It would simply require an enormous amount of work. There is absolutely nothing in the world stopping you from painstakingly finding every single piece of coffee mug and every single molecule of coffee and putting it all back together. Imagine dropping a mug of coffee on the floor and it shatters into a million pieces, with drops of coffee going everywhere. One intriguing possibility is that while physics doesn’t care about time in the microscopic or force-level sense, it does care about time in complex, macroscopic systems. So, perhaps there is an explanation for the arrow of time. Read More: What Is the Grandfather Paradox of Time Travel? However, this “ chronology protection conjecture ” stands outside of physics, and we have no way of testing it (other than through our direct experience). You could kill your own grandparents (meaning that you would never exist, preventing you from traveling back in time to commit the act in the first place). If time could move in any direction, then paradoxes would abound. If we were to allow backward time travel, then effects could come before causes, and the logical connections that underlie the material universe would fall apart. Read More: How Big Is the Observable Universe?Īnother resolution is that time really does exist, and we and everything else are forced to move in one direction – to the future. However, the entire universe seems to have a concrete past that existed long before we gained consciousness and started observing it, and if time only exists as a matter of convenience, then there’s no need for the universe to organize itself this way. Our brains need a way to organize the chaotic mess of sensory inputs constantly bombarding us and putting a timestamp on every sensation keeps us living and functioning. What we perceive as time is really an artifact of consciousness. ![]() That it can flow from past to future or future to past (or stand perfectly still). One possible resolution to this is that time is an illusion. And yet we all sense time always moving forwards. Our theories of gravity, and the force of gravity itself, don’t really care about time. One of the most frustrating parts about this is that on the surface our always of physics are reversible in time – there’s nothing in the equations themselves that insist that time must flow in only one direction.įor example, if I were to record myself throwing a ball up in the air and catching it, and I played it back to you, you wouldn’t be able to know if I was playing the recording normally or in reverse. This phenomenon is called the “arrow of time,” and its existence has perplexed scientists and philosophers for ages.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |