machine at all.

The idea that you can go into the past or the future has given rise to a whole genre of chrono-fiction, and it seems that all possible paradoxes and pitfalls have long been known to us. Now we read and watch such works not for the sake of looking at other eras, but for the sake of the confusion that inevitably arises when trying to disrupt the flow of time. What tricks eventually form the basis of all chrono-operas and what plots can be assembled from these building blocks? Let's figure it out.

Wake up when the future comes

The simplest task for a time traveler is to travel to the future. In such stories, you don’t even have to think about how exactly the time flow works: since the future does not affect our time, the plot will be almost no different from a flight to another planet or to a fairy-tale world. In a sense, we all already travel through time - at a speed of one second per second. The only question is how to increase the speed.

In the 18th-19th centuries, dreams were considered one of the fantastic phenomena. Lethargic sleep was adapted for traveling into the future: Rip van Winkle (the hero of the story of the same name by Washington Irving) slept for twenty years and found himself in a world where all his loved ones had already died, and he himself had been forgotten. This plot is akin to the Irish myths about the people of the hills, who also knew how to manipulate time: the one who spent one night under the hill returned after a hundred years.

This "hit" method never gets old

With the help of dreams, writers of that time explained any fantastic assumptions. If the narrator himself admits that he has imagined strange worlds, what is the demand from him? Louis-Sébastien de Mercier resorted to such a trick when describing a “dream” about a utopian society (“Year 2440”) - and this is already a full-fledged time travel!

However, if travel to the future needs to be plausibly justified, doing this without contradicting science is also not difficult. The cryogenic freezing method made famous by Futurama could, in theory, work - which is why many transhumanists are now trying to preserve their bodies after death in the hope that medical technology the future will allow them to be revived. True, in essence this is just Van Winkle’s dream adapted to modern times, so it’s difficult to say whether this is considered a “real” journey.

Faster than light

For those who want to seriously play with time and delve into the jungle of physics, traveling at the speed of light is better suited.

Einstein's theory of relativity allows time to be compressed and stretched at near-light speeds, which is used with pleasure in science fiction. The famous “twin paradox” says that if you rush through space for a long time at near-light speed, in a year or two of such flights a couple of centuries will pass on Earth.

Moreover: the mathematician Gödel proposed a solution for Einstein’s equations in which time loops can arise in the universe - something like portals between at different times. It was this model that was used in the film "", first showing the difference in the flow of time near the horizon black hole, and then using a “wormhole” to build a bridge into the past.

All the plot twists that the authors of chronoopers are now coming up with were already in Einstein and Gödel (filmed on an iPhone 5)

Is it possible to go back in time this way? Scientists strongly doubt this, but science fiction writers are not bothered by their doubts. Suffice it to say that only mere mortals are prohibited from exceeding the speed of light. And Superman can make a couple of revolutions around the Earth and go back in time to prevent the death of Lois Lane. What about the speed of light - even sleep can work in the opposite direction! And Mark Twain got the Yankees on the head with a crowbar at the court of King Arthur.

Of course, it’s more interesting to fly into the past, precisely because it is inextricably linked with the present. If an author introduces a time machine into a story, he usually wants to at least confuse the reader with time paradoxes. But most often main topic in such stories there is a struggle with predestination. Is it possible to change your own destiny if it is already known?

Cause or effect?

The answer to the question of predestination - like the concept of time travel itself - depends on the principle by which time is organized in a particular fantasy world.

The laws of physics are not a decree for terminators

In real the main problem with traveling into the past it is not the speed of light. Sending anything, even a message, back in time would violate a fundamental law of nature: the principle of causality. Even the most seedy prophecy is, in a sense, time travel! All known to us scientific principles are based on the fact that first an event occurs, and then it has consequences. If the effect is ahead of the cause, it breaks the laws of physics.

To “fix” the laws, we need to figure out how the world reacts to such an anomaly. This is where science fiction writers give free rein to their imagination.

If the film genre is a comedy, then there is usually no risk of “breaking” time: all the actions of the heroes are too insignificant to affect the future, and the main task is to get out of their own problems

It can be stated that time is a single and indivisible flow: between the past and the future there is, as it were, a thread along which one can move.

It is in this picture of the world that the most famous loops and paradoxes arise: for example, if you kill your grandfather in the past, you can disappear from the universe. Paradoxes arise because this concept (philosophers call it “B-theory”) states that the past, present and future are as real and unchangeable as the three dimensions we are familiar with. The future is still unknown - but sooner or later we will see the only version of events that must happen.

This fatalism gives rise to the most ironic stories about time travelers. When an alien from the future tries to correct the events of the past, he suddenly discovers that he himself caused them - moreover, it has always been so. Time in such worlds is not rewritten - a cause-and-effect loop simply arises in it, and any attempts to change something only reinforce the original version. This paradox was one of the first to be described in detail in the short story “In My Own Footsteps” (1941), where it turns out that the hero was carrying out a task received from himself.

The heroes of the dark series "Dark" from Netflix go back in time to investigate a crime, but are forced to commit actions that lead to this crime.

It can be worse: in more “flexible” worlds, a careless act by a traveler can lead to the “butterfly effect.” Intervention in the past rewrites the entire time flow at once - and the world not only changes, but completely forgets that it has changed. Usually only the traveler himself remembers that everything was different before. In the "" trilogy, even Doc Brown couldn't keep track of Marty's jumps - but he at least relied on the words of his comrade when he described the changes, and usually no one believes such stories.

In general, single-threaded time is a confusing and hopeless thing. Many authors decide not to limit themselves and resort to the help of parallel worlds.

The plot, in which the hero finds himself in a world where someone canceled his birth, came from the Christmas film It's a Wonderful Life (1946).

Split time

This concept not only removes controversy, but also captures the imagination. In such a world, everything is possible: every second it is divided into an infinite number of similar reflections, differing in a couple of little things. A time traveler doesn't actually change anything, but only jumps between different facets of the multiverse. This kind of plot is very popular in TV series: in almost any show there is an episode where the heroes find themselves in an alternative future and try to return everything to normal. On an endless field you can frolic endlessly - and there are no paradoxes!

Nowadays, in chrono-fiction, the model with parallel worlds is most often used (a still from Star Trek).

But the fun begins when the authors abandon the B-theory and decide that there is no fixed future. Maybe the unknown and uncertainty are the normal state of time? In such a picture of the world, specific events occur only in those segments where there are observers, and the remaining moments are just probability.

An excellent example of such “quantum time” was shown by Stephen King in “”. When Strelok unwittingly created a time paradox, he almost went crazy because he remembered two lines of events at the same time: in one he traveled alone, in the other with a companion. If the hero came across evidence that reminded him of past events, the memories of these points formed into one consistent version, but the gaps were as if in a fog.

Quantum approach in Lately popular - partly due to development quantum physics, and partly because it allows for even more intricate and dramatic paradoxes to be shown.

