Study of the lunar artifact retrieved from the K1 mission provides insight
into the effect I have termed "Clarity."
Clarity violates established symmetries and conservation laws. In doing
so, it defies Noether's theorem, the most fundamental and beautiful
cornerstone of physics.
Symmetry and conservation are two sides of the same coin. "All things are
transformations of one thing, without gain or loss," as my childhood tutor
put it. "If A can become B, then B can become A. We say that state B (say,
a mixed drink) comes after state A (say, sugar and water) only because there
are more probable pathways from A to B. Wait long enough—longer than
the universe—and your drink really can return to state A, spontaneously
unmixing itself."
But Clarity is NOT always symmetrical. For example, it violates time
reversibility. Consider the simple equation:
Clarity(A) -> B.
This is the application of Clarity to state A to produce a lower-entropy state
B. (Clarity is fond of removing portions of a state configuration, harrowing
the phase space down to only its most robust inhabitants.)
Time symmetry suggests that we should be able to run this process in
reverse and retrieve the original:
reverse Clarity(B) -> A.
But in fact, we obtain:
reverse Clarity(B) -> C,where C is the same as in Clarity(B) -> C.
Clarity's effects cannot be used to return a transformed state to its original
state. Instead, we obtain a second transformed state, further yet from the
original configuration.