Oops, I said my last post on the recent Foundational Questions Institute conference would be my final one, but I can't resist just one more. At the conference, Gavin Crooks at Lawrence Berkeley Labs, who studies molecular machines and gave a great talk on how life balances time asymmetry with thermodynamic efficiency, showed this brilliant short film by Rocketboom. In it, a woman walks, skips, and jump-ropes through the streets of New York while everyone else moves backwards. Of course, she's the one moving backwards—a vivid illustration of the time-reversibility of the laws of physics.
As Crooks noted, the most remarkable thing is how the passers-by seem not to notice. A New York minute, it seems, is not just sped up, but time-reversal invariant.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
George Musser is a contributing editor at Scientific American and author of Spooky Action at a Distance (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015) and The Complete Idiot's Guide to String Theory (Alpha, 2008). Follow him on Mastodon @gmusser@mastodon.social Credit: Nick Higgins