Marty McFly almost erased himself from reality by preventing his parents from meeting each other. I had to fix everything urgently!

Take, for example, the film “Time Loop” (2012): as soon as the young incarnation of the hero performed some actions, the alien from the future immediately remembered them - and before that, fog reigned in his memory. Therefore, he tried not to interfere once again with his past - for example, he did not show his younger self a photograph of his future wife, so as not to disrupt their first unexpected meeting.

The “quantum” approach is also visible in “”: since the Doctor warns companions about special “fixed points” - events that cannot be changed or bypassed - it means that the rest of the fabric of time is mobile and plastic.

However, even a probabilistic future pales in comparison to worlds where Time has its own will - or its guard is guarded by creatures that lie in wait for travelers. In such a universe, the laws can work as they please - and it’s good if you can come to an agreement with the guards! The most striking example is the langoliers, who after every midnight eat yesterday along with everyone who is unlucky enough to be there.

How does a time machine work?

Against the background of such a diversity of universes, the technology of time travel itself is a secondary issue. Time machines have not changed since the time of time: you can come up with a new operating principle, but this is unlikely to affect the plot, and from the outside the journey will look approximately the same.

Welles's time machine in the 1960 film adaptation. That's where steampunk is!

Most often, the principle of operation is not explained at all: a person climbs into a booth, admires the buzzing and special effects, and then gets out at a different time. This method can be called an instantaneous leap: the fabric of time seems to be pierced at one point. Often, for such a jump, you first need to accelerate - gain speed in ordinary space, and the technology will already translate this impulse into a jump in time. This is what the heroine of the anime “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time” and Doc Brown did in the famous DeLorean from the “Back to the Future” trilogy. Apparently, the fabric of time is one of those obstacles that can be attacked with a running start!

DeLorean DMC-12 is a rare time machine that deserves to be called a car (JMortonPhoto.com & OtoGodfrey.com)

But sometimes it happens the other way around: if we consider time to be the fourth dimension, in the three ordinary dimensions the traveler must remain in place. The time machine will rush him along the time axis, and in the past or future he will appear at exactly the same point. The main thing is that they don’t have time to build anything there - the consequences can be very unpleasant! True, such a model does not take into account the rotation of the Earth - in fact, there are no fixed points - but in extreme cases, everything can be attributed to magic. This is exactly how it worked: each revolution of the magic clock corresponded to one hour, but the travelers did not move.

Such “static” travel was dealt with most harshly in the film “Detonator” (2004): there the time machine rewinded exactly one minute at a time. To get to yesterday, you had to sit in an iron box for 24 hours!

Sometimes a model with more than three dimensions is interpreted even more cunningly. Let's remember Gödel's theory, according to which loops and tunnels can be laid between different times. If it is correct, you can try to get through additional dimensions to another time - which is what the hero “” took advantage of.

In earlier science fiction, a “time funnel” worked on a similar principle: a kind of subspace that can be entered on purpose (on Doctor Who’s TARDIS) or by accident, as happened to the destroyer crew in the film “The Philadelphia Experiment” (1984). Flight through the funnel is usually accompanied by dizzying special effects, and leaving the ship is not recommended, so as not to be lost in time forever. But in essence, this is still the same ordinary time machine, delivering passengers from one year to another.

For some reason, lightning always strikes inside temporary craters and sometimes credits fly

If the authors do not want to delve into the jungle of theories, the time anomaly can exist on its own, without any devices. It is enough to enter the wrong door, and now the hero is already in the distant past. Is it a tunnel, a puncture or magic - who can figure it out? Main question- how to get back!

What can't be done

However, usually science fiction still works according to rules, albeit fictitious ones, which is why restrictions are often invented for time travel. For example, one can follow modern physicists in declaring that it is still impossible to move bodies faster than the speed of light (that is, into the past). But in some theories there is a particle called a “tachyon”, which is not affected by this limitation because it has no mass... Maybe consciousness or information can still be sent into the past?

When Makoto Shinkai takes on time travel, he still manages to create a touching story about friendship and love (“Your Name”)

In reality, most likely, you won’t be able to cheat like that - all because of the same principle of causality, which doesn’t care about the type of particles. But in science fiction, the “informational” approach seems more plausible - and even original. It allows the hero, for example, to find himself in his own young body or to travel through other people’s minds, as happened with the hero of the series “Quantum Leap.” And in the anime Steins;Gate, at first they could only send SMS to the past - try changing the course of history with such restrictions! But plots only benefit from restrictions: the more complex the problem, the more interesting it is to watch how it is solved.

Microwave-phone hybrid to connect with the past (Steins;Gate)

Sometimes additional conditions are imposed on ordinary, physical time travel. For example, often a time machine cannot send anyone back in time before the moment when it was invented. And in the anime “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya”, time travelers forgot how to go into the past beyond a certain date, because on that day a catastrophe occurred that damaged the fabric of time.

And this is where the fun begins. Simple leaps into the past and even time paradoxes are just the tip of the iceberg of chrono-fiction. If time can be changed or even damaged, what else can be done with it?

Paradox on paradox

We love time travel for its confusion. Even a simple leap into the past gives rise to such twists as the “butterfly effect” and the “grandfather paradox,” depending on how time works. But this technique can be used to build much more complex combinations: for example, jump into the past not just once, but several times in a row. This creates a stable time loop, or “Groundhog Day.”

Do you experience deja vu?
“Didn’t you already ask me about this?”

You can cycle for one day or several - the main thing is that everything ends with a “reset” of all changes and a journey back to the past. If we are dealing with linear and unchanging time, such loops themselves arise from cause-and-effect paradoxes: the hero receives a note, goes into the past, writes this note, sends it to himself... If time is rewritten each time or generates Parallel Worlds, it turns out to be an ideal trap: a person experiences the same events over and over again, but any changes still end with a reset to the original position.

Most often, such stories are devoted to attempts to unravel the cause of the time loop and break out of it. Sometimes the loops are tied to emotions or tragic fates characters - this element is especially loved in anime (“Magical Girl Madoka”, “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya”, “When Cicadas Cry”).

But “Groundhog Days” have an undoubted advantage: they allow you, through endless attempts, to sooner or later achieve success in any endeavor. No wonder Doctor Who, having fallen into such a trap, recalled the legend about a bird that, over many thousands of years, chipped away a stone rock, and his colleague managed with his “negotiations” to bring white heat extraterrestrial demon! In this case, you can break the loop not with a heroic act or insight, but with ordinary perseverance, and along the way you can learn a couple of useful skills, as happened with the hero of Groundhog Day.

In Edge of Tomorrow, aliens use time loops as weapons to calculate the ideal battle tactics

Another way to build a more complex structure from ordinary jumps is to synchronize two periods of time. In the film "X-Men: Days of Future Past" and in "Time Scout", the time portal could only be opened to a fixed distance. Roughly speaking, at noon on Sunday you can move to noon on Saturday, and an hour later - only at one o'clock in the afternoon. With such a limitation, an element appears in a story about traveling into the past that, it would seem, cannot be there - time pressure! Yes, you can go back and try to fix something, but in the future time goes on as usual - and the hero, for example, may be late to return.

