Does Time Run Backward in Other Universes?

One of the most basic facts of life is that the future looks different from the past. But on a grand cosmological scale, they may look the same.The basic laws of physics work equally well forward or backward in time, yet we perceive time to move in one direction only—toward the future. Why? To account for it, we have to delve into the prehistory of the universe, to a time before the big bang. Our universe may be part of a much larger multiverse, which as a whole is time-symmetric. Time may run backward in other universes. Make no mistake: cosmologists have put together an incredibly successful picture of what the universe is made of and how it has evolved. Some 14 billion years ago the cosmos was hotter and denser than the interior of a star, and since then it has been cooling off and thinning out as the fabric of space expands. This picture accounts for just about every observation we have made, but a number of unusual features, especially in the early universe, suggest that there is more to the story than we understand.
Among the unnatural aspects of the universe, one stands out: time asymmetry. The microscopic laws of physics that underlie the behavior of the universe do not distinguish between past and future, yet the early universe—hot, dense, homogeneous—is completely different from today’s—cool, dilute, lumpy. The universe started off orderly and has been getting increasingly disorderly ever since. The asymmetry of time, the arrow that points from past to future, plays an unmistakable role in our everyday lives: it accounts for why we cannot turn an omelet into an egg, why ice cubes never spontaneously unmelt in a glass of water, and why we remember the past but not the future. And the origin of the asymmetry we experience can be traced all the way back to the orderliness of the universe near the big bang. Every time you break an egg, you are doing observational cosmology.
The arrow of time is arguably the most blatant feature of the universe that cosmologists are currently at an utter loss to explain. Increasingly, however, this puzzle about the universe we observe hints at the existence of a much larger spacetime we do not observe. It adds support to the notion that we are part of a multiverse whose dynamics help to explain the seemingly unnatural features of our local vicinity.

Ice in Mars?

WASHINGTON - Scientists working on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander mission are reporting what they call compelling evidence that the robot craft has found ice while digging on the Martian surface.
NASA is expected to give details on the discovery during a news conference on Friday.
The small science probe landed safely last month on a frozen desert at the Martian north pole to search for water and assess conditions for sustaining life.
Small chunks of bright material described as the size of dice have disappeared from inside a trench where they were photographed by the craft earlier this week, NASA said in a statement late on Thursday.
This has convinced scientists the chunks were ice -- frozen water -- that vaporized after digging exposed it, NASA said.
"It must be ice," said mission principal investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona. "These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days. That is perfect evidence that it's ice. There had been some question whether the bright material was salt. Salt can't do that."
The presence of water on Mars is a hot topic for scientists. They have presented strong evidence in recent years of huge deposits of frozen water at the Martian poles and point to geological features that indicate that large bodies of water have flowed on the planet's surface in the distant past.
Water is a key to the question of whether life, even in the form of mere microbes, has ever existed on Mars. On Earth, water is a necessary ingredient for life.
The chunks were left at the bottom of a trench dubbed "Dodo-Goldilocks" when Phoenix's robotic arm enlarged that trench on June 15. Several chunks were gone when Phoenix looked at the trench again on Thursday, NASA said.
The U.S. space agency also said that the lander, digging in a different trench, used its robotic arm to connect with a hard surface that has scientists believing they have found an icy layer on the Martian surface.
The $420 million lander spent 10 months journeying from Earth to Mars.