Then again, if one is going to argue from authority, could one not equally well cite the equally stonking smart physics PhD's who dismissed the argument with "there is no physics in this paper"? And does the argument about quantum entanglement not also circularly assume the existence of a forward arrow of time?
'dismissed the argument with "there is no physics in this paper"?'
Since retracted by essentially the same authorities and it's now a bustling field, so that doesn't work very well as an argument.
And I'm pretty sure the entire point here is that the arrow falls out of the entanglement process itself, not that we first assume temporal ordering in the physics. Remember that we do get to assume the existence of time in general in this argument; the article may not have spelled it out as clearly as it could have but it did in fact observe this still doesn't solve "time" in general. It's a big result, though.
Is the entanglement "process" theoretically reversible in the same way that classical physics is theoretically reversible? Is it possible to describe the idea without using words that implicitly include the arrow of time?
It's possible that I'm simply not understanding the concepts well enough, but I don't see how the "process" of entanglement is any less dependent on temporal ordering. Why wouldn't running it backwards make physical sense as a "disentanglement" phenomenon?
For that matter, why is it right to conclude that the coffee cup has only become entangled with its exterior after it has cooled down? Is this only because the matter in the cup is supposedly the result of disentangled quantum fluctuations from the distant past? I realize that the coffee cup example is an imperfect one, but can someone explain why the process of entanglement is special in this regard where the process of increasing entropy is not?
I'm sure that many smart people have been thinking about these questions, but the interpretations of QM still seem to be stuck in the realm of philosophy.