To complicate the traveler's life, you can make time jumps random - take away control over what is happening from him. In the TV series Lost, such a misfortune happened to Desmond, who interacted too closely with a time anomaly. But back in the 1980s, the TV series Quantum Leap was built on the same idea. The hero constantly found himself in different bodies and eras, but did not know how long he would last in this time, and certainly could not return “home.”

Spin time

The heroine of the game Life is Strange faces a difficult choice: undo all the changes she made to the fabric of time to save her friend, or destroy an entire city.

The second technique used to diversify time travel is changing speed. If you can skip a couple of years to find yourself in the past or future, why not, for example, put time on pause?

As Wells also showed in the story “The Newest Accelerator,” even slowing down time for everyone except yourself is a very powerful tool, and if you completely stop it, you can secretly sneak somewhere or win a duel - and completely unnoticed by the enemy. And in the web series “Worm,” one superhero could “freeze” objects in time. Using this simple technique, it was possible, for example, to derail a train by placing an ordinary sheet of paper in its path - after all, an object frozen in time cannot change or move!

Enemies frozen in time are very convenient. You can see this for yourself in the shooter Quantum Break

The speed can be changed to negative, and then you will get the counter-movements familiar to readers of the Strugatskys - people living “in reverse side" This is possible only in worlds where the “B-theory” works: the entire time axis is already predetermined, the only question is in what order we perceive it. To further confuse the plot, you can launch two time travelers in different directions. This happened with the Doctor and River Song in the Doctor Who series: they jumped back and forth through eras, but their first (for the Doctor) meeting was River’s last, the second was the penultimate, and so on. To avoid paradoxes, the heroine had to be careful not to accidentally spoil the Doctor's future. Then, however, the order of their meetings turned into complete leapfrog, but the heroes of Doctor Who are not used to this!

Worlds with “static” time give rise not only to contrarians: often in science fiction there appear creatures who simultaneously see all points of their life path. Thanks to this, the Trafalmadorians from Slaughterhouse-Five treat any misadventures with philosophical humility: for them, even death is just one of the many details of the overall picture. Doctor Manhattan from "" due to such an inhuman perception of time, moved away from people and fell into fatalism. Abraxas from The Endless Journey regularly got confused with his grammar, trying to understand which event has already happened and which will happen tomorrow. And the aliens from Ted Chan’s story “The Story of Your Life” developed a special language: everyone who learned it also began to simultaneously see the past, present and future.

The film "Arrival", based on "The Story of Your Life", begins with flashbacks... Or does it?

However, if the countermoths or Trafalmadorians really travel in time, then with the abilities of Quicksilver or Flash everything is not so obvious. After all, in fact, they are the ones accelerating relative to everyone else - can we really assume that the whole world around is actually slowing down?

Physicists will notice that the theory of relativity is called that way for a reason. You can speed up the world and slow down the observer - this is the same thing, the only question is what to take as the starting point. And biologists will say that there is no science fiction here, because time is a subjective concept. An ordinary fly also sees the world “in slow-mo” - that’s how quickly its brain processes signals. But you don’t have to limit yourself to the fly or the Flash, because in some chronoopers there are parallel worlds. Who's stopping you from letting time pass through them at different speeds - or even in different directions?

A well-known example of such a technique is “The Chronicles of Narnia,” where formally there is no time travel. But time in Narnia flows much faster than on Earth, so the same heroes find themselves in different eras - and observe the history of a fairy-tale country from its creation to its fall. But in the Homestuck comic, which, perhaps, can be called the most confusing story about time travel and parallel worlds, two worlds were launched in different directions - and when contacts between these universes arose the same confusion that the Doctor had with River Song.

If dials haven't been invented yet, hourglasses will do too (Prince of Persia)

Kill time

Based on any of these techniques, you can write a story that would make even Wells's head crack. But modern authors are happy to use the entire palette at once, tying time loops and parallel worlds into a ball. Paradoxes with this approach accumulate in batches. Even with one leap into the past, a traveler can inadvertently kill his grandfather and disappear from reality - or even become his own father. Perhaps the best mockery of the “paradox of causation” was in the story “All of You Zombies,” where the hero turns out to be both his own mother and father.

The story “All You Zombies” was adapted into the film Time Patrol (2014). Almost all of his characters are the same person

Of course, paradoxes must be resolved somehow, which is why in worlds with linear time it often restores itself, according to the will of fate. For example, almost all novice travelers first decide to kill Hitler. In worlds where time can be rewritten, he will die (but according to the law of meanness, the resulting world will be even worse). Asprin's assassination attempt in "Time Scouts" will fail: either the gun will jam, or something else will happen.

And in worlds where fatalism is not held in high esteem, you have to monitor the preservation of the past on your own: for such cases, they create a special “time police” that catches travelers before they do anything bad. In the film "Looper" the mafia took on the role of such police: the past for them is too valuable a resource to allow someone to spoil it.

If there is neither fate nor chronopolice, travelers risk simply breaking time. At best, it will turn out like in Jasper Fforde’s “Thursday Nonetot” series, where the time police went so far as to accidentally cancel the very invention of time travel. At worst, the fabric of reality will collapse.

As Doctor Who has shown more than once, time is a fragile thing: one explosion can cause cracks in the universe across all eras, and an attempt to rewrite a “fixed point” can cause both the past and the future to collapse. In Homestuck, after a similar incident, the world had to be recreated anew, and all eras were mixed together, which is why the events of the books are now impossible to combine into a consistent chronology... Well, in the manga Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, the son of his own clone, erased from reality, had to replace himself with a new person, so that in the events that have already happened there was at least some kind of character.

Some heroes of the Tsubasa multiverse exist in at least three incarnations and come from other works of the same studio

Fans' favorite pastime is drawing for the most confusing works of chronology

Sounds crazy? But this kind of madness is why we love time travel - it pushes the boundaries of logic. Once upon a time, an ordinary leap into the past must have driven an unaccustomed reader crazy. Nowadays, chrono-fiction truly shines at long distances, when authors have room to expand, and time loops and paradoxes are layered on top of each other, giving rise to the most unimaginable combinations.

Alas, it often happens that the structure folds under its own weight: either there are too many time jumps to make it worth keeping track of them, or the authors change the rules of the universe on the fly. How many times has Skynet rewritten the past? And who can now say by what rules time works in Doctor Who?

But if chrono-fiction, with all its paradoxes, turns out to be harmonious and internally consistent, it is remembered for a long time. This is what captivates BioShock Infinite, Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle or Homestuck. The more complex and intricate the plot, the stronger the impression left on those who reached the end and managed to look at the entire canvas at once.

