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Re:The Quantum Thermodynamics Revolution (2017) by krastanov on Friday March 09, 2018 @12:14AM (#16549947)
For the sake of completeness, another way to say the same thing is: The laws of nature are the same if we reverse the direction of time.

Until you start talking about entropy and chaos and statistics (which is a fascinating can of worms), the laws that you use to predict the next state of a system are the same that you would use to calculate the previous state of a system.

To restate it in another way once again: The function mapping "state of the universe at time t" to "state of the universe at time t+dt" is a one-to-one map, hence two possible pasts could not have created the same present.

Re:The Quantum Thermodynamics Revolution (2017) by jessriedel on Friday March 09, 2018 @01:58AM (#16550198)
This

> The laws of nature are the same if we reverse the direction of time.

and this

> To restate it in another way once again: The function mapping "state of the universe at time t" to "state of the universe at time t+dt" is a one-to-one map

are not the same. Even for deterministic theories, time-reversal invariance implies one-to-one mappings but the reverse is not true. And for a stochastic theory it breaks down completely; you can have time-reversal symmetry but still lose information about the past (e.g., each time step the system changes into a completely random state form the state space).

Whether quantum mechanics is considered fundamentally stochastic or deterministic depends on interpretation. (Roughly, Copenhagen is stochastic and Many Worlds is deterministic.)