Towards A Physical Basis For The Arrow Of Time And Matter-Anti-Matter Asymmetry

by Steven Gussman 

ASSUMPTIONS

        Two broad assumptions will be made:
1. The Wheeler-Feynman hypothesis that anti-matter is merely matter moving backwards in time.

2. That any particle is intrinsically as likely to move in the forward-or-backward direction in the temporal dimension (yielding a space-like time-dimension, part a hyper-space-like four-dimensional universe).

HYPOTHESIS

        The arrow of time is modeled here as arising from the thermodynamic diffusion of particles in the single time-dimension. This diffusion in turn arises from the fact that, while there are no boundaries in the three classical spatial dimensions—diffusion there is not biased in any particular direction, and generally, matter diffuses outward in all directions (particularly as the universe expands), there is a one-sided boundary in the temporal dimension in which 13.8 billion years ago there is a barrier (whereas there is none in the future, or at least it is extremely far off). When matter first arose, there was equal matter and anti-matter (particles moved in both temporal directions), but because there was a nearby barrier at the big bang in the backward direction, and no foreseeable barrier in the future direction, particles tended to move forward in time as space went on, so as to diffuse and fill the “container” at equilibrium (a fool's errand if there is no future boundary). If particles “collide” in all four dimensions, it is annihilation and the duel-particle “freezes” in the temporal dimension (as it turns into light, moving so fast into the future that time stops for it). Otherwise, half of particles began moving forward in time in the t-dimension by symmetry, and the other half over time, by traveling backward early on and colliding with the initial boundary, being sent then forward in time, just as the particles of gas in a box will bounce off of the container's walls in the process of diffusion. The special theory of relativity suggests it is perhaps not so strange that we might “see” things in the past. The following are today's notebook writings on this topic (I should at some point upload the older model; I have just been sitting on this philosophy of physics hypothesis too long not to publicly lodge the general prediction):

The following are some older notes from back towards the idea's inception between April and August 2020:

I just stayed up all night exploring a very strange (and likely wrong) physics hypothesis I had--the 'back-of-the-envelope' calculation predicts either a cyclical cosmology with a period of ~10^20 years, or (even less likely) an "end" of the universe in half that time (~10^19 y).

— Steven Gussman (@schwinn3) April 23, 2020

Footnotes:

1. "Diffusion" (Wikipedia) (accessed 1/29/23) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion) (though I have not read this full article).

2. Baryogenesis" (Wikipedia) (accessed 1/29/23) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryogenesis#:~:text=In%20physical%20cosmology%2C%20baryogenesis%20(also,antibaryons)%20in%20the%20observed%20universe.) (though I have not read this full article).

3. "There's Almost No Antimatter In The Universe, And No One Knows Why" by Ethan Siegel (Forbes) (2019) (https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/02/08/theres-almost-no-antimatter-in-the-universe-and-no-one-knows-why/?sh=5c85d74a9c6b) (though I do not believe I have read this article beyond getting the 1/10¹⁵ figure).

4.  "Antimatter" (Wikipedia) (accessed 1/29/23) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter) (though if I have read this entire article, it could not have been in recent years).

5. "The Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry Problem" (CERN) (https://home.cern/science/physics/matter-antimatter-asymmetry-problem).