* * *

Time travel, parallel worlds and the rewriting of reality are inextricably linked, so now almost no work of science fiction can do without them - be it a fantasy like Game of Thrones or a sci-fi exploration of the latest theories of physics, as in Interstellar. Few plots give the same scope for imagination - after all, in a story where any event can be undone or repeated several times, everything is possible. However, the elements that make up all these stories are quite simple.

It seems that over the past hundred years, the authors have done everything possible with time: they let them go forward, backward, in a circle, in one stream and in several... Therefore, the best of such stories, as in all genres, rest on the characters: on the one who has yet to come from ancient Greek tragedies on the theme of struggle with fate, on attempts to correct one’s own mistakes and on the difficult choice between different branches of events. But no matter how the chronology jumps, the story will still develop only in one direction - in the one that is most interesting to viewers and readers.

Introduction. 2

1. The problem of formation. 3

2. Revival of the time paradox. 3

3. Basic problems and concepts of the time paradox. 5

4. Classical dynamics and chaos. 6

4.1 KAM theory... 6

4.2. Large Poincaré systems. 8

5. Solution to the time paradox. 9

5.1. Laws of chaos. 9

5.2. Quantum chaos. 10

5.3.Chaos and the laws of physics. 13

6. The theory of unstable dynamic systems is the basis of cosmology. 14

7. Prospects for nonequilibrium physics. 16

Space and time are the main forms of existence of matter. There is no space and time separated from matter, from material processes. Space and time outside of matter are nothing more than an empty abstraction.

In the interpretation of Ilya Romanovich Prigogine and Isabella Stengers, time is a fundamental dimension of our existence.

The most important problem on the topic of my essay is the problem of the laws of nature. This problem is “brought to the fore by the paradox of time.” The authors' justification for this problem is that people are so accustomed to the concept of "law of nature" that it is taken for granted. Although in other views of the world such a concept of “laws of nature” is absent. According to Aristotle, living beings are not subject to any laws. Their activities are determined by their own autonomous reasons. Every being strives to achieve its own truth. In China, the dominant view was about the spontaneous harmony of the cosmos, a kind of statistical equilibrium linking nature, society and the heavens together.

The motivation for the authors to consider the issue of the time paradox was the fact that the time paradox does not exist in itself; two other paradoxes are closely related to it: the “quantum paradox”, the “cosmological paradox” and the concept of chaos, which ultimately can lead to to solving the time paradox.

At the end of the 19th century, attention was drawn to the emergence of the time paradox from both natural science and philosophical points of view. In the works of philosopher Henri Bergson, time plays a major role in judging the interactions between man and nature, as well as the limits of science. For the Viennese physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, introducing time into physics as a concept associated with evolution was the goal of his entire life.

In Henri Bergson's work “Creative Evolution,” the idea was expressed that science developed successfully only in those cases when it was able to reduce the processes occurring in nature to monotonous repetition, which can be illustrated by the deterministic laws of nature. But whenever science tried to describe the creative power of time, the emergence of something new, it inevitably failed.

Bergson's conclusions were perceived as an attack on science.

One of Bergson's goals in writing Creative Evolution was "to show that the whole is of the same nature as myself."

Most scientists today do not at all believe, unlike Bergson, that “another” science is needed to understand creative activity.

The book "Order Out of Chaos" outlined the history of 19th century physics, which centered on the problem of time. Thus, in the second half of the 19th century, two concepts of time arose corresponding to opposite pictures of the physical world, one of them goes back to dynamics, the other to thermodynamics.

The last decade of the 20th century witnessed the revival of the time paradox. Most of the problems discussed by Newton and Leibniz are still relevant. In particular, the problem of novelty. Jacques Monod was the first to draw attention to the conflict between the concept of natural laws that ignore evolution and the creation of new things.

In reality, the scope of the problem is even broader. The very existence of our universe defies the second law of thermodynamics.

Like the emergence of life for Jacques Monod, the birth of the universe is perceived by Asimov as an everyday event.

The laws of nature are no longer opposed to the idea of ​​the truth of evolution, which includes innovations that are scientifically defined by three minimum requirements.

First requirement– irreversibility, expressed in the violation of symmetry between the past and the future. But this is not enough. If we consider a pendulum whose oscillations are gradually fading or the Moon, whose period of rotation around own axis are increasingly decreasing. Another example could be chemical reaction, the speed of which becomes zero before reaching equilibrium. Such situations do not correspond to truly evolutionary processes.

Second requirement– the need to introduce the concept of event. By their definition, events cannot be derived from a deterministic law, be it time-reversible or irreversible: an event, no matter how it is interpreted, means that what happens does not necessarily have to happen. Therefore, at best one can hope to describe the event in terms of probabilities.

this implies third requirement, which must be entered. Some events must have the ability to change the course of evolution, i.e. evolution must not be stable, i.e. characterized by a mechanism capable of making certain events the starting point of a new development.

Darwin's theory of evolution serves as an excellent illustration of all three requirements formulated above. Irreversibility is obvious: it exists at all levels from new ecological niches, which in turn open up new opportunities for biological evolution. Darwin's theory was supposed to explain the astonishing event of the emergence of species, but Darwin described this event as the result of complex processes.

The Darwinian approach provides only a model. But every evolutionary model must contain the irreversibility of events and the possibility for some events to become the starting point for a new order.

In contrast to the Darwinian approach, thermodynamics of the 19th century focuses on equilibrium that meets only the first requirement, because it expresses the non-symmetrical relationship between past and future.

However, thermodynamics has undergone significant changes over the past 20 years. The second law of thermodynamics is no longer limited to describing the equalization of differences that accompanies the approach to equilibrium.

The time paradox "poses before us the problem of the laws of nature." This problem requires more detailed consideration. According to Aristotle, living beings are not subject to any laws. Their activities are determined by their own autonomous internal causes. Every being strives to achieve its own truth. In China, the dominant view was about the spontaneous harmony of the cosmos, a kind of statistical equilibrium linking nature, society and the heavens together.

Christian ideas about God as setting laws for all living things also played an important role.

For God, everything is a given. Newness, choice or spontaneous actions are relative from a human point of view. Such theological views seemed to be fully supported by the discovery of dynamic laws of motion. Theology and science have reached agreement.

The concept of chaos is introduced because chaos allows the paradox of time to be resolved and leads to the inclusion of the arrow of time in the fundamental dynamic description. But chaos does something more. It brings probability into classical dynamics.

The time paradox does not exist by itself. Two other paradoxes are closely related to it: the “quantum paradox” and the “cosmological paradox.”

There is a close analogy between the time paradox and the quantum paradox. The essence of the quantum paradox is that the observer and the observations he makes are responsible for the collapse. Therefore, the analogy between the two paradoxes is that man is responsible for all the features associated with becoming and events in our physical description.

