Apocalypse map image by ChristianHoel on Photobucket. 187 - A Map of the Apocalypse | Strange Maps. Time travel for beginners. Quantum time waits for no cosmos THE INTRIGUING notion that time might run backwards when the Universe collapses has run into difficulties. Raymond Laflamme, of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, has carried out a new calculation which suggests that the Universe cannot start out uniform, go through a cycle of expansion and collapse, and end up in a uniform state.
It could start out disordered, expand, and then collapse back into disorder. But, since the COBE data show that our Universe was born in a smooth and uniform state, this symmetric possibility cannot be applied to the real Universe. Physicists have long puzzled over the fact that two distinct "arrows of time" both point in the same direction. In the everyday world, things wear out -- cups fall from tables and break, but broken cups never re- assemble themselves spontaneously.
In the expanding Universe at large, the future is the direction of time in which galaxies are further apart. Is time travel possible?