For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the weird aspects of time’s unidirectional flow.
Time as we experience it only ever appears to move forward, pointing one-way like an arrow. But at the scale of quantum physics, time is reversible: simple quantum processes, such as a particle scattering through a potential, make just as much sense when viewed forward or backwards through time. We do know, however, that many complex processes are irreversible: they cannot simply be reversed by running the clock backwards. How such irreversible processes emerge from smaller reversible building blocks is not fully understood by scientists, but it may be a paradox that life itself has resolved. A new 3-year, $3 million project, led by physicists Jim Al-Khalili and Andrea Rocco of the University of Surrey, U.K., with funding from the John Templeton Foundation, will expand the theoretical and philosophical frameworks used to understand the “arrow of time” and reversibility, with special attention to what biology might be able to reveal to us about the nature of time — and vice versa.
A growing body of research suggests that some of life’s most complex and marvelous achievements, from the efficiency of photosynthesis in plants to migratory birds’ ability to sense the earth’s magnetic field for precise navigation, may involve biological exploitation of quantum effects. In this project, the project leaders propose that a key to organisms harnessing quantum effects lies in their ability not only to harness processes that take place irreversibly, (as many have assumed all biological processes are), but also to manipulate and maintain conditions which enable some quantum processes to take place reversibly.