Now, we should note the third paradox - the cosmological paradox. Modern cosmology ascribes age to our universe. The universe was born as a result big bang about 15mld. years ago. Clearly this was an event. But events are not included in the traditional formulation of the concepts of natural laws. This brought physics to the brink of its greatest crisis. Hawking wrote about the Universe this way: “...it just has to be, that’s all!”

With the advent of Kolmogorov's work, continued by Arnold and Moser - the so-called KAM theory - the problem of integrability was no longer considered as a manifestation of nature's resistance to progress, but began to be considered as a new starting point for the further development of dynamics.

KAM theory considers the influence of resonances on trajectories. It should be noted that the simple case of a harmonic oscillator with a constant frequency independent of the action variable J is an exception: the frequencies depend on the values ​​​​accepted by the action variables J. At different points in the phase space, the phases are different. This leads to the fact that at some points of the phase space of a dynamic system there is resonance, while at other points there is no resonance. As is known, resonances correspond to rational relationships between frequencies. The classical result of number theory comes down to the statement that the measure rational numbers compared to the measure of irrational numbers is equal to zero. This means that resonances are rare: most points in phase space are non-resonant. In addition, in the absence of disturbances, resonances lead to periodic motion (the so-called resonant tori), whereas in the general case we have quasiperiodic motion (non-resonant tori). We can say briefly: periodic movements are not the rule, but the exception.

Thus, we have the right to expect that with the introduction of perturbations, the nature of the motion on the resonant tori will change sharply (according to the Poincaré theorem), while the quasiperiodic motion will change insignificantly, at least for a small perturbation parameter (KAM theory requires the fulfillment of additional conditions that we we will not consider here). The main result of the KAM theory is that we now have two completely different types of trajectories: slightly changed quasiperiodic trajectories and stochastic j trajectories that arose when the resonant tori collapsed.

The most important result of the KAM theory - the appearance of stochastic trajectories - is confirmed by numerical experiments. Let's consider a system with two degrees of freedom. Its phase space contains two coordinates q 1, q 2 and two pulses p1, p2. Calculations are performed at a given energy value H ( q 1, q 2, p 1, p 2), and therefore only three independent variables remain. To avoid constructing trajectories in three-dimensional space, we agree to consider only the intersection of trajectories with the plane q 2 p 2. To further simplify the picture, we will construct only half of these intersections, namely, take into account only those points at which the trajectory “pierces” the section plane from the bottom up. This technique was also used by Poincaré, and it is called the Poincaré section (or Poincaré map). The Poincaré section clearly shows the qualitative difference between periodic and stochastic trajectories.

If the motion is periodic, then the trajectory intersects the q2p2 plane at one point. If the motion is quasi-periodic, that is, limited to the surface of the torus, then successive points of intersection fill in the plane q 2 p 2 closed curve. If the motion is stochastic, then the trajectory randomly wanders in some regions of the phase space, and its intersection points also randomly fill a certain region on the q2р2 plane.

Another important result of the KAM theory is that by increasing the coupling parameter, we thereby increase the regions in which stochasticity predominates. At a certain critical value of the coupling parameter, chaos arises: in this case we have a positive Lyapunov exponent, corresponding to the exponential divergence over time of any two close trajectories. Moreover, in the case of fully developed chaos, the cloud of intersection points generated by the trajectory satisfies equations like the diffusion equation.

The diffusion equations have broken symmetry in time. They describe the approach to a uniform distribution in the future (i.e., when t-> +∞). Therefore, it is very interesting that in computer experiment, based on a program compiled on the basis of classical dynamics, we obtain evolution with broken symmetry in time.

It should be emphasized that the KAM theory does not lead to a dynamic theory of chaos. Its main contribution is different: the KAM theory showed that for small values ​​of the coupling parameter we have an intermediate regime in which trajectories of two types coexist - regular and stochastic. On the other hand, we are mainly interested in what happens in the limiting case, when again only one type of trajectories remains. This situation corresponds to the so-called large Poincaré systems (LPS). We now turn to their consideration.

When considering Poincaré's proposed classification of dynamic systems into integrable and non-integrable, we noted that resonances are rare, since they arise in the case of rational relationships between frequencies. But upon transition to the BSP, the situation changes radically: in the BSP, resonances play a major role.

Let us consider, as an example, the interaction between a particle and a field. The field can be considered as a superposition of oscillators with a continuum of frequencies wk . Unlike a field, a particle oscillates with one fixed frequency w 1 . Here is an example of a non-integrable Poincaré system. Resonances will occur whenever wk =w 1 . All physics textbooks show that the emission of radiation is caused by precisely such resonances between a charged particle and a field. The emission of radiation is an irreversible process associated with Poincaré resonances.

The new feature is that the frequency wk There is continuous function index k , corresponding to the wavelengths of the field oscillators. This is a specific feature of large Poincaré systems, i.e. chaotic systems that do not have regular trajectories coexisting with stochastic trajectories. Large systems Poincarés (BSPs) correspond to important physical situations, in fact to most situations we encounter in nature. But BSPs also allow eliminate Poincaré divergences, that is, to remove the main obstacle to the integration of the equations of motion. This result, which significantly increases the power of the dynamic description, destroys the identification of Newtonian or Hamiltonian mechanics and time-reversible determinism, since the equations for the BSP in the general case lead to a fundamentally probabilistic evolution with broken symmetry in time.

Let us now turn to quantum mechanics. Between the problems we face in classical and quantum theory, there is an analogy, since the classification of systems proposed by Poincaré into integrable and non-integrable remains valid for quantum systems.

It is difficult to talk about “laws of chaos” while we are considering individual trajectories. We are dealing with the negative aspects of chaos, such as exponential divergence of trajectories and non-computability. The situation changes dramatically when we move to a probabilistic description. The description in terms of probabilities remains valid at all times. Therefore, the laws of dynamics should be formulated at the probabilistic level. But this is not enough. To include time symmetry breaking in the description, we must leave ordinary Hilbert space. In the simple examples they considered here, irreversible processes were determined only by Lyapunov time, but all the above considerations can be generalized to more complex mappings that describe irreversible processes! other types of processes, for example, diffusion.

The probabilistic description we obtained is irreducible: this is an inevitable consequence of the fact that eigenfunctions belong to the class of generalized functions. As already mentioned, this fact can be used as a starting point for a new, more general definition of chaos. In classical dynamics, chaos is determined by the “exponential divergence” of trajectories, but this definition of chaos does not allow generalization to quantum theory. In quantum theory there is no "exponential decay" of wave functions and therefore no sensitivity to initial conditions in the usual sense. However, there are quantum systems characterized by irreducible probabilistic descriptions. Among other things, such systems are of fundamental importance for our description of nature. As before, the fundamental laws of physics as applied to such systems are formulated in the form of probabilistic statements (rather than in terms of wave functions). It can be said that such systems do not allow distinguishing pure state from mixed states. Even if we choose a pure state as the initial state, it will eventually turn into a mixed state.

