Wednesday, December 5, 2007

The Error of Time

Well, I'm sure these guys spend a lot more time on this issue than I do, but it appears there's growing popularity to the idea of an arrow of time. This, of course, refers to the long persistent idea that time has a direction.

Apparently, the irreversibility of entropy is somehow proof of the arrow of time.

I don't get it. We exist and perceive at a certain level, one parameter of that level is that we are on the planet Earth. So, for most of our existence, we could treat time as an absolute, and the sense of time having a direction did, for the most part, help us. But when you start thinking extraterrestrial, or you start dabbling with the quanta, well why on Earth would you take your provincial attitudes with you? It's like going to Paris, but just eating at MacDonald's.

Entropy is just entropy. Obviously our observance of entropy would be bounded by our cognition of time. Instead of the arrow of time, why not come up with something like the blender of space? It seems entropy could be explained by both. We all know we should keep our complex systems out of blenders or else entropy will rapidly ensue, don't we?

We infer time from movement and then infer that time has movement. Or something. I wish I had time and money to invest in the kind of education that would let me figure this stuff out.

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