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"why does time always run forwards and never backwards?"
genkaku
Northampton, Mass. U.S.A. Veteran
Not that everyone is likely to be as enthusiastic, but I was left giddy as a school girl in the front row at a rock concert to find a BBC article today about why time moves forward and never back. It's literate, accessible and mind-bending. I am left as dumb as I was before I found it, but that doesn't put a dent in the delight.
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Comments
Physics is definitely not a strong suit of mine, but I find it fascinating. Terrific article
When the article was talking about how things move to a greater state of disarray, it made me think of the human body aging, lol. My body definitely feels in disarray compared to 20 years ago, and I'm only 39.
Thanks for sharing! It'll make for a great conversation with my son later. He understands all these things much better than I do.
I'm afraid my brain scrambled by the fifth paragraph. I tried to digest it, but unless someone can outline and summarise the article in a few simple sentences, I'm afraid I can't be arsed....
@federica -- I sympathize utterly. I guess what I liked about it was that, although I couldn't claim to 'understand' it all, at least someone was thinking outside the box and invited me to come along.
Thinking inside the box -- time never moves backwards -- is the rational, reasonable and inside-the-box assumption. But is it true or is it merely convenient? I don't know, but I find the bubblegum flavorful.
Maybe it's a bit like manoeuvring a boat on a river.... Really quite smooth and 'plain sailing' going forward but it looks awkward and unnatural reversing... And does going backwards really undo something or merely make more of a mess of what just happened? I am reminded of how a man cannot look upon the same river twice....
I've never assumed that if rebirth or reincarnation occur, that one is always reborn or reincarnated forward in time. In fact, I think quite the opposite may be true.
They say that it was discovered that the universe had a beginning. So they are assuming that the anomaly we refer to as the big bang is the only one of its kind because we cannot detect beyond it.
I think that if we could zoom out past the speck that was the big bang and come out the other side, we would eventually see more specks with distance between them. All of which expand.
Probably why I find the Mandelbrot set so fascinating.
I still don't think we can unbreak an egg but I do think the known universe is just a branch of the tree.
Or even a vein in a leaf of a branch of the tree.
It's basically the arrow of time and entropy. And that's all I have to say about that.
This is an interesting article: http://www.big-bang-theory.com/
But this sounds like an interesting group. Go down and read their "About Us" section.
@genkaku, That's good stuff; the philosopher in me thanks you for that bit of cosmology in the morning :-) Of course, science can't answer your question just yet, but the good folks at CERN hope to in the furture.
Heat death theories don't seem to take quasars into account which themselves have been theorized to be the opposite of black holes.
It's been a while though. May have to brush up on the subject.
I have very limited understanding of cosmology and physics, but I know that space and time can't be separated from each other and the Universe is (probably) expanding. So we cannot move backwards in the spacetime. Maybe my simple conclusion is false... Time travelling may be theoretically possible but we don't have (will never have) such technology. But it's possible to look to the past when we are looking stars.
(In fact, an extraordinary moving in spacetime IS possible. I have some personal experience...)
I wonder, do we suffer basically because we have a deep-seated hatred of entropy? Sickness, old age, death--just disorder manifesting itself in human life. If so, then perhaps a Buddha is one who has developed empathy for entropy.
ink:
by woody guthrie...
Why can't a dish break a hammer?
Why oh why oh why?!
'Cause a hammer's a hard head.
Goodbye goodbye goodbye.
Why, oh why, oh why oh, why?
Why, oh why, oh why?
Because because because because
Goodbye goodbye goodbye
Why can't a bird eat an elephant?
Why, oh why, oh why?
'Cause an elephant's got a pretty hard skin.
Goodby goodbye goodbye.
Why can't a mouse eat a streetcar?
Why, oh why, oh why?
'Cause a mouse's stomach could never get big enough to hold a streetcar.
Goodbye goodbye goodbye.
Why does a horn make music?
Why, oh why, oh why?
Because the horn-blower blows it.
Goodbye goodbye goodbye
Why does a cow drink water?
Tell me why n why?
Because the cow gets thirsty just like you or me or anybody else.
Goodye goodbye goodbye.
Why don't you answer my questions?
Why, oh why, oh why?
'Cause I don't know the answers.
Goodby goodbye goodbye.
What make the landlord take money?
Why, oh why, oh why?
I don't know that one myself.