The study of the mappings described in this chapter is of great interest. These simple examples allow us to clearly imagine what we mean when talking about the third, irreducible , formulation of the laws of nature. However, mappings are nothing more than abstract geometric models. Now we turn to dynamic systems based on the Hamiltonian description - the foundation of the modern concept of the laws of nature.

Quantum chaos is identified with the existence of an irreducible probabilistic representation. In the case of BSP, this representation is based on Poincaré resonances.

Consequently, quantum chaos is associated with the destruction of the invariant of motion due to Poincaré resonances. This indicates that in the case of BSP it is impossible to move from amplitudes |φ i + > to probabilities |φ i + ><φ i + |. Фундаментальное уравнение в данном случае записывается в терминах вероятности. Даже если начать с чистого состояния ρ=|ψ> <ψ|, оно разрушится в ходе движения системы к равновесию.

The destruction of the state may be associated with the destruction of the wave function. In this case, the evolution of the “collapse” is so important that it makes sense to trace it with an example.

Let there be a wave function ψ(0) at some initial time t=0. The Schrödinger equation transforms it into ψ(t)=

e - itH ψ(0). Whenever we have to deal with irreducible representations, the expression ρ=ψψ must lose its meaning, otherwise it would be possible to move from ρ to ψ and vice versa.

This is exactly what happens with nonvanishing interactions in potential scattering.

Figure 1 shows graphs of sin(ώt)/ώ versus ώ

Fig.1 Schematic graph of sin(ώt)/ώ

Having the wave function, we can calculate the density matrix

.

This expression is ill-defined, but when combined with trial functions, both ill-defined expressions make sense:

Consider the diagonal elements of the density matrix:

The graph of this function is shown in Fig. 2

rice. 2 schematic graph of magnitude

In combination with the test function f(ω), it is required to calculate

Conversely, the amplitude of the wave in combination with the test function remains constant over time, because

.

The reason for such different behavior of the functions becomes clear if we compare the graphs of the functions shown in Fig. 1 and 2: the function sinωt/ω takes both positive and negative values, while the function takes only positive values ​​and makes a “larger contribution to the integral.”

The conclusions obtained can be confirmed by modeling the probability P as a function of k for increasing values ​​of t. The graphs are shown in Fig. 5.

Now it can be noted that the collapse propagates in space causally, in accordance with the general requirements of the theory of relativity, excluding effects that propagate instantly.

rice. 3 modeling the probability P as a function of k for increasing values ​​of t.

In addition, to achieve equilibrium in a finite time, scattering must be repeated several times, i.e. N-body systems with continuous interactions are needed.

Chaos has been repeatedly defined through the existence of irreducible probabilistic concepts. This definition allows us to cover a much wider area than was originally intended by the founders of modern dynamic chaos theory, in particular A. N. Kolmogorov and Ya. G. Sinai. Chaos is due to sensitivity to initial conditions and, consequently, exponential divergence of trajectories. This leads to irreducible probabilistic representations. Description in terms of trajectories gave way to probabilistic description. Therefore, we can take this fundamental property as a distinctive feature of chaos. An instability develops that forces us to abandon the description in terms of individual trajectories or individual wave functions.

There is a fundamental difference between classical chaos and quantum chaos. Quantum theory is directly related to wave properties. Planck's constant leads to additional coherence behavior compared to classical behavior. As a result, the conditions for quantum chaos become more limited than the conditions for classical chaos. Classical chaos arises even in small systems, for example, in the mapped and systems studied by the KAM theory. The quantum analogue of such small systems exhibits quasiperiodic behavior. Many authors have come to the conclusion that quantum chaos does not exist at all. But that's not true. First, it is required that the spectrum be continuous (i.e., that quantum systems were"big") Secondly, quantum chaos is defined as associated with the emergence of irreducible probabilistic concepts.

Traditional quantum theory has a large number of weaknesses. The formulation of this theory continues the tradition of classical theory - in the sense that it follows the ideal of a timeless description. For simple dynamic systems, such as a harmonic oscillator, this is quite natural. But even in this case, can such systems be described in isolation? They cannot be observed in isolation from the field leading to quantum transitions and the emission of signals (photons).

To include evolutionary elements in the picture, it is necessary to move to the formulation of the laws of nature in terms of an irreducible probabilistic description.

Cosmology must be based on the theory of unstable dynamic systems. To some extent, this is just a program, but, on the other hand, within the framework of physical theory, it currently exists.

In addition, introducing probability at a fundamental level removes some of the obstacles to building a coherent theory of gravity. In their paper, Unruh and Wald wrote that this difficulty can be traced directly to the conflict between the role of time in quantum theory and the nature of time in general relativity. In quantum mechanics, all measurements are made at “instants of time”: only quantities related to the instantaneous state of the system have physical meaning. On the other hand, in general relativity only the geometry of space-time is measurable. Indeed, as we have seen, quantum measurement theory corresponds to instantaneous, acausal processes. From the authors’ point of view, this circumstance is a strong argument against the “naive combination” of quantum theory and general relativity, which also includes such a concept as the “wave function of the Universe.” But this approach allows us to avoid the paradoxes associated with quantum measurements.

The birth of our Universe is the most obvious example of instability leading to irreversibility. What is the fate of our Universe at present? The Standard Model predicts that our Universe will eventually die, either as a result of continuous expansion (thermal death) or subsequent contraction (a terrible crash). For the Universe, which merged under the sign of instability from the Minkowski vacuum, this is no longer the case. Nothing currently prevents us from assuming the possibility of repeated instabilities. These instabilities can develop on different scales.

Modern field theory believes that in addition to particles (with positive energy), there are completely filled states with negative energy. Under certain conditions, for example in strong fields, pairs of particles move from vacuum to states with positive energy. The process of creating a pair of particles from vacuum is irreversible . Subsequent transformations leave the particles in positive energy states. Thus, the Universe (considered as a collection of particles with positive energy) is not closed. Therefore, the formulation of the second law proposed by Clausius is inapplicable! Even the Universe as a whole is an open system.

It is in the cosmological context that the formulation of the laws of nature as irreducible probabilistic concepts entails the most striking consequences. Many physicists believe that progress in physics should lead to the creation of a unified theory. Heisenberg called it "Urgleichung" ("proto-equation"), but now it is more often called the "theory of everything." If such a universal theory is ever formulated, it will have to include dynamical instability and thus take into account time symmetry breaking, irreversibility and probability. And then the hope of constructing such a “theory of everything”, from which a complete description of physical reality could be derived, will have to be abandoned. Instead of premises for deductive inference, one can hope to find principles of a coherent “narrative”, from which not only laws, but also events would follow, which would give meaning to the probabilistic emergence of new forms, both regular behavior and instabilities. In this regard, we can quote similar conclusions from Walter Thirring: “The proto-equation (if such a thing exists at all) must potentially contain all the possible paths that the Universe could take, and therefore many “delay lines.” Having such an equation, physics found itself in a situation similar to that created in mathematics near 1930, when Gödel showed that mathematical constructions could be consistent and still contain true statements. Likewise, the “proto-equation” will not contradict experience, otherwise it would have to be modified, but it will not determine everything. As the Universe evolves, "circumstances create their own laws." It is precisely this idea of ​​the Universe, developing according to its internal laws, that we come to on the basis of an irreducible formulation of the laws of nature.

