Sorry, but all you’ve done is restate the problem of the Arrow of Time. Why is it that things solidify? That’s a process of entropy.

You could say that time is just one of those four dimensions in which we are trapped. We can move around in the other three (though not separately), and when we move, we’re using one of the properties of the 4th – time – to do our moving with. The difference is that we have a choice about how we move in the three – but not in the 4th.

(It was Arthur Eddington, in 1927, who came up with the expression. He concluded that it’s a property only of entropy.)

I couldn’t find anything by either Bradbury or Clarke called “Arrow of Time”, but Bradbury (and a host of others) have written stories about time-travel.

In any quantum theory, for any possible process there exists the reverse process (technically due to the unitarity of the evolution). More importantly, a state can evolve into as many higher entropy states as lower entropy states. No emergent phenomena that can in principle be based on quantum theory will satisfactorily explain the perceived arrow of time.

“Does anyone happen to remember that article in the NY Times science section that appeared a few years back, about comparing time to a loaf of bread? Where each instance was a slice of the bread that was, as I remember it, persistent for all eternity? (imagine that statement as mathematically as possible)…”

I remember that article. There were several analogies in it – let’s see, which stack of NYTs is that in? (Kidding) The image could be mathematically represented by rows of receding cones for each slice but I don’t remember the gist of that analogy in context. There is a distinction as you imply between our psychological perception of time as living beings and the physics that surround or permeate the effect of time.

So, this universe is what happens inside a black hole?

I wonder if we’re recapitulating the information generation of an external(read higher level) dimensionality. Hawking seemed to think that information was conserved inside a black hole, ie, all the mass/energy that went into it must eventually return as Hawking radiation. In between the establishment of the event horizon and it’s discontinuance, exists the “black” hole. Within the event horizon,,,S&%t happens,,,but we assume we can never know what that was.

Perhaps the initial mass/energy that goes into creating the black hole is squashed into the false vacuum, then recondenses into new nuclear particles, etc, consistent with a new universe encapsulated within the hole,,,???

Condensation from a supercooled/phase change would eliminate the need for a singularity of the infinite temperature/density kind and replace it with a phase change starting point of the same density as the initial false vacuum, triggered by a small quantum fluctuation, kinda like dropping a rock in a super cooled lake in the arctic circle,,,

I LOVE speculative,,,fiction,,,

Gary 7

You may want to set your tricorder to detect sarcasitons.

It already is.. eh.. no wait.. that’s my phaser, oh dear, what have I done?

(Err…. Groucho, not Karl)

If you think this definition is circular, go and look up “time” in a dictionary.

I recall a series of Royal Institution Christmas lectures about time, about 10 years ago (ish). The first thing the lecturer asked the audience was “What is the time?”. Everyone put their hand up. He then asked “What is time?”. Obviously, no-one volunteered an answer. This little paradox (we don’t know what time is, but we measure it all the … um … time) gave quite a nice little entry into thinking about time.

Wouldn’t it be more correct to say that we’re moving through time, instead of implying that time is moving around us?

The argument presented by Prof. Carroll basically states that the laws of physics are invariant under the CPT transformation and therefore non-invariance under T is not relevant. This may be technically true; however, I would argue that a universe based on a left-handed coordinate system and consisting of atoms with positrons in a cloud around nuclei consisting of anti-neutrons and anti-protons with time evolving in the reverse direction is not the same as the universe we know, even though the current laws of physics in such a universe would be the same. This is aside from the question as to whether the CPT theorem holds on a global scale under General Relativity (it is my recollection that an assumption of Lorentz invariance is required to prove the theorem). However, it is possible that, if the multiverse hypothesis is correct, such an anti-particle universe could exist.

Anyway, this post fits in nicely with the anti-creationist posts on here, since our perception of time seems to stem from our evolution. We only evolved to perceive a certain aspect of time (which may not be an aspect of “slice time” at all).

My father made me realize it when we were having dinner at a diner. He said something to the effect that the days were just zipping on by. I was about 19 at the time, and it made me realize that time as we think it is actually a process so far removed from physics it could be called uniquely human.

What my father was referring to was a memory comparison process. When an infant is born, they spend 100% of their total life waiting for the next day. The next day, they spend 50%… and so on, until we are spending only .001% of our lives waiting for the next day (barely a drop in the mnemonic bucket at that point), each second being compared to the last, being compared to a total acquisition of seconds all up to that point. This showed me how time seems to speed up as we get older: because each second becomes less important than the last.

In sleep, we don’t have this mnemonic comparison process active, so time doesn’t seem to exist at all. Time as a mathematical entity or dimension is a completely alien thing to the human psychology. I can’t see a reason for any lifeform (as we know them) to ever evolve a way to directly perceive “slice time”. Such a perception device makes no sense to Darwinian survival… for the evolutionary lines on this planet, at least.

That song always bugged me because, as I see it, time is slipping into the past.

You may want to set your tricorder to detect sarcasitons.