Notes on Time's Enigma

TL;DR

This paper explores how the universe's birth from a multiverse influences the nature of time, suggesting that the arrow of time emerges locally during nucleation while fundamental multiversal time remains arrowless.

Contribution

It proposes a distinction between local emergent time's arrow in our universe and the fundamental arrowless time of the multiverse, linking universe nucleation to time-reversal symmetry breaking.

Findings

Nucleation from the multiverse breaks time-reversal symmetry.

The arrow of time emerges locally during universe nucleation.

Physical laws inherit time-reversal symmetry from the multiverse.

Abstract

Scientists continue to wrestle with the enigma of time. Is time a dynamic or a fundamental property of spacetime? Why does it have an arrow pointing from past to future? Why are physical laws time-symmetric in a universe with broken time-reversal symmetry? These questions remain a mystery. The hope has been that an understanding of the selection of the initial state for our universe would solve such puzzles, especially that of time's arrow. In this article, I discuss how the birth of the universe from the multiverse helps to unravel the nature of time and the reasons behind the time-reversal symmetry of our physical laws. I make the distinction between a local emerging arrow of time in the nucleating universe and the fundamental time with no arrow in the multiverse. The very event of nucleation of the universe from the multiverse breaks time-reversal symmetry, inducing a locally emergent arrow. But, the laws of physics imprinted on this bubble are not processed at birth. Time-reversal symmetry of laws in our universe is inherited from its birth in the multiverse, since these laws originate from the arrowless multiversal time.