Physics of nonequilibrium processes is a science that penetrates into all spheres of life. It is impossible to imagine life in a world devoid of interconnections created by irreversible processes. Irreversibility plays a significant constructive role. It leads to many phenomena such as the formation of vortices, laser radiation, and oscillations of chemical reactions.

In 1989, the Nobel Conference took place at Gustavus Adolphus College (St. Peter, Minnesota). It was entitled "The End of Science", but the meaning and content of these words were not optimistic. The organizers of the conference made a statement: “... We have come to the end of science, that science as a certain universal, objective type of human activity has ended.” The physical reality described today is temporary. It covers laws and events, certainties and probabilities. The intrusion of time into physics does not at all indicate a loss of objectivity or “intelligibility.” On the contrary, it opens the way to new forms of objective cognition.

The transition from a Newtonian description in terms of a trajectory or a Schrödinger description in terms of wave functions to a description in terms of ensembles does not entail a loss of information. On the contrary, this approach allows us to include new essential properties in the fundamental description of unstable chaotic systems. The properties of dissipative systems cease to be only phenomenological, but become properties that cannot be reduced to certain features of individual trajectories or a wave function.

The new formulation of the laws of dynamics allows us to solve some technical problems. Due to the fact that even simple situations lead to non-integrated Poincaré systems. Therefore, physicists turned to the S-matrix theory, i.e. idealization of scattering occurring within a limited time. However, this simplification applies only to simple systems.

The described approach leads to a more consistent and uniform description of nature. There was a gap between the fundamental knowledge of physics and all levels of description, including chemistry, biology and the humanities. The new perspective creates a deep connection between sciences. Time ceases to be an illusion that relates human experience to some subjectivity that lies outside of nature.

The following question arises: if chaos plays a unified role from classical mechanics to quantum physics and cosmology, then is it not possible to build a “theory of everything” (TVS)? Such a theory cannot be constructed. This idea claims to comprehend the plans of God, i.e. to reach a fundamental level, from which all phenomena can be derived deterministically. Chaos theory has a different unification. A TVS containing chaos could not reach a timeless description. Higher levels would be allowed by the fundamental levels, but would not follow from them.

The main goal of the proposed method is to search for “a narrow path lost somewhere between two concepts ...” - a clear illustration of the creative approach in science. The role of creativity in science has often been underestimated. Science is a collective endeavor. A solution to a scientific problem, to be acceptable, must satisfy precise criteria and requirements. However, these restrictions do not exclude creativity; on the contrary, they challenge it.

Paving the way, it turned out that a significant part of the concrete world around us had hitherto “eluded the meshes of the scientific network” (according to Whitehead). New horizons have opened up before us, new questions have arisen, new situations have emerged that are fraught with danger and risk.

The central problem posed by I. Prigogine and I. Stengers was the problem of the “laws of nature,” which arises from the paradox of time. Therefore, its solution provides an answer to the time paradox.

Prigogine I. and Stengers I. connect their solution to the time paradox with the fact that the discovery of dynamic instability led to the need to abandon individual trajectories. Therefore, chaos turned into a tool of physics, which gave a solution to the paradox of time, as it was said at the beginning of the work, the paradox of time depends on chaos, and dynamic chaos underlies all sciences.

The concept of the "arrow of time" was introduced in 1928 by Eddington in his book The Nature of the Physical World.

Kolmogorov–Arnold–Moser theory

Mathematical notation of the density matrix

What do we live for? [A view from the position of subjective realism] Zakharov Konstantin Valerievich

Paradoxes of time

Paradoxes of time

The previous chapter was actually devoted to the problem of the existence of the world in space, but now let’s turn our attention to its existence in time. What is time anyway? The obvious answer: a quantitative description of the flow of changes occurring. The more changes in general, the more time passes. You can select a certain type of change, characterized by regularity and periodicity (for example, the Earth’s revolution around the Sun), and use it to measure time. However, not all so simple. Perhaps any of us could repeat after St. Augustine that he knows the answer to the question, what is time, if no one asks him about it, and does not know if it needs to be explained to someone.

First of all, has time and the world always existed in time? “Empty” time, in which no events occur, at first glance seems as absurd as empty space. However, suppose that we can observe such time, then it would not be difficult for us to measure it, simply by comparing it with the flow of events in our usual time. For example, we can say that on a broken watch the hands remained motionless for twenty minutes, recording this time interval on a working watch. To do this, we do not need to invent some new measurement system, just as on the coordinate axis we can get a scale of negative values ​​by simply mirroring the scale of positive values ​​we know. But with empty space, a similar trick will not work. Since it is only imaginable outside of matter (understood in the same sense as in the previous chapter), and therefore outside the sphere of being, we will have nowhere to apply even an imaginary ruler.

Thus, if empty space is a pure abstraction, then “empty” time still has some meaning. If now, at the moment, certain changes and events are taking place, then this is already enough to set a unit of the time scale, which will not lose its meaning even if the world ceases to exist and no more events occur. It turns out that time is eternal, that is, time taken as a whole is a synonym for eternity. Moreover, it can be divided, for now purely theoretically, into actual and potential, i.e. “empty”, free from events.

Another characteristic feature of time, in contrast to space, is its one-way direction. The fact that the “arrow of time” is aimed from the past to the future is determined by the sequence of events, which we perceive as their cause-and-effect relationship. Sometimes they try to criticize this habit of interpreting changing phenomena as a chain of causes and consequences, but it is still difficult to deny the obvious.

True, on the side of the critics is the irrefutable argument that we observe only phenomena, and not essences, i.e. some part of the essence is always hidden from us, which means that someday it may manifest itself in some new way for us, and then , it would seem that a reason known to us will give rise to unexpected consequences (but whether, for example, spilled milk will come back into a broken bottle is a big question). Moreover, we are never given the opportunity to comprehend the entire chain of causes. Thus, looking at a masterpiece of painting, we can come to the conclusion that it arose thanks to the talent of the artist. Having inquired about the history of the creation of this painting, we understand that it was born because it was commissioned from the author. But we will never know that if it were not for a chance meeting on the street, the artist’s parents would never have met, and the picture would not have been painted. Which of these reasons is decisive? All of them, along with many others, known and unknown to us, were necessary for the picture to appear. Therefore, it would be correct to indicate them all, but this is impossible.