Goodbye goodbye goodbye.
Why's there no pennies for ice cream
Why, oh why, oh why?
You put all the pennies in the telephone.
Goodbye goodbye goodbye.
Why can't a rabbit chase an eagle?
Tell me why, oh why?
'Cause the last rabbit that took out and chased after an eagle didn't come
out so good and that's why rabbits don't chase after eagles that's all I
know about rabbits and eagles?
Because because because.
Why ain't my grandpa my grandma?
Why, oh why, oh why?
Same reason your dad's not your mommy.
Goodbye goodbye goodbye.
Why couldn't the wind blow backwards?
Why, oh why, oh why?
'Cause it might backfire and hurt somebody and if it
hurt somebody it'd keep on hurting them
Goodbye goodbye goodbye.
Read more: Woody Guthrie - Why, Oh Why Lyrics | MetroLyrics
The philosophy of ideas ARE subject to entropy - once an idea is posited - it's posited, it just is, and moves in the way it does, and the form it takes can be viewed as secular or religious; cool or boreing, but always it moves towards a centre-point...
The definition of entropy is basically that thermal energy (lets call it karma to stir things up a bit) is converted into mechanical energy, and vice versa; and as energy is conserved and things just keep going in one direction unless someone tries to change it... Newton had a very good understanding of the world; Einstein and modern scienctist have complicated it beyond belief...
IDEAS are stated in a specific state of reference which is comprehensible to the self-conscious awareness and if they ascilate (yes I mean ascilate which is just a stoopid idealogical way that we represent things, rather than oscillate as they really do) they can't be comprehended properly. So whilst space can be reversible and understandable (back and forth; up and down; left and right), time has to relate to some point so we can have referential perspective, the O in order, the 0 in an x-y axis, else what kind of world would we find ourselves in - there must be at least 11 rules to be self-conscious ;-)
A truly academic/scientific mind will not comprehend the above gibbledigoop...
A truly religious mind will just roll it's eyes and know it's just gobbledigoop...
But who has time to read this crap anyway....
...\lol/...
Here's a diagram of the Universe where time is one dimension. I tend to think like I'm driving a car from west to east and I can't go into the opposite direction at the same time. But time stops if I can drive the speed of light.
It would be nice to become a light even a short moment because that moment would be an eternity. There would be no past and future, only this moment without time. Perhaps it would feel like becoming one with the whole Universe?
"There was a young lady named Bright-who could travel much faster than light-She set out one day in a relative way and came back the previous night!"
The word Pöljä is an opposite to Bright. My tiny candle doesn't light much so I stumble into the grave.
There's something similar in one of Brian Greene's books ( The Elegant Universe? ) where he represents space-time like a sliced loaf, with each slice represent successive time periods. Some argue that these slices remain permanently in place but they are fixed and cannot be altered, making time travel backwards impossible.
So every slice live forever? Is it possible to experience the eternity in the slice of time? To "become a light" was my stupid association/metaphor to stop one's time.
You could view every second as a very thin slice, those slices extend back to the big bang and are perfectly preserved. So the past is preserved but fixed, which means you couldn't travel back in time and alter something. Obviously this assumes time as linear, I've heard of another theory where time is circular, there are all sorts of theories out there.
I just watched Brian Greene's Youtube video about time. Oh, I see... Entropy caused by space-time and expanding Universe. But in a way I was totally wrong when I wrote that you can't go backwards in time because of space-time and expanding Universe? Btw, I have had a red cat quite similar to Greene's cat
Yes, there are all sorts of interesting theories, like multiversums and living in the Matrix.
Time direction . . . m m m . . . My brain hurts!
even with diagrams.... No go. Brain feels like slop....
So according to the string theory (M-theory) there are up to 11 dimensions in the Universe. A flatlander can't live in our world of four dimensions, and she/he/it can't even fully understand it? In the fifth dimension it's possible to go back in time, but it's impossible in our four dimensional reality? Is it necessary to understand or learn to experience different realities like eternity?
I doubt it very much. I'm having enough on my plate being Mindful, let alone needing to digest this little lot...!
Dimensions are more like coordinates within the world and not separate worlds that exist alongside each other.
Kind of like how dogs can perceive some frequencies that we cannot, right now, we only percieve 4 dimensional space even as there may be other dimensions besides height, width, depth and time.
