Abstract Our experience of the world is temporally asymmetric: coffee spontaneously cools, glasses smash, people age and die, while the reverse processes never occur. However, our best theories of fundamental physics are temporally symmetric, making no distinction between past and future directions. This creates a puzzle: how can our asymmetric experiences emerge from a symmetric foundation? The usual solution is to posit a special initial condition for the universe. This solution, however, amounts to putting in the asymmetry by hand, and one may be left looking for a further explanation of this asymmetric boundary condition. In this paper I explore another possible solution, namely that the asymmetry of experience can be explained anthropically, via an observer selection effect. In particular, I use the formalism of decoherent histories to argue that such an explanation is available in the Everettian, or “many worlds”, interpretation of quantum mechanics. Along the way, we will discover that Everettian quantum mechanics implies the existence of many more worlds than are traditionally recognised.
We investigate the shift caused by asymmetry of spectroscopic lineshape in atomic interferometers, which has not previously been discussed in the scientific literature. This asymmetry arises because laser field is frequency-chirped not only during the free-evolution intervals of atoms, but also during the Ramsey pulses. As a result, the effective detuning from the working atomic transition during the pulses also depends on the chirping rate, which, in turn, leads to the lineshape-asymmetry-caused shift (LACS). It is shown that this shift has an inverse cubic dependence of
∝1/T3 on the duration of the interval between the Ramsey pulses T , which markedly contrasts with the
∝1/T2 dependence typical in atomic interferometry. Therefore, the metrological importance of this shift substantially increases for compact atomic interferometers with a short baseline. For example, for interferometers-gravimeters using two-photon transitions in rubidium atoms, at
T∼1 ms we estimate the LACS shift and its variations at the level of 0.1–1 mGal, while for
T∼100 μs this can reach a value of 0.1–1 Gal.
Time asymmetry and irreversibility are signal features of our world. They are the reason of our aging and the basis for our belief that effects are preceded by causes. These features have many manifestations called arrows of time. In classical physics, some of these arrows are described by the increase of entropy or probability, and others by time‐asymmetric boundary conditions of time‐symmetric equations (e.g., Maxwell or Einstein). However, there is some controversy over whether probability or boundary conditions are more fundamental. For quantum systems, entropy increase is usually associated with the effects of an environment or measurement apparatus on a quantum system and is described by the von Neumann‐Liouville equation. But since the traditional (von Neumann) axioms of quantum mechanics do not allow time‐asymmetric boundary conditions for the dynamical differential equations (Schrödinger or Heisenberg), there is no quantum analogue of the radiation arrow of time. In this paper, we review consequences of a modification of a fundamental axiom of quantum mechanics. The new quantum theory is time asymmetric and accommodates an irreversible time evolution of isolated quantum systems.