Nearly 30 years ago Seth Lloyd, now an SFI Science Board member, sought to explain the apparent directionality of time, or "time's arrow," as the increasing entanglement of particles. This year, two research teams have added strength to the then-dismissed idea.
"Lloyd realized that quantum uncertainty, and the way it spreads as particles become increasingly entangled, could replace human uncertainty in the old classical proofs as the true source of the arrow of time," writes Quanta magazine's Natalie Wolchover. "The idea, presented in his 1988 doctoral thesis, fell on deaf ears. When he submitted it to a journal, he was told that there was 'no physics in this paper.' Quantum information theory 'was profoundly unpopular' at the time, Lloyd said, and questions about time’s arrow 'were for crackpots and Nobel laureates who have gone soft in the head,' he remembers one physicist telling him.
"Advances in quantum computing have since turned quantum information theory into one of the most active branches of physics. Lloyd is now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recognized as one of the founders of the discipline, and his overlooked idea has resurfaced in a stronger form."
Read the article in Quanta magazine (April 16, 2014)