Eyes of a flatlander can't see this world in three dimensions. Like Christopher Nolan could't film the tesseract in Interstellar. And I can't hear high voices like cats. And I can't see the UV light like many other animals can see.
Don't know about dogs but I lived almost 20 years with cats. They spent a lot of their time lying eyes semi-open but still very aware of their surroundings.
The extra dimensions are theorised at sub-atomic level, so it's not something which would effect our everyday world.
http://www.livescience.com/50019-image-light-wave-particle.html
Mmm, we people are made of atoms which are made of subatomic particles. For some scientists quantum physics give solid proofs of the existence of multiverse. It goes far over the subatomic level and our everyday world. But the other levels like other worlds are there unavailable of our senses. Again, cosmology and physics are not my branch...
Ok, sorry, it sounded almost like you were saying different dimensions exist as different planes of existence instead of different points of reference for things that exist.
Of course the notion of there being a "flatlander" is just a notion. Even if they cannot detect enough of us to know we are here, we would have detected them by now.
If there are other universes then we would have to call them something else and update our understanding of the universe. Even if there is a multiverse, it is a multiversal-style universe... There cannot be more than one "everything that has ever or will ever exist, anywhere".
Say for example we discover that the big bang is one of an infinite amount of big bangs expanding as we live and breathe. That doesn't mean there is an infinite amount of universes. It means that the big bang is just another function of the universe and not the beginning of the universe.
Alternate versions of our timeline from our big bang (alternate universes) is a whole other matter and can of worms.
Oh, by the way, I'm not trying to be a pest, I just enjoy this kind of stuff.
I enjoy this kind of stuff, too. And I can't separate science from spirituality when building my worldview (v. 3.7).
You are right about universe vs. multiverse. They have found that there is a huge black hole in the centre of almost every big galaxy. Are those black holes powerful enough to create new worlds?
I'm so sorry, this reminds me of a classic quotation/line from "Frazier" When he's in his studio at the radio Station, broadcasting his 'Psychotherapy On Air' Programme...
Frazier is responding to a man who has just, at some length, expounded his issue.
Frazier replies:
I commented this comment:
"The extra dimensions are theorised at sub-atomic level, so it's not something which would effect our everyday world."
I can't figure out what I did wrong.
You haven't done anything wrong....
The passage i quoted was merely one I remembered when the discussion about 'Atoms' came up.
It wasn't intended to indicate anything wrong - I just found it funny.
I'm not good in these games.
> I enjoy this kind of stuff, too. And I can't separate science from spirituality when building my worldview (v. 3.7).
> You are right about universe vs. multiverse. They have found that there is a huge black hole in the centre of almost every big galaxy. Are those black holes powerful enough to create new worlds?
------------------------------
Do a quick google search on quasars and white holes... You may find it enjoyable.
Wow, the quote feature here really comes and goes, eh?
"
"why does time always appear to run forwards and never backwards?""
Time on the quantum level does observably run backwards in many situations involving quantum tunnelling. This is known for example in photosynthesis and smell. Particles arrive before they have left. Ludicrous as this sounds, that is what happens.
http://www.andersoninstitute.com/quantum-tunneling.html
Brain meltdown will now commence . . . 10, 9, 8 . . .
Have you ever seen your brain ? How do you know you have one?
My brain hurts from thinking so it is there.
Quantum tunneling looks interesting. Photosynthesis requires photons which are subatomic particles. Besides, the information between entangled subatomic particles moves faster than light. It's theoretically possible to send messages faster than light by using gravity and gravitons.
Actually I have seen pictures of my brain and know a guy who has touched it! Brain surgery 6 years ago for an unruptured aneurysm. I'm fine. Well mostly fine. Different but fine.
Glad to hear that you made a successful recovery @ThomB...
We can only go by what others tell us (this includes pictures)...However it would be a fascinating experience to be on the outside looking in so to speak, instead of having to take other people's pictures and or word for it...
I have a can of worms....
Whatever you do DON"T open it....
honestly i don't believe life goes forward but instead backward like entropy but there are exceptions. i believe our forefathers were sentient beings. i think deep within us we know our past lives, special knowledge of the universe was more common place. there were flying machines from outer space. and we designed our own devolution - for example we crave machines to do our thinking for us. a good cell phone gives us more joy than knowledge. one can reverse this in our own life though. it is very possible.
I'm ecstatic that there is a new member named @boobysattva. welcome.