{"id":3912,"date":"2007-10-30T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2007-10-30T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wpdev.hmc.edu\/physics\/2007\/10\/30\/why-is-the-past-different-from-the-future\/"},"modified":"2007-10-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2007-10-30T00:00:00","slug":"why-is-the-past-different-from-the-future","status":"publish","type":"physics_colloquium","link":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/physics\/research\/colloquium\/why-is-the-past-different-from-the-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Is the Past Different From the Future?"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"page-featured-image\" class=\"wp-block-image is-style-alignleft\" data-pic=\"\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/physics\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/22\/2023\/01\/\" alt=\"Promotional image for talk: Elements of a successful scientific talk\" data-pic=\"\" \/><\/figure>\n<p><strong>Speaker(s):<\/strong> Sean Carroll<\/p>\n<p>Over a century ago, Boltzmann and others provided a microscopic understanding for the tendency of entropy to increase.  But this understanding relies ultimately on an empirical fact about cosmology: the early universe had a very low entropy.  Why was it like that?<\/p>\n<p>Cosmologists aspire to provide a dynamical explanation for the observed state of the universe, but have had very little to say about the dramatic asymmetry between early times and late times.  I will argue that the search for a natural explanation for the observed breakdown of time-reversal symmetry in cosmology leads us directly to interesting conclusions about inflation, quantum gravity, and the multiverse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"template":"","class_list":["post-3912","physics_colloquium","type-physics_colloquium","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/physics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/physics_colloquium\/3912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/physics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/physics_colloquium"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/physics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/physics_colloquium"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/physics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/physics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}