At the same time, when speaking about the phenomenon of causality, we mean much more direct and obvious relationships between phenomena. For example, if I see a person walking along the road towards me, then with a high degree of confidence I can assume that in a second he will be about a meter closer to me, and not five meters further, and will not turn into, say, a cat. Even simpler: if I am in a room and looking out the window, then it is very likely that in the next moment I will again find myself in this room and looking out the window. This kind of causality is a fundamental property of our world (even the laws of quantum phenomena do not contradict it, but only make adjustments characteristic of the corresponding level of matter).

What is causality based on? Does this series of causes generating each other have a beginning, that is, a final cause? Followers of the most ancient religious and philosophical tradition, together with modern scientists, assure that no.

Hinduism and other religious schools that arose on its soil believe that the world is beginningless and represents an endlessly repeating series of stages of origin, development, decline and disappearance - the wheel of Brahma. Physicists generally seem to subscribe to a similar concept, calling it the pulsating universe model, which theoretically traces the repeating path of the universe from the Big Bang to its collapse.

How does classical philosophy solve this problem? Let us confine ourselves to Kant’s opinion expressed by him regarding the following antinomy (i.e., a pair of equally convincing but opposite judgments):

1) the world has a beginning, since otherwise it turns out that an infinite amount of time has passed up to the present moment;

2) the world has no beginning, because otherwise it turns out that time existed before the world came into being.

Kant resolves this contradiction in the style of Alexander the Great, who, according to legend, cut the Gordian knot. From his point of view, both of the above judgments are false, because they belong to the world of phenomena, and in the world of “things-in-themselves” a certain third judgment is possible, which will be true.

In general, sharing Kant’s skepticism regarding our theoretical knowledge, which, in essence, is always relative and, one might say, of a probabilistic nature, one cannot help but note that, despite this circumstance or even precisely because of it, it is advisable to evaluate various hypotheses by comparing these probabilities. Having compared the two statements under consideration, we apparently must still come to the conclusion that the second is much less likely.

Indeed, if the world is beginningless, and the existence of the world is understood as a sequence of events - it doesn’t even matter whether they are connected by a chain of causality or not - then the very fact of the onset of the present moment indicates that the infinity of all previous moments and events has passed (and we are talking about the actual, and not about potential infinity), i.e. we get a counted, finite infinity - what could be more absurd? On the contrary, if we assume that the world has a beginning, then there will be nothing absurd in such an assumption. Kant's refutation of this idea is based only on the fact that before the beginning of the world, the actual flow of time is impossible. Time, which measures the course of events, in the absence of events, of course, is nonsense, but the “empty” time, which was mentioned earlier, is quite acceptable.

Thus, it is reasonable to accept the assumption that the world had a beginning. However, doesn't this mean that it will have an end? After all, everyday experience teaches us that everything that has ever arisen will inevitably disappear. Therefore, following this logic, if the world has arisen, then it will definitely come to its end.

Needless to say, such intuitive conclusions are not always worth trusting. All our theoretical schemes are based on establishing analogies between observed phenomena. At the same time, the world as a whole is a unique, isolated phenomenon; there are no completely adequate analogies for it. In a sense, we can liken the whole to its individual parts, but the limited applicability of this approach is obvious. The right way is not to stop at the first conclusions obtained, but to try to expand the range of phenomena under consideration as much as possible, building all objects of experience related by analogies into a single consistent picture.

In solving the question of the duration of the world's existence, mathematics can help us in some way. The simplest geometric illustration of time is a straight line or, given its one-way direction, a coordinate axis. Let the zero point on this axis be the moment of the creation of the world. The ray defining the region of negative values ​​is the “empty” time preceding the specified moment. Let us formulate our problem as follows: can the time of existence of the world be represented by a segment in the region of positive values ​​of the coordinate axis, after which “empty” time will come again?

If this is permissible, then it should be assumed, based on the theory of probability, that the emergence of the world, being obviously a possible event, under the same conditions (the same before the beginning of the world and after its end) will be repeated again and again in the infinity of time. But we have already made a similar assumption - about the beginninglessness of the world - and rejected it as incorrect. This means that the opposite hypothesis, which claims that the existence of the world will never cease, is more preferable. Then the time axis will consist of two rays, i.e., two infinities balancing each other. In this case, the emergence of the world can be considered a miracle. Indeed, this word is perfectly suited for an event whose probability is one chance in infinity. On the other hand, if this chance does exist, then in an infinite time period it must inevitably occur. Accordingly, in order for the world to return to its previous state, before its creation, it will also take infinity of time. In other words, the world will never cease to exist, because the probability of this event is zero.

The regularity and improbability of the appearance of our world can also be understood based on the understanding of matter as the basis of potential and actual existence. Let's look at this in more detail.

If we take a mental look at everything that is happening in the world, then everywhere we will see the desire of material elements (i.e., any material objects) to some kind of harmonious combination, when all forces and energies opposing each other are equalized, to a state of peace. This state is similar to the equilibrium of a metal ball on the point of a needle, and therefore is almost never achieved, but can be considered as the ideal limit to which matter tends. In one of the main branches of physics - thermodynamics - this general tendency of matter is expressed in the form of the law of increasing entropy, usually interpreted as a destructive tendency.

Equalization of temperatures in material systems, of course, can in some cases be interpreted as a decrease in the degree of orderliness of matter, leading to undesirable, from our point of view, consequences (for example, if I like hot coffee with ice cream, then the process of cooling the coffee and melting the ice cream, in my opinion I think it will ruin this drink). However, this is true only for those systems that, in essence, lack integrity, consist of disparate subsystems and are themselves such subsystems. The world is an absolutely integral, self-contained system, and the internal balance of this system should not be considered chaos, but rather its opposite - harmonious unity.

So, balance and peace are the highest, ultimate state of matter to which it strives. The constancy of aspiration means that this state is an expression of its fundamental properties. It is logical to assume that ideal peace was originally inherent in matter. Why did she lose it?

It would seem that absolute peace is absolute because the system that is in it must remain in this position constantly, and any change will be a loss of this state. But how does such peace differ from complete non-existence? The latter is very simple to define - it is everything that is outside of existence, that has no manifestations. Strictly speaking, we cannot know anything about it, except that no changes occur in it (any change we recorded would be a manifestation). But matter is not non-existence. Moreover, as a concept, it is the opposite of it. It turns out that matter, which is in a state of absolute rest, on the one hand, must remain in it forever, and on the other hand, it cannot sooner or later not disturb it, that is, not undergo changes, not manifest itself. A reasonable compromise is achieved if we assume that the potential existence of matter, which in the infinity of “empty” time represents “empty” space, as a result of an infinitesimal change turns into actual existence.

What exactly this change is, we cannot know; more precisely, as in the previous chapter, we can say that this is the qualitative change that is expressed in the transition of the elements of matter from the unmanifested state of being to the manifested one. The mechanism of this transition is completely hidden from us, since it occurs outside the world of phenomena, and therefore the transition itself can be considered by us as a